HONG KONG, Jun 3, 2020 – (ACN Newswire) – Always too late or never too late?

Enterprises know they need to backup. Time is money, and business data is the product of countless hours of labor and intelligence. Precious company goodwill, resources, productivity, and competitiveness can be lost due to accidentally or maliciously corrupted or deleted data, or data and applications made unavailable due to hardware disasters or criminal hostage by ransomware. Certain types of data are even irreplaceable. According to the National Cyber Security Alliance , cyberattacks caused 69% of small organizations to be forced offline for a while and 37% experienced financial loss. In 2019, cybercrime forced 10% of small businesses to shut down.

Yet, diligently backing up organizational data can be complicated, time-consuming, and expensive. Many organizations only attempt to regularly back up the minimum assets, such as a few critical servers and workstations. The remaining data and applications, including work-in-progress documents, are left vulnerable to risks. Having data properly backed up offsite, as it should be, makes all this even more complicated.

Key Criteria in Choosing a BaaS Provider

Offered by an outside service provider, Backup-as-a-Service, or BaaS, addresses the complexity and overhead of traditional enterprise backup methods. As a virtualized cloud service, it is naturally offsite and managed by the provider. It requires no on-premises hardware, and can be fully automated. BaaS transparently handles all backup tasks in realtime, without relying on the effort or diligence of in-house human operators. There are no tapes or disks to manually rotate or keep track of, and it can be as specific or general as the enterprise desires, protecting several servers or the entire organization. In case of data issues, BaaS can offer easy and rapid data restoration so the company can quickly resume operations and get back to work. This highly convenient, cost-effective, and secure solution frees up staff so they can focus on more productive tasks, without compromising data and applications integrity.

When choosing a BaaS provider, several key criteria should be kept in mind:

– Compatibility – As a start, check whether the backup service supports your particular choices of operating systems and applications.
– Compliance – Consider whether your industry has compliance issues that impact usage of BaaS, and whether your organization can create policies to accommodate those compliance requirements.
– Security – Ask what security measures the service provider offers to protect your digital assets.
– Manageability – Check whether you can easily configure the service through a user-friendly portal, or do you need to call the technical support line to make adjustments and check on the status of your backups?
– Cost-effectiveness – Research and compare pricing among different BaaS vendors. The least expensive might not necessarily be the best value, if the BaaS is not reliable or cannot fully ensure your business continuity.

You should also consider other aspects of your IT infrastructure that can impact the performance and success of BaaS usage. Do you have sufficient bandwidth to support the realtime traffic to the BaaS provider's offsite facilities, and does the bandwidth allow you to restore data in a quick enough manner? If not, check whether the service provider offers connectivity solutions alongside the BaaS, which can scale in realtime according to your needs, with high performance catering to the geographic locations you operate in.

Success with Managed Services

Indeed, aside from the technical aspects of the BaaS provider, you also need to consider whether the service provider offers a range of other relevant managed services. These services should at minimum include 7×24 customer support, and also give you confidence about the reliability of the underlying platform operating the BaaS solution. Professional consultation with certified experts is also a high priority for successfully helping you evaluate and design a reliable architecture that delivers the backup and disaster recovery functionality for your business needs.

Because you are planning for business success, you need to consider your future requirements for expanding into other markets around the world. A BaaS service provider with extensive points of presence and experienced local support will be instrumental to achieving your roadmap milestones. Although BaaS is cloud-based and should work from anywhere in the world, it is important your enterprise staff can contact knowledgeable professionals for inquiries and support. Ideally, your BaaS provider will have offices local to your own business points of presence, and competently support your team members in their own native languages.

Listed in Gartner's Market Guide for BaaS – CITIC Telecom CPC

When researching the most appropriate BaaS solution provider for your enterprise needs, be sure not to overlook CITIC Telecom CPC, listed in Gartner's Market Guide for Backup as a Service (May 2020) as one of the key BaaS hosters in China, the Middle East & Africa, Japan, and the rest of APAC. CITIC Telecom CPC's SmartCLOUD(TM) BRR gives enterprises a full range of managed backup, replication and recovery services. It was created based on all the considerations discussed above, and provides operation modes that include onsite, offsite, and a variety of physical and virtual replication models. To speed up deployment, SmartCLOUD(TM) BRR supports "initial seed" transfers of your enterprise data to significantly reduce time and bandwidth needed for the initial full backup, and gives you the flexibility to have copies of your enterprise backup stored both in the cloud datacenter and locally on your premises for quick recovery if possible. SmartCLOUD(TM) BRR protects your sensitive data using encryption for both data-in-transit and data-at-rest giving your backup the most comprehensive data protection.

CITIC Telecom CPC also provides a user-friendly online management portal called ManagedCONNECT where your enterprise backup status and usage information can be easily accessed. ManagedCONNECT also provides visibility and configurability for other CITIC Telecom CPC flagship solutions your enterprise might choose to interoperate with SmartCLOUD(TM) BRR, including the SmartCLOUD(TM) cloud computing platform itself, TrustCSI(TM) comprehensive network security and enterprise protection (covering a wide range of modern threats including ransomware detection), TrueCONNECT(TM) carrier-class global and regional networking, and much more.

Similar to other BaaS solutions, SmartCLOUD(TM) BRR is offered on a subscription basis, with pricing based on the backup type. For example, backing up your enterprise's physical servers, virtual machines (such as VMware and Hyper-V instances), and Microsoft Office 365 installations. The subscription pricing will also vary depending on your cloud storage and bandwidth requirements.

Act Today to Protect Your Data and Your Future

To help customers with inquiries and technical support for SmartCLOUD(TM) BRR and other solutions, CITIC Telecom CPC's 24×7 professionals are always on hand, even offering native language support via the company's many points of presence around the world. In fact, CITIC Telecom CPC is staffed by over 1,000 business and technology professionals with deep experience in their areas of expertise, including extensive IT industry certifications and vertical industry experience, all working at more than 140 points of worldwide presence, 18 cloud service centers, 30+ data centers, and two dedicated 24×7 Security Operations Centers.

Whether your organization ultimately decides to use CITIC Telecom CPC's SmartCLOUD(TM) BRR or another vendor's BaaS solution, it is imperative this decision is made sooner rather than later. Every second your mission critical digital data is not properly backed up, it is exposed to countless vulnerabilities, including those catastrophic enough to cease business operations. To make sure your company stays competitive and maintains its forward momentum, protect its achievements by backing up with the right BaaS.

To enjoy hassle-free and flexible managed cloud backup services, simply scan the QR code and register for the latest SmartCLOUD(TM) BRR offers with FREE restoration test!

About CITIC Telecom CPC
We are CITIC Telecom International CPC Limited ("CITIC Telecom CPC"), a wholly owned subsidiary of CITIC Telecom International Holdings Limited (SEHK: 1883), serving multinational enterprises the world over by addressing their specific ICT requirements with highly scalable tailored solutions built upon our flagship technology suites, comprising TrueCONNECT(TM) private network solutions, TrustCSI(TM) information security solutions, DataHOUSE(TM) cloud data center solutions, and SmartCLOUD(TM) cloud computing solutions.

As a leading Global Local ICT Solutions Partner with worldwide footprint across East to West and native presence, we truly live our motto, "Innovation Never Stops." Being a preferred Digital Society Enabler, we lead our key markets at the forefront of pioneering ICT development, embracing AI, AR, Big Data, IoT, and other cutting-edge emerging technologies to transform technical potential into real-world value for our customers, helping them achieve higher productivity, agility, cost-efficiency, and ultimately, Digital Globalization.

As one of the first managed service providers in Hong Kong to achieve ISO 9001, 14001, 20000, 27001, and 27017 ICT-related certifications, CITIC Telecom CPC delivers on our superior quality commitment through a broad global self-managed infrastructure encompassing some of the highest growth markets in Asia, Europe and America, with over 140 points of presence, 18 Cloud service centers, 30+ data centers, and two dedicated 24×7 Security Operations Centers.

For more information please visit www.citictel-cpc.com

Media Contact:

Rowena Leung
CITIC Telecom International CPC Limited
(852) 2170 7536
Email: rowena.leung@citictel-cpc.com


Copyright 2020 ACN Newswire. All rights reserved. http://www.acnnewswire.com

HONG KONG, Apr 28, 2020 – (ACN Newswire) – Blockchain began in 2009. Most people have heard of Bitcoin. Blockchain is actually the key underlying technology of Bitcoin. It is a way to have "blocks" of encrypted data "chained" to each other in a robust way to ensure the data cannot be altered, once its transaction has been recorded. It uses sophisticated mathematics to achieve this. In addition to a robust data storage mechanism, distributed ownership is the other powerful benefit of Blockchain technology. Nobody can monopolize the Blockchain, and all participants play a role in ownership and authentication of transactions. All records are traceable yet irrevocable. This creates trust among parties, very quickly and efficiently, and is crucial for a scalable, robust economy.

Blockchain under the Pandemic Situation

Daniel Kwong, Chief Information and Innovation Officer at CITIC Telecom CPC said, "As for real world usage today, I think the best example is with the current pandemic situation. In general, COVID-19 has been a tremendous driver for accelerating the digital transformation of organizations, away from physical workflows toward virtual presences, virtual interactions. We are seeing massive increases in use of our virtual applications, such as for video conferencing, remote access, virtual desktops, data warehousing. Our customers have already been using these remote and virtual applications, but now we are seeing a major surge."

China, for example, launched twenty Blockchain projects to cope with COVID-19, including for infection tracing, medical materials tracking, donation tracking, and insurance claims. Blockchain enabled all these to be rapidly implemented, within days.

"Shandong University was able to deliver a rapid rollout of a pandemic data collection and monitoring system, in just two days," said Kwong. This was a system for the real-time online collection of the health status, hometown information of students and faculty members. It is used for monitoring the outbreak status in the university. Access levels to the data depended on varying levels of authority to ensure data integrity.

Kwong added, "Compared to a traditional database system, the Blockchain approach makes the data and transactional record very robust against tampering. Once a student or faculty submits the health information, it cannot be tampered with. This is crucial for management during health crisis."

Additionally, China launched a nationwide health tracking system for some 1.4 billion people! This system provides a color-coded health status, similar as traffic lights signal, for the whole population, with different colors indicating the health status of individuals on their smartphones. If this was to be implemented with a traditional database system, not only would it take a much longer time to develop, it will also require huge processing power for a centralized database. Plus, it would be challenging to scale and ensure security and data integrity. It might need weeks or months to be completed. But with Blockchain, China did it in just a few days!

Blockchain offers Tremendous Benefits

Aside from rapid deployment, Blockchain offers four key benefits to supply chains: Extremely high transparency, security, efficiency, and trust. Many people think of a Blockchain as a database but it's more of a ledger. The data is enclosed in the ledger but the secure ledger is the crucial new technology.

Besides supply chain, medical and insurance claims are also benefitting from Blockchain. "Insurance processes often involve a lot of documentation from multiple parties, and with medical insurance it even involves doctors and hospitals. Blockchain not only accelerates the whole transaction process, from insurance purchase to claims, but also removes face-to-face contacts, and physical paperwork. This eliminates a lot of infection risk. It also makes transactions traceable and authenticated. The whole process is much faster, more efficient, safer, and robust, even conducted from just a mobile phone," Kwong explained.

In addition to the COVID-19 use-cases, Blockchain applications have also been rolling out in various industries. For example, in retail, Blockchains are helping with customer loyalty programs.

Other Uses Cases

Most airline loyalty programs have a single data source, with numerous members and transactions. This loyalty program involves multiple airlines, and the customers of those airlines, all with different promotions and policies. So it's a very complicated program with many stakeholders and transactions. Blockchain brings incredible efficiency and security to such a system, solving many problems and simplifying the whole workflow, in addition to providing very strong security against hackers and transaction fraud.

Kwong added, "Interestingly, traditional unused loyalty credits are recorded on the issuing platform's balance sheet as a financial liability and deferred revenue. But under the Blockchain mechanism, they are not recorded, and are considered shared liability across multiple parties. So there are business advantages other than technological aspects."

In recent years, Blockchain technology has undergone a lot of standardization, and now there are ready-to-use APIs and programming libraries, modules, and even applications, that can be quickly purposed for specific business needs. "So I would say it's easier than ever to implement Blockchain applications," said Kwong.

Enterprises generally can build their operations on Blockchain over existing systems such as ERP, CRM, e-commerce, customer service, technical support, finance, office applications, leave applications, payroll. All these can be built upon a General Purpose Blockchain API platform, using the same generic libraries to start quickly keeping track of data transactions.

Key Things to Consider when Implementing Blockchain

While a company is considering implementing Blockchain technology, the first thing to consider will be, who is going to do the design and implementation? "Traditionally, you would find a system integrator to do this. Or you might develop it in-house. But do your existing staff, or your chosen system integrator, have the necessary skills?" Kwong questioned.

"You also need to consider what additional value your new Blockchain application can create. We already talked about a better balance sheet regarding loyalty programs, and visibility into Accounts Receivables. But do you have existing policies, or stakeholders, that are restricting the possibilities of your new Blockchain system? Perhaps those policies are obsolete, designed for less secure, slower, inefficient systems?"

Privacy is another thing to consider, especially when data cannot be altered or deleted. Companies should make sure they have the right procedures to ensure data put into the Blockchain system is what they want.

"You also need to think about the infrastructure to support the new Blockchain application," Kwong emphasized. "The system will be distributed across many nodes, so you must be mindful of network latency. Also consider network stability and security, system and data loading capacity, and especially technical loopholes when programming Smart Contracts. Additionally, decide how you will monitor the ongoing process and make fixes or improvements over the coming weeks, months, years. Do you have the right technical skills to do so, and how will you get feedback and consensus among distributed stakeholders?"

How CITIC Telecom CPC helps with Blockchain Deployment

CITIC Telecom CPC has been supporting its customers' Blockchain deployments with its flagship portfolio of cloud computing, enterprise networking, security and data warehousing solutions. "Our SmartCLOUD computing platform obviously can run Blockchain and Smart Contracts processes, and our other solutions help ensure high performance and reliability. In fact, our TrustCSI managed security service helps protect Blockchain applications. Don't forget, access to the Blockchain must be secure. While the Blockchain itself is tamper-proof, anyone with access can add unauthorized data to the Blockchain, which is irrevocable. That can be a nuisance, or a major privacy and confidentiality problem. We have sophisticated security mechanisms to help prevent that," Kwong said.

The future of Blockchain is clear. There is a lot of activity going on to standardize Blockchain in the legal and regulatory fields. Eventually Blockchain will become a very widely used ICT foundation for many areas of society.

About CITIC Telecom CPC
We are CITIC Telecom International CPC Limited ("CITIC Telecom CPC"), a wholly owned subsidiary of CITIC Telecom International Holdings Limited (SEHK: 1883), serving multinational enterprises the world over by addressing their specific ICT requirements with highly scalable tailored solutions built upon our flagship technology suites, comprising TrueCONNECT(TM) private network solutions, TrustCSI(TM) information security solutions, DataHOUSE(TM) cloud data center solutions, and SmartCLOUD(TM) cloud computing solutions.

As a leading Global Local ICT Solutions Partner with worldwide footprint across East to West and native presence, we truly live our motto, "Innovation Never Stops." Being a preferred Digital Society Enabler, we lead our key markets at the forefront of pioneering ICT development, embracing AI, AR, Big Data, IoT, and other cutting-edge emerging technologies to transform technical potential into real-world value for our customers, helping them achieve higher productivity, agility, cost-efficiency, and ultimately, Digital Globalization.

As one of the first managed service providers in Hong Kong to achieve ISO 9001, 14001, 20000, 27001, and 27017 ICT-related certifications, CITIC Telecom CPC delivers on our superior quality commitment through a broad global self-managed infrastructure encompassing some of the highest growth markets in Asia, Europe and America, with over 140 points of presence, 18 Cloud service centers, 30+ data centers, and two dedicated 24×7 Security Operations Centers.

For more information please visit www.citictel-cpc.com

Media Contact:

Rowena Leung
CITIC Telecom International CPC Limited
(852) 2170 7536
Email: rowena.leung@citictel-cpc.com


Copyright 2020 ACN Newswire. All rights reserved. http://www.acnnewswire.com