 Hello everybody, and welcome to Backup and Disaster Recovery in the Cloud. There's a couple of things to get us started today. You should be able to hear the audio through your computers, mic and speakers today. If you do lose your internet connection at any time, you can reconnect using the same links that you used when you initially connected. And if you need to contact early talk support, you can do that at 800-843-9166. And just as a reminder, you are being or this webinar is going to be recorded today and everybody will be muted. So if you do have any questions, you can go ahead and type those into the chat pane and we will get back to you either within the chat pane or if it's content related. I will be feeding those questions audibly to our presenters throughout the presentation today. So again, this webinar is Backup and Disaster Recovery in the Cloud. My name is Kyla Hunt and I'm the Webinar Program Manager at TechSoup. I'm going to be the facilitator of this webinar today. And our presenter today is going to be Sam Jenkins from NPCloud. He's going to be talking a lot about just definitions of disaster recovery and the cloud and a little bit about NPCloud products like NPVault. And where it says shop sign in is suggesting the chat, that actually should be Kevin Lowe. So you will be seeing his name pop up in the chat once in a while. And just a little bit about the agenda today. We of course are taking care of housekeeping right now. Sam is going to be talking about NPCloud, some terminology, backup considerations, and the NPCloud product NPVault. And at the end of the webinar, I am going to be providing you with a link to NPVault products through TechSoup. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and give it over to Sam to go ahead and begin the presentation. So take it away, Sam. Sam Jenkins Okay, thank you. Hello everyone. My name is Sam Jenkins. I'm the Product Manager at NPCloud. I realize that backup and disaster recovery is not exactly the most exciting topic. So I'm going to try and keep it interesting. So let me just lead off with a little bit of an introduction to NPCloud. I'll try to keep that short too. So NPCloud is a nonprofit. We're a 501c3 organization. And we provide cloud-based technology products to other nonprofits and NGOs and charities. And we have a mission, just like you do. And our mission is to ensure all nonprofits can use technology to better serve their communities. So our whole deal is helping you do your work more effectively. We grew out of an organization called Empower PA. I'm sure some of you are familiar with the Empower Network. We were founded in 2003 in Philadelphia. We have almost 400 regional clients. About over 100 of those, we provide all of their IT consulting needs, their networks, their servers. And we also do technology planning services for the rest of the organization at some point. And really, working with these local regional nonprofits, we realized that there's a need for something different. It was getting harder and harder to do project-based IT, where every four years you put in a new server, you get your new computers, every three years it's getting harder to get funding for these expenses that are increasingly being seen as operational. And it's just a lot of energy and time being spent on something that isn't really your main job as a nonprofit. You shouldn't be spending all your time working on your desktops and your networks. So our goal was to address some of these needs. So we built MPCloud to bring cloud technologies to you as nonprofit organizations. And we see these technologies as providing a predictable ongoing cost. So you don't need to raise that $10,000 every four years. You know ahead of time how much you're going to pay. And it's going to be a smaller amount. It's going to be broken out month to month to month. It's going to be easier to work into your operational budget. It's going to be lower risk because this isn't your core job. It's not your job to maintain your servers and your networks. It's your job to help people. So you can let other people whose job it is handle those things. And hopefully that leads to less anxiety for you as a nonprofit. Hopefully you can sleep safely at night knowing that your data is actually safe. And then it also provides really some tremendous features particularly around mobility and access. I'm sure a lot of you are increasingly having mobile workforces, right? You hire people wherever they are and they help out from where they are. And people work from home and you want to work from client sites. And these are some of the real features among others of cloud-based solutions. Okay, so that's the end of my MPCloud spiel. And let's get into the meat of the terminology. So this is I think the most important section of this whole presentation. We're a nonprofit and we're a really education heavy nonprofit. So I want to do some education around the terminology. What does backup mean? What does disaster recovery mean? What do these things mean? And really there are a lot of terms that are being used and thrown around mostly as marketing speak. They're all used interchangeably and usually not correctly. Each of these things does mean to have its own distinct meaning. And some of them won't be applicable to you, but I want to go through the big ones. And just so you know, we're going to be using some really businessy and corporate kind of language. And I know that can be a turn-off and you know, why are we doing this? But the fact of the matter is these big corporations, these big businesses, they are in the business of managing their risk. This is what they do. And they're really, really good at this business continuity and disaster recovery stuff. So this is a good example of where maybe we can learn and adapt some of what they've figured out to actually work for smaller nonprofits. Okay, so let's start with the big one, which is disaster. So I don't know if anyone wants to type into that chat window what you normally think of when you think of a disaster. What does a disaster mean for your organization? So data loss, fire, flood, natural disaster, you can't access your data. So loss of facility, right? Your entire chaos. I like it. Okay, so all of these things are really big, really clear things. And a lot of them are natural disaster-related, right? Things you have no control over. Your entire building burning down. Maybe your server crashing. But some things we don't always think of are more subtle and maybe higher risk things. One of the ones that we always talk about is your sprinkler going off over your server room, right? Someone accidentally hits the sprinkler head and now the closet that you're using as your server room is flooded, right? And your server crashes. Or maybe you have a user who is annoyed for some reason and he or she decides to just delete your entire client database. So these are things that we don't always think about when we think of disaster, but they're much more likely to happen than the natural disaster variety. So when we go through these planning steps, we want to make sure we think about not just the big obvious ones, but also the less obvious and probably more likely issues. Okay, so here are the big terms, right? So resiliency is the fancy new term. I just learned about last month in the corporate world. When they talk about all this stuff, they talk about it in terms of resiliency. And then under resiliency, components of resiliency is business continuity and disaster recovery. You've probably heard those terms at some point, but they're separate and distinct items and we're going to talk about them separately. And you'll see that backup fits into all three of these different components. It's its own discrete item. So when we talk about backup, we'll talk about it as it works with business continuity and resiliency and disaster recovery. So I'm going to go over in a little bit of detail about business continuity and disaster recovery now. So this is a little chart that demonstrates this idea. So along the x-axis, you'll see there's time. And along the y-axis, there's capabilities. So this is sort of your organization most of the time, right? You have full capabilities and you're kind of going along, everything's great, no problems, no problems doing your normal work. And then suddenly there's an incident. And this is what we were talking about in terms of disasters. So something happens and suddenly your capabilities are reduced. You're not able to serve your clients and your constituents as well as you'd like to be able to. Maybe you can't talk with them because your phones are out or you can't look up their information to figure out what they need because your database is down. So your capabilities drop precipitously, right? So now we're down here. And this is where our two terms, business continuity and disaster recovery come in. So disaster recovery is kind of the obvious one, right? Like everything's not working. What do we do to get us back up to where we were before the disaster? And unsurprisingly there's fancy terms for all these different points. But disaster recovery is how we get back up to that point. Business continuity is how we keep providing services while our main systems are down. So what plans do we have in place to make sure that we're still able to communicate with clients, that we're still able to provide those services while that disaster happened before we have all of our original capabilities back up and running? So I was just curious. I wanted to ask a couple of poll questions while there's in a moment about which organizations have business continuity and disaster recovery plans and how confident all of you as organizations are that your data is actually safe. I'm going to launch those polls now. So the first one is, has anyone ever done any business continuity or disaster recovery planning? And if you guys could go ahead and answer those so I see the answers coming in. The options are my organization has both. You have a business continuity plan, that you have a disaster recovery plan that your organization has neither, and you're joking, right? So I'll give you guys a couple more seconds to answer. I'm going to close the poll in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. So I'm impressed at the number of people that have both a business continuity and a disaster recovery plan. That's special. It's good to see. I am not surprised that many more people have a disaster recovery plan than a business continuity plan. A business continuity plan is quite a bit more complicated than a disaster recovery plan. It spans a lot more of your organization. I expected to see a lot of people who don't, but I'm glad people aren't just scared by the question. So that's great. Awesome. So going to the next one. This is How Confident. Can you see how confident are you that all your data, files, databases, email, etc. are being backed up? And this is a like it scale from 1 to 6. Either you lie awake at night worrying about this, or you sleep like a baby. So I am going to leave it open for about 5 more seconds. So 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Okay, great. So this is good. We have more people who are confident about their backups. And this is actually fairly unusual again for smaller nonprofit organizations. Now I will admit that I have a little bit of suspicion about those people who say that they sleep like a baby. But maybe these are the IT professionals who actually make sure that those backups are running. If you are not an IT professional, please check with whoever is handling your backups and just make sure that you have your data safe. I mean at any time I've talked to an organization that has lost data, they were surprised that they weren't being backed up. But it's good to see that people are thinking about this and feel confident. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about what we are going to be going over today and where backup fits into all this. So backup obviously provides basic assurances that you won't lose your data. And it can be in addition to or separate from or sort of included in your business continuity and disaster recovery planning. So lots of times, right, so if you have a business continuity or disaster recovery plan you might have things like a hot site or a warm site or a cold site or something like that. And these are kind of separate to and in addition to backups. But today we are going to be talking about backups and disaster recovery. MPRPA has a whole service we do around business continuity planning and it's really complicated. And it actually has just as much to do with the people as it does with the technology. So it's a little bit out of scope for today. Okay, so Kayla, I don't know if you wanted to… Sure. We did have a question when you were talking about just MB Cloud in general. And this was from Sharon. She was wondering can MB Cloud provide products and services to 501c4s as well? Yeah, we do provide, it's not just 501c3s but it depends on the product. And a lot of that is because we partner with third-party organizations. So we don't have a data center, right? That's not our goal is to be the server experts. Our goal is to understand all the solutions that are out there and find the best ones for you and negotiate pricing with them for nonprofits that's really affordable and then help you get there and then provide support. So some of those partners have requirements about what kind of organization you need to be. But we could absolutely have a conversation for your organization. Okay, great. Thanks. And yes, we have worked with Canadian nonprofits. Okay, and Jenny was wondering if you could go over again what resiliency was. Sure, so let's go back to… So resiliency is this blanket umbrella term that encompasses business continuity and disaster recovery, and even back up to some extent. And the idea is how resilient is your organization as a whole to having a disaster happening, to having an outage, to having a… So if something does happen, how easy is it for your organization to kind of bounce back from that? This is a newer term. Right, and I was actually wondering, do you get people that are more interested in disaster recovery or back up if they are defining disaster in a different way? So if they see disaster as just being a huge thing that hardly ever happens, or if it's something that can happen that's smaller, they're not thinking just a fire, they're thinking smaller things that you lose your general data backup or things like that. Yeah, absolutely. So in my time at this organization for years, I've seen one organization with a fire that destroyed their offices. And you know what, their server survived. It booted right back up, and all their data was fine. And I've seen dozens of organizations call us and say we had one hard drive crash, and we didn't know that it crashed, and then the other redundant hard drive crashed, right? Or someone, it was being kept under a tarp and the sprinklers went off, or someone deleted, someone was leaving and they deleted this file, or someone accidentally deleted the file, and they had administrative permissions and they weren't supposed to. We have so many different kinds of disasters happen, and very few of them are the ones you actually think about as disasters. And I think that's a really important point and something to think about. Okay, great. And then before we get, before we keep going on, I saw one comment that I wanted to share from Jeff, and it was with the Likert scale, and he was saying that being the IT person, he's actually the one that can never be competent in data backups. You know what can go wrong, right? You know how easy it is for those backups to stop working, and then you just don't know about it for two weeks. And I'll say, none of the organizations that lost data didn't have a backup plan. It was always that it either didn't include the right data, or it had stopped working a month or two months ago, and no one knew, right? So having a backup plan is a really active process, and we'll get into some of that later. Okay, great. And so I think we can go on to the next section and just as a reminder everybody, if you have any questions while Sam is talking, just feel free to type us into the chat pane, and we'll get them to him. Thanks. Okay, so now I wanted to go over some of the things you should be thinking about when you're thinking about backup, and we'll tie this into disaster recovery some. And this is just a quick summary. There are obviously many, many, many things that you should think about when you think about backup, but I wanted to sort of boil it down to the simplest. And some of these are a little bit technical, and that will be too simple for some people and too complicated for others. So please let us know if you have questions, or if you want more detail about something. Okay, so the first thing, and really the most basic thing, and the thing that often doesn't get thought about is what kinds of data are you actually backing up in your organization, right? So everyone probably has files on their shared drive, on their P drive, and they probably also have personal files on their H drive, or their My Documents folder, which is stored on the server. And any solution out there will back up those files. But other things are quite a bit more complicated. So backing up your email, which is often in exchange, is its own beast. It's its own challenge, and you need to back that data up in very different ways. And you actually need to make sure that your software or whatever you're using specifically supports backing up exchange. And then you have all your different databases, right? You probably have at least two databases that you're using in your organization. Many of them are probably totally proprietary, right? Like maybe, well QuickBooks is kind of an example of a database so it uses a file, or SageMIP, or you use ProCare, or any of these things. And these all have different databases that need to be backed up in different ways. So it's really important that you do an inventory of what kinds of information you have and check that against the list of what the backup provider is saying they support. And sometimes it's not clear, right? Because one database is not like every other database. So you're going to have to do some digging. We'll talk about it a little bit later. We can help you with that process too with our solution. Okay, next up is retention and versioning. And I wanted to get to this pretty early because this is some of the most complicated technically stuff that we're going to cover today. So retention and versioning is the area that discusses what is actually being backed up and how long it's kept for. So generally you have a retention policy, and the retention policy includes two important pieces of information. So the first is how long after a file is deleted from your server is that file deleted from your backup? So if I delete a file this week or today, next week, will that file still be in that backup? So if I deleted a file a week and a half ago and I didn't realize that I deleted it today, does that delete the file still exist in my backups? And the next is the number and the age of versions that are maintained of each file. So when you work on a Word document or this PowerPoint document or whatever, you normally make changes to it over time. So over a week you might have five or six different versions of that file. And over a year, especially for those, probably most of you have Excel documents that you're using to track intakes or something that your database doesn't quite support. So you might have 200 versions of that document over a year, and maybe many of those versions are important because if someone misentered something you need to know what was going on at that time. So any backup system is generally going to maintain multiple versions of a particular file. And it's going to delete those versions once either you have a certain number of them. So I've made 12 changes to this file and the 13th one is deleted from the backup, or by the age of the version. So if this version is two weeks old, if I made this change two weeks ago, I don't need to keep this version anymore. I only need to keep changes that have happened in the last week. And these retention policies are driven by a number of factors. And I think the most important is what your actual plan is for the backup. So if you're trying to protect against traditional disasters, right, there being a tornado or a flood or something like that, you probably don't need to keep many versions of your files because you're going to know immediately if something happened another backup isn't going to happen that overwrites that, right? So you only need maybe one version of everything. But if you're trying to protect against a user deleting something or accidentally overwriting something or anything like that, then maybe you need to keep more versions and you need to keep deleted files for a longer period of time. The second one, and the one that most organizations don't actually think of is how long will it take you to notice that something went terribly wrong? And we see this a lot with databases especially. Sometimes a database becomes corrupted and things actually work fine for a week or two weeks and it's only after two weeks that someone tries to run a report and realizes that things aren't right. So you need to make sure that you have enough versions in your backup to cover that time period before you realize that something happened, right? Or maybe a file gets deleted but you don't need to look at that file for another two weeks and you don't realize that it's been deleted until two weeks pass. So this is a really important thing to think about. The third is storage cost. This is pretty straightforward. Obviously you need more space, the more versions you're keeping and the longer you're keeping deleted files. And this is usually you do a cost benefit, right? How much money does it cost my organization to keep this stuff versus the risk of it being lost? And then you make that decision. And the fourth is legal requirements and you probably know who you are if this affects you. But in some sectors you're required to maintain information for a certain number of years. And some people use their backup system to help do that. So think about how long you're required to maintain a record if something happens, okay? Now this is all pretty complicated. Maybe I'll just pause for a moment if anyone wants to, any questions? I'm not seeing any questions yet coming in. I was thinking of a couple. First of all, how many organizations do you come across that don't have retention policies? Oh, all of them. I mean maybe three of the biggest ones have a formal retention policy written down. Now when I say retention policy it could mean a written policy in your policy handbook that I'm sure all of you have and is totally up to date and you review it with your staff every three months, right? But any backup system is also going to include a retention policy even if it's not called that. So when you configure your backups you say how long should it be before this deleted file is removed or how many versions do I want to keep of this file? So you'll have some kind of retention policy and if it's not an option that you get to set it's something that is given to you by default by the software. So you should do the research to find that out. Now I think there are very few organizations that actually understand what a retention policy is. So that's something to think about. Okay, great. And with the legal requirements do the organizations usually come to you with an understanding of what the legal requirements for the organization are? I would say that most know the name like HIPAA or PCI or whatever it is. We are not a legal entity and we do our best to help out. And sometimes they know well everything needs to be encrypted and we have to be the only ones that can access it and we can help out with that. But one of the nice things about having worked with nonprofits, me personally for four years, and our organization as a whole for nine is that we have a general understanding of what needs to be done. So I'm not going to call us the experts or the legal experts but we can help you along. Okay, great. And I think we can keep going. So next up is monitoring. And this is often taken for granted. So obviously when we are looking at backups we want to know if a backup failed. Did that backup get canceled? Was there an issue with the server? Did it break? What happened? But having a failed backup doesn't actually necessarily tell us what we really want to know which is did the backup complete successfully? Is our data safe even? That's really what we want to know. Is our data safe? And there are all these other questions that you really have to ask when you want to know if your backups failed. I just talked to an organization two weeks ago who called us and is on MP Vault because of this. They were using, I think it was Carbonite and they were getting email notifications that their backups were completing successfully. And in reality they were completing successfully. They were successfully backing up one file every night over and over and over again. And for them, with the notifications they had set up, that was a successful backup. So it didn't actually tell them that their data was safe, and they lost almost all of their data in a server failure. So these are all these questions that you need to be asking. And then you need to know how are we actually notified if something goes wrong. So if we get an email we need to make really, really sure that someone is monitoring that email account. If we get called that's great. We need to make sure that whoever it is knows the right person to call. And kind of the wisdom that I would like to pass on to you if I can call it wisdom is there's no substitute for regular test restores. Getting a notification that your backups completed successfully or lacking a notification that they failed is not the same thing as knowing that your data is safe. And you need to be independently as a nonprofit organization doing your own test restores, not asking your IT provider to. If at all possible you should be restoring your own files maybe once a month, just making sure that you can download things successfully because that's really where you get hung up, right? Things seem to be working but in fact they weren't. And you don't know until you've tried to do a restore. So save yourself some heartache there. Okay, next up is recovery. So something happened. Your user overrode a file. They deleted a file. Your server crashed. So you need to think, and this is specific to the backup solution you're using, how do we actually get the data? Do we download it? Does someone ship something to us? Do we copy it off of a hard drive? How long does it take? And really importantly, can I do it myself? Or do I need to pay someone else to restore that file? And if I need to pay someone else, how long does it take? How expensive is it? Is it actually worth it in case someone just deleted a file? And this goes back to what we talked about before with retention policies and the intent of your backup. So if you want a backup system so that if a user deletes a file accidentally you can get it back or they overwrite a file, you need to make sure that the actual restore process isn't so cumbersome that it doesn't make sense to do that. And the other thing is restoration is not the same thing as recovery, right? Restoration just means getting the files and the database export and that kind of stuff onto your server or whatever. And so what you need to know is what do you actually have to do in order to rebuild your server, reinstall the software, restore the database? How do you put that data in something that's actually running? And how long does it take? How long does it actually take before your organization is going to be able to get back to work? Because that's really what disaster recovery is all about. Okay, we're near the end of this section. I appreciate your patience. This is a slide with a lot of text, but I promise you don't actually need to read everything. I just wanted to give you an overview of the three most common backup locations and methodologies. So the first is backing up on-site usually to an external USB hard drive attached to your server or a thumb drive or something like that. The next one is doing an off-site manual backup, which generally means once a week you swap out two external hard drives, you take one home, you keep the other one on-site. And the idea is you have an off-site backup. These two solutions are really, really, really cheap. They're dirt cheap. Maybe it's two external hard drives, that's what, $200 these days? It's very inexpensive. You can often use the software built into your server really easy. The problem is they're not reliable, so those hard drives fail pretty frequently. I'm sure someone has had a backup drive that fails, hopefully not when they needed to restore data from it. With the off-site backup, if you have that hard drive with you, it's probably in the trunk of your car bumping up and down as you drive along. With the off-site backup, there's also a huge, huge legal risk there. I had a client a while ago who lost for several hours their backup drive with unencrypted information in a parking lot of a grocery store. It fell out of their car because that's where they were keeping it and it was just sitting in that parking lot. If someone had picked that up and decided to do something with that information, it could have been a real issue. The other big issue with these two solutions, at least with most ways of doing these two solutions, is actually monitoring everything. It is really hard to monitor these solutions. And things go wrong with them a lot because it's easy to unplug external hard drives and the swapping of hard drives just doesn't work very well. So it's very hard to make sure that your backups are actually running. If you are using one of these two solutions and you're not checking your backups every day or every other day, you should be concerned about the health of your backups. I'm not trying to fear longer and it's not hard to check. It's an easy way to make sure that these two solutions aren't going to cost you something in the long run. So the third solution, and obviously what we're really focused on today, is backing up to the cloud. Having the cloud be your location for their backup. And the biggest downside obviously is it's expensive. You have to pay for storage in the cloud because you have to pay someone ongoing fees. They have ongoing costs to keep that information somewhere that's not your site. And really for some organizations, that's a deal killer. It's a huge issue. But I think the thing to think about is what's the cost to your organization if you actually lose that data? And you have to make that decision for yourself. The benefits of the cloud are huge. For one thing, it just kind of works unlike swapping hard drives. You install the software and you have to monitor it and make sure it's working and do those tests for stores. But you don't have to every day go into the server and do something. You can restore it anywhere. So if that data is online, you download it to your backup site or to a user's home or whatever you need to do to get that data if something happens. And lastly, it's really, they're easy to monitor. There's always pretty much a web component, a website that tells you what the status is of your backups. And emails you if something goes wrong. And those are more reliable than having software on your server. Okay, just one more slide in this section. I just wanted to give a quick overview of what is the cloud? So I think we hear about the cloud a lot. It's a really common term and it's a really catch-phrasey term which is obviously why we use it in our name. But it's not really clear what it is. So the cloud is not that different fundamentally from your local network. So you have servers which have hard drives and memory and they're sitting somewhere and they might fail. But instead of one server, you have hundreds or thousands of servers. And they're all distributing the work among them. So if one server fails, you don't lose your data. Things keep on working. And then they also, all these organizations have, it's their job to maintain your data to keep everything safe. So they have network engineers on call 24-7. They have air conditioned data centers with fire suppression systems and all these fancy words and ISO certifications and tier one classifications and all this stuff. So that's why you go with the cloud versus your closet. But because it's still physical and things can fail, you still need to think about which cloud you're actually backing up to. So do they know what they're doing? Do they have the certifications? Are they a tier one or a tier two or a tier three data center? Do they have the ISO, I think the 9001 or something like that classification? Or is it just someone with their own closet and their own servers? And when you're doing a backup, is it backing up to one data center or is it backing up to two data centers? Because just like you could have a physical disaster in your office, there could be a fire or something in that data center and your data could be wiped out. Carbonite a couple of years ago lost several thousand clients' data because they only backed up to one data center and something happened to that data center and they lost that data. And then you need to think about is it secure? And your data will always be secure in transit. And generally every provider says that it's secure, it's encrypted on their network. Not everyone will allow you to encrypt data yourself using your own password, and that's a requirement for HIPAA. So if you're a HIPAA-bound organization, you need to make sure you find a solution that allows you to use your own encryption key so that the backup provider can't decrypt your data and kind of look in it. And I know some of that was really technical. So Kayla? All right, let me take a look. So we had a question from Terry who was wondering, is it easy to do test restores and does your system, so I guess MpCloud make it easy for us to do the test restores? Right, so it's really easy to do file restores with most systems. You can normally fairly easily do a file restore. And with MpVault you go into the software and you can do your own restore to whatever location you want. It's a wizard. It's straightforward. And we can also work with you over the phone with a remote session so you can see what's going on. We can do a test restore with you that way. It is much harder to do a test recovery of things like your Exchange database and your SQL database. And so the best you can do with those normally is download them and make sure that it was last modified recently. In order to do a more comprehensive test restore of Exchange and SQL, you need to work with your IT provider. And we can work with your IT provider to help them with that. But it's a little complicated. But you should do a file restore at the very least, and then you should do a download of your Exchange or your SQL backups maybe once every six months, and just make sure that at least it is in there somewhere. And at least it's been modified recently. Okay, great. And Sharon had just said, she doesn't think that she knows how to do a test restore. And I know some of what you just said answers that a little bit, but I was wondering if they are not with MP Cloud, would they go to their IT person to figure out how to do that? Would they go to whatever? Yeah, go to your IT person. Something to think about. The reason I say you as an organization should do the backups is IT companies have a vested interest in seeming competent and seeming like they know what they are doing. So if you can't do the test restore yourself and you are going to the same IT person that set up the backups in the first place, you should kind of watch over their shoulder and just see what is going on. I don't think they will tell you. They are unlikely to then do a test restore and then say everything is working when it is not, and then just leave it that way. But they might notice that things haven't been working for two months, and then fix it, and then do a test restore and give you that output. And I am not speaking ill against any specific IT provider, but the temptation is there and it really is hard to keep backups working with a lot of these solutions. And that can be hard to explain to an organization. So just work with your IT provider or find a third party IT provider to help you out with that. Okay, great. And we had a question come in that says if you do a test restore, do you lose any files changed since the last backup? Right, great question. And with file backups, you would just do a test restore to an alternate location. So you would back it up to a separate folder so it didn't overwrite things. And normally the default is not to overwrite things because it would be easy to do that with the test restore. With an exchange database or a SQL database, you can do a test restore without overwriting your existing SQL database or existing exchange database. Okay, great. And I'm just going to ask a couple more questions that have come in. And there are some questions that have come in that are MP Cloud, MP Vault-specific. So I'm going to hold those until after you move to your MP Vault section. But we did have a question coming in from Kathy who is asking, is there an independent rating agency for cloud services that gives you a rating on things like security? Yes and no. There is an entire rating industry that's out there. And basically there's ISO, the International Standards Organization, and they create all these standards that say in order to be classified as an ISO 9000 data center or organization or whatever. And I'm sure I'm getting the numbers wrong and I could do some research on this if anyone wanted more detail. But they set out standards and they say in order to have this standard, you need to do test restores every day. You need to have a change policy where anytime you make a change it has to be checked out with these three people. You need to fill out these 12 forms anytime anyone does anything. You need to secure your data center with biometric security. You need to make sure that your data centers have enough backup capacity to keep them online for 36 hours if the power goes out. They set out all these requirements and then organizations apply for certification and they pay a third-party rating agency that's been certified by ISO to actually do the certification. And so you can look at those certifications. And then there's a classification of data centers and generally they're classified as 1, 2, and 3. And those depend on the guaranteed uptime in the data center. So what percentage of the time they're going to be online and what percentage of the time they're going to be unavailable. There's four tiers, I just found it. So there's third-party organizations that set these separate requirements. So you should look at what certifications they've got and then you should actually look up what that certification means, because there's tens of thousands of certifications, and many of them might not really mean much for cloud computing. So do your own research. Okay, great. And do you think we have time for one more question before the next section? Yeah, sure. I think we'll be fine. This question is asking, can you restore or recover individual files or a group of files or does the restore apply to the whole backup so that the issue would be spaced or restored or recovered files if the server is down? Right, so anytime you should be able to restore individual files. You should pick a solution where you can do that. And really I don't think there are many solutions anymore where you have to download everything. Now that's not the same as with databases or with exchange mailboxes. So you're unlikely with most solutions to be able to just download this user's mailbox and leave the rest in place. But you should be able to just download this file or this folder or these 12 files. Okay, great. And I think with that I'll let you get on to the next section. And if there are any questions that we didn't get to, I will hold them for questions. Oh yeah, I see. So 9001 is the wrong certification. I can dig them up. That's one from my schooling I remember now. But there are other ISO standards for data centers. And if you're interested, I can dig those up and we can send them out after the presentation. Okay, great. Okay, so let's talk about MP Vault specifically. So as I said before, we have over 100, we have about 120 local clients where we manage their whole network, all their servers, all their desktops. We provide help desk services. We monitor their servers. We do the backups. We do the test restores. We handle that for these organizations. Okay, and as an IT professional with a lot of experience, we were not able to reliably provide these organizations with backup without going in ourselves every three days and checking to make sure things were working, which was a huge pain, right? It took a lot of time to do. And we knew that we had to find something better. So we actually built MP Vault originally for our local clients so that they would have reliable backup. And it's really, it's built out of the common needs that we see nonprofit organizations as having. Okay, so the first big benefit is we will help you get on board with MP Vault. So it's not just a web form that you go to and you sign up and then you download the software and then you configure everything. We'll actually have a conversation with you. And I don't know how many of you feel really confident that they know exactly where everything is and where all their data is. And they know they use this database maybe, but you don't know exactly where that database file is stored. So we can work with you to figure all that out. We can remote into your server with you, with you looking over our shoulder to kind of look over all of that. And then we can help prioritize that data with you. So if you provide walk-in health services, you need to make sure that your electronic health record system is being backed up online, right? And we'll take all this information and we'll build a backup plan just for you that makes sure that your organization is safe, okay? And I think that's one of the real — oh, go ahead. Just to, as promised, I wanted to remind you that we have 15 minutes left. Thanks a lot. Yeah, we're doing fine on time. Okay, next up, we are real people working for a real 501C3. And I promise we actually do care. And that's our big 888 number. And you'll probably talk to me at some point if you sign up through TechSoup helping you get on board and having a conversation with you about your organization. And I promise I'll ask you what your organization actually does and what your mission is. I want to know. Next up is help with recovery. So you don't just have to open up the software and download the file. We'll actually help you get a file restored. So if a user deletes a file, whatever, you can call that 888 number and we'll work with you remotely to get everything restored. And then if your entire server crashes, if you need disaster recovery services, we can help you kind of chart out what needs to be done. And we can work with your on-site IT provider and help them get everything back up and running. We won't do the work for you, obviously. That would be a lot of work for us. But we're not going to just abandon you to the winds and just kind of say, good luck. Here's these files. And if you have a network attached storage device which I'll talk to in a moment, we can actually restore your files to that device on your network so you can have your shared files back up and running within a few hours after a server crash or anything like that. Okay, next up is flexibility. And I think this is besides actually having a person to talk with and help plan out your backup strategy, the best feature and really why we built this solution is flexibility. So what online companies don't tell you is you don't really need to back up everything online. So your electronic health record system or your donor database, those should probably go online. It's going to be hard for you to exist as an organization if you don't know who's given you money in the last five years and you're dependent on donations. But some of the information, maybe some templates that you have are your user files. That's nice stuff to have, but it's not going to put you out of business if you don't have it. So with our solution, you can actually back up not just online. You can also back up to a network attached storage device that's on your network. You can back up to a device that just sits on your network. It's only on your network. And our software will back up to both those locations and will monitor both those locations. So we'll make sure that not only the online backups, the cloud backups, but also those local backups are happening. And we don't charge you anything for local storage because we don't get charged for local storage. And MP Vault isn't a huge money maker for us, trust me. We really are passionate about making sure that nonprofit organizations are safe. So this is how the MP Vault stuff works with that local storage. So we'll back up some information to a network attached storage device and some information online. And that network attached storage device has what's called redundant hard drives in it. So if one of those hard drives fails, you don't lose your backed up data. And right now they're about $380 for two terabytes of redundant storage. And you buy that yourself. We don't make money off of those sales. Okay, so just to give a brief overview of pricing, through TechSoup right now it's $24 a month. Includes 30 gigabytes of online storage. And unlimited local storage. Again, that network attached storage device storage, that storage in your site, that's free. And includes one backed up computer, the computer with the software installed on it. You don't need to pay for every computer on your network, just the server that we're backing up. Or maybe the two desktops that are remote site that don't have access to the server. Additional storage is $1 gigabyte a month. And additional computers are $5 a gigabyte a month. So that's pricing. And I guess anyone have any questions about the solution? We do have some questions that have come in. We had a few questions from people asking if MP Cloud is compatible, or MP Fall is compatible with Mac network. Not right now. It will be, but it's not at the moment. Now a lot of our other solutions for, a lot of our other solutions for MP Office which is hosted Exchange, that does support Macs. And our desktop and virtual server technologies do support Macs. But this solution is PC only at the moment. Okay, got it. And if you could go back to the pricing slide again, Kay would like to see that one again. Okay, great, thanks. And Kathy just asked, we need the backup files on PCs, not a server. So does MP Vault work? Yes, absolutely. And we need to work together to make sure that those computers are left on while the backup is happening obviously. But yeah, we have some organizations that do that. A lot of organizations with maybe a server and a big site, and then a couple remote users. I saw a question earlier about system state backups, MP Vault backup, system state backups, files, Exchange databases, Microsoft SQL databases, and we can also backup VHDs in virtual environments. But all that information is on our website. Okay, great. And Katherine was asking, do you have any clients that are public libraries? Yes. Well, we don't have the moment actually, but I'm talking with two other public libraries. And we certainly don't have a problem. We like public libraries here and then be clapped. Got it. And John was asking, do you use VMware at all or virtual servers? A lot of our clients use Hyper-V because they get it for free. And we can backup VHD files from Hyper-V or actually using ShadowCopy, we can backup the virtual hard disk for VMware as well. And I can tell you that our virtualization platform, MPBase, is built on VMware Sphere. I don't know if that was the question. I will take a look to see if he clarifies a little bit more. Denise in North Carolina was asking, how much it costs to get the service set up? Oh right, so the service is free to set up actually. And this is I think where our passion as a nonprofit really influenced this solution. We want to make sure that you are getting the right information backed up and that you're comfortable with what is getting backed up and that we're all on the same page about it. So that process we talked about where we work with you remotely to take a look at your server and we document everything for you, that's all free. We don't charge you anything for that. That's part of the process. And I really think that's really core to our mission as a nonprofit. Okay. And Becky was asking, the pricing by computer, we have three servers running multiple virtual servers. Is the price per physical server or virtual server? The price is per server that the software is installed on. If you have that many servers, we can have a conversation. It doesn't need to be installed on every single server. It depends on what information you actually need to backup. So we could have a conversation offline about your particular organization. Okay, great. And going back to the question about Macs, Jeff was saying we're an all Mac house. Do you have an estimated date for when MP Vault would be available for Macs? I'm afraid I don't right now. So as I said before, we partner with a third party and it's in their pipeline. It's been in their pipeline for about six months now. So I hope we're getting somewhat close. And if you want to send me an email or submit an inquiry or something on our website, I could certainly reach out to you when that happens. And for those of you that are Mac people and it doesn't work for you, I hope you can take something out of the general back of disaster recovery information earlier in the presentation and apply that to some of the Mac only solutions if you need something right now. Okay, great. And Kathy was asking, does the software get backed up as well as the files? That's a complicated question. So our backup, unless you have a virtualized environment, backs up the data level. So it doesn't do a bare metal backup where you then just restore the whole server backup and running. So it would back up the files. Now we could back up like a program files directory but it's not quite the same thing as backing up the application. So I would recommend that you submit an inquiry on our website and we could talk about the specific applications you're worried about and we could probably find a solution. The reason for that by the way is that we're trying to limit the cost to you as an organization and backing up all of that stuff, doing that bare metal backup would be very expensive just because of data storage. Right, right. Okay. And we had a question coming in asking, how much does the monitoring cost? The monitoring is also free. It's part of that $24 a month fee. And the restores are also free. Now we won't go in, we won't rebuild your server, we won't do that. What we will do is we'll work with a local IT person to help them understand what's been backed up and how to restore everything and we'll give some guidance based on our experience about the best order to do things in and some things to think about. Okay. And we've had a couple of questions come in about working with IT consultants. One question, I was just going to ask a couple of them at the same time. One question was, how does that work exactly working with IT consultants? And then the other question was from Diane who was saying, we already have an IT consultant and they offer their own cloud infrastructure. So how could we have them work with MPCloud so we can take advantage of the MPCloud special pricing through TechSoup? Sure. So MPCloud is kind of a separate solution to most of the other stuff you're doing, MPVolt. So you could keep your IT provider and they could still use MPVolt. And there's software that exists on the server that they can check on backups and we could add email alerts for them so that they know when something happened or give them access to a web portal so that they can check to make sure that the backups actually worked. And we work with a lot of small consulting firms that don't have a good backup solution for their organizations either and they're excited that we're here to provide them with this tool to them bring to their organizations. Did that answer the question? I believe it did. And I will take a look to see if we get a follow-up for that. Oh, and I see a couple of questions about using MPCloud with a cloud server and kind of how that works. And I just want to point out just because you're using a cloud solution doesn't mean that your data is actually being backed up. Amazon doesn't guarantee that your data is safe or that things will ever be available. It's in their terms of service. So it's, and really every cloud solution makes that same claim. So it's important to have some redundancy built in there. So if you're using one cloud solution, you should have a backup with a different cloud solution. And that might already be built into whatever cloud solution you're using. Okay. And Mark was wondering what vendors you work with that own the backup sites. Yeah, so we have a special relationship with an organization called Intronus and we've gotten some really good pricing for them because we work with so many nonprofit organizations. Okay. And I'm just going to take a couple of more questions because we are nearing the hour. I do want to remind everybody that if we don't get to your questions today, I'm going to forward your unanswered questions to Sam and he will be able to respond after the webinar. I'm probably within a week or so. So never fear, we will get to them. So here's a question from Bernadette. And I think this is a really just good general question. So we are recognizing a need for a virtual server. Can you help us to understand how to set this up and to include MP Cloud? Yeah, absolutely. That's actually why we exist as an organization. And on our website you'll see we have a whole product line called MPBase. And that's all virtual desktops and servers in the cloud. And we'll help you out with the whole process. We also have a solution called MPOffice which is built on Office 365. We'll help you get the nonprofit pricing for Office 365 and then we'll help you get on to Office 365 which isn't, you know, it's kind of like a server migration. It's not totally straightforward. And we've done, wow, we have like 1,500 seats on Office 365 now where we've migrated them. So that's really our goal is to help make it easier to understand what you need and help you get there. Okay, great. And that actually answered another question which would be, how would you back up Office 365? And I'm going to take one more question. So Bonnie was wondering, can the computers be in different locations or laptops? Yeah, absolutely. They all go over the Internet. And the real issue with backing up individual computers is just making sure that they're on at the same time when the backups are happening. And there's a couple ways you can do that. You can have them not hibernate or go to sleep at night, or we can set up the backups to happen continuously whenever the computer is on or during the day or in the afternoon. And we can work with you to figure out the best time for those backups to happen. Okay, great. So with that I'm going to go ahead and do my closing bit here really fast. And this should work, but I will be sending out the full link as well in the follow-up message acronym. If you want to take a look at the end people offering through TechSoup, you should be able to follow that affiliate link and take a look. And I wanted to go ahead and thank MP Cloud. And I want to thank Sam Ripchaker for this really, really great presentation today. We really, really appreciate it. Just so everybody knows, we will be sending out a recording and the slide deck to everybody as well as some resources and links. And that should be getting to all registrants today. And just a little bit about who TechSoup is. We are probably a 1C3 nonprofit like the rest of you out there, or like many of the rest of you out there. And we are attempting to provide technology and technology resources so that your organization can fulfill your full potential. And just a little bit about where those resources are on the TechSoup website. You can go to the Learning Center to find articles. You can go to the blog to read blog posts. Don't forget to check out our products on the Find Products section of the site on the right-hand side. And you can subscribe to TechSoup Newsletters by the Cup and New Product Donation Alert. And again, so thank you to Sam and MP Cloud. And thank you to our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk who has provided the donation of this webinar service. So again, thank you everybody. If you could take just a moment and fill out the survey after this webinar, that would be great.