Is Your Network Safe?

Cyber criminals are coming up with more and more sophisticated ways to threaten your security. Your network is only as strong as its weakest link and that is why training your employees in security awareness is crucial. 

Train Your Employees. Protect Your Network.

We have your data protected, but not from "human error”. It’s imperative to ensure all employees are educated and up to speed on how to spot ransomware attacks BEFORE they click on a dangerous link.

UCG now provides the following base value-added service at no additional cost to current and new UCG Enterprise Cloud Backup & DR (formerly VAULT400) subscribers.

1. Phishing test for all active email users.
2. List of users whose email addresses are exposed.
3. Twenty-five users will receive online cyber security training. (Additional training may be purchased for $10 per user plus $2 every six months for maintenance, updates and support. This is a complete managed service.
4. UCG will schedule ongoing phishing tests and training on your behalf.
5. Quarterly reports will be emailed to bring your attention to violators who can then be scheduled for additional online training.

Bottom Line: Your organization is 20 to 40%+ risk of being hit with ransomware. With this training, it will reduce to negligible single digits or eliminate it completely.

Get started with a free phishing test or security awareness training quote! 

800.211.8798 | info@ucgtechnologies.com

Power Systems Tech Showcase: The Rising Cost of Security Breaches

by Margarette Burnette 

"If your company faced a cyber attack this year, it could cost $3.8 million. That's according to a new study from the Ponemon Institute, a cybersecurity company based in Traverse City, Michigan. 

The recently released “Cost of Data Breach Study: Global Analysis,” sponsored by IBM, found that cyber attacks are also increasing in frequency."

Read article online here or download PDF. 





What can you do to help protect your company from cybercrime?

The recent Ponemon Institute report states that "Malicious or criminal attacks continue to be the primary cause of data breach. Forty-nine percent of incidents involved a malicious or criminal attack, 19 percent concerned negligent employees, and 32 percent involved system glitches that includes both IT and business process failures."

The importance of a security-minded culture across your business cannot be overstated.

As the result of our recent partnership with KnowBe4, UCG’s VAULT400 BaaS will now include a turnkey managed solution version of their cybersecurity solution suite via remote implementation in less than 90 minutes. The KB4 team has built, deployed, and supported market leading e-learning applications and has deep roots in IT Security.

Scheduled simulated phishing attacks and monthly reports will provide executives the insight they need to maximize training ROI and track security compliance. As an added value, a base number of KB4 users will be included at no additional charge to current and new VAULT400 subscribers.

Free Phishing Security Test

It's important to remember that it's not a matter of IF you'll be hacked, but WHEN.

Sign up for our complimentary Phishing Security Test to find out the level of risk to your business, and how security awareness training can lessen the chances that you'll be the victim of ransomware.

Visit ucgrp.com, call 800.211.8798, or email info@ucgrp.com to learn more.

UCG’s Top 10 ways to work smarter, faster, and reclaim your time with VAULT400 BaaS

United Computer Group, Inc.’s VAULT400 hybrid (local and cloud-based) backup and disaster recovery solutions have a number of ways to save you time and boost backup operations.

But, for iSeries environments, we’re focusing specifically on our own 

‘Top 10’ ways use of VAULT400 can help iSeries users work smarter, work faster, and reclaim their time. 

A few things to ponder while you wait for your next backup window to finish...

1.  Fast, ‘over the wire’ backup/restore that leaves tape in the dust. (Hint: Our online backups even beat the backup speeds of many TSM environments.) Compare us to traditional backup, whether full tape backup or disk-based backup solutions like VTLs. Even TSM. You’ll find it hard to beat VAULT400’s fast performance. Our secret? It’s all in VAULT400’s efficient use of very small data blocks.

2.  Affordable, complete cloud-based disaster recovery. What good is fast backup if you can’t recover fast? There’s a better way than struggling with tape to meet your organization’s RTOs. VAULT400’s Cloud Disaster Recovery (CDR) service lets you back up securely online to VAULT400’s iron-clad cloud environment. Then, if disaster strikes, we’ll fail over your iSeries environment from the cloud within just 24-48 hours. That includes restoring your connections, systems, associated servers, and more.

3. End-to-end encryption without the overhead. No need to buy costly encryption software. With VAULT400, you get built-in encryption whether your data is at rest or in-flight. In fact, you get VAULT400’s complete backup/recovery system with built-in encryption for less than most encryption solutions.

4. Uses less bandwidth and less storage for backup. VAULT400 architecture is designed to use as little bandwidth and storage as possible. That means faster backup/restore times. It also means less money spent to store your backup data. VAULT400 algorithms evaluate your data, offering unbelievable compression with very small footprints for sizable data sets. For IFS systems, that means 2:1 compression. For non-IFS systems? It’s common to see 10:1 compression—or significantly greater. Curious? Ask us to walk you through a concrete example based on an average 100GB database.

5. Extreme DB2 compression. DB2 environments are a perfect example of IFS backup savings. For DB2, we routinely see 10:1 compression with iSeries customers. We’ve also seen as high as 25:1 compression ratios! How much could that save you on bandwidth or storage? It could easily mean the difference of hundreds of gigabytes per database backup, per week.

6. Forget tape multiplexing. Shorten backup windows with concurrent LPAR backups. Many iSeries environments now manage multiple LPAR environments from the same system. VAULT400 helps you shrink backup windows further by streaming multiple LPAR backups at the same time.

7. Easy command interface, easy management. Anyone who’s ever waded through the intricacies of tape or VTL operations will appreciate how easy VAULT400 makes it to automate data protection.

8. Multiple platforms beyond iSeries? We’ve got you covered. You’ll find VAULT400 is one of the few solutions to offer robust, similar backup/restore operation across virtually any operating system. 

9. DR testing that works like a charm. VAULT400 automation makes it easy to run routine tests of your iSeries DR procedures. We help companies perform over 400 successful DR tests each year.

10. Help that’s there when you need it most. Every vendor talks about how great their support is, but United Computer Group’s VAULT400 customers speak for themselves with a 98% customer satisfaction rating. Ever need answers? We’ve got ‘em and are happy to help!


UCG is dedicated to the swift, sure handling of your backup and restore data. With VAULT400 BaaS, you also know one thing: You always get your data back. If you truly want to reclaim your time, contact us today at 800.211.8798. We’ll show you more ways VAULT400 BaaS can collapse your backup windows and streamline your DR.

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UCG And Expedient Partner For Expanded IBM i Hosted Services

By Dan Burger, IT Jungle

United Computer Group built a trustworthy reputation alongside its growing IBM midrange customer base by offering online backup services. It also offered disaster recovery services to organizations that have figured out the limitations of their downtime survival endurance. UCG has made the investments in equipment and staff to deliver service that meets high expectations, and now it's taking the next step.

Expedient, a company with 11 data centers in seven markets from Chicago eastward, including the northeast regions of the United States, and UCG decided they could use one another's help, so they formed a partnership.

Expedient provides colocation services--rack, power, and pipe--along with utility processing, backup as a service (BaaS), and disaster recovery primarily for X86 servers. The company has some IBM i on Power in their data center, business that has come along with some X86 customers, but the IBM i servers remain managed by the customers. When more companies wanted the option of having their IBM i servers managed as a service, Expedient brought in UCG to handle that business.

"Expedient's foot-print in the Midwest and on the East Coast is 'significant,'" says Jim Kandrac, president of UCG. "We have worked on getting to know one another over the past several years and things just progressed naturally."

Kandrac explained that IBM i customers with servers in Expedient's data centers are doing tape backups, but UCG's BaaS will be a cost effective alternative that is expected to have a high adoption rate. Expedient expects to expand it backup and recovery business for X86 servers and that will bring some additional IBM i business with it. With UCG onboard, Expedient can provide service for both platforms when its customers are looking for an all-in-one service provider.

Kandrac points out that UCG also does backup and recovery for X86, but it doesn't seek that business. UCG does it for IBM i shops that want to bring X86 along with the i-centric services UCG provides. Colocation services has not been part of the UCG offerings, but now when IBM i shops mention it, UCG has an answer.

UCG has its operations in Cleveland in a data center owned by BlueBridge Networks, a company that, like Expedient, does most of its business in the X86 arena, according to Kandrac. UCG also makes use of a second data center in Marietta, Georgia.

Expedient also has data centers in Cleveland. UCG will have servers in data centers owned by both Expedient and BlueBridge.

The two data centers Expedient operates in Cleveland are connected to the other nine data centers the company owns. One of the Cleveland data centers will provide redundancy for the IBM i and storage area networks (SANs) UCG has at BlueBridge Networks.

UCG is also expanding its services beyond the backup and recovery expertise that has resulted in an IBM i customer base totaling 150 organizations. The new capabilities include services surrounding development, test, and production environments.

Kandrac says his company has slowly grown into hosting those environments. It has developed as the client-vendor relationship has developed dependability and trust. In the managed services business, it's nearly impossible to overestimate the value of trust.

"Customer demand is pushing this," Kandrac says. The journey began with BaaS. Then the DR element became important and the recovery time decreased to 24 hours and 12-hours and we also became a managed high availability service provider.

"Over the past three years, UCG has invested significantly in staffing and systems and we are poised to continue to have a 'controlled growth' of 25 percent to 35 percent per year in the managed services arena."

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