Backup

Multi-layered Backup Protection and Security

An organisation is based on the information and data it has. Whether this information is based around the product and services it can offer or on the customers and clients it supplies or supports - this information is of the upmost importance and must be protected. 

Why the traditional process of tape backup is flawed?

9 out of 10 small and medium size businesses follow a traditional tape Backup process whereby core business information and data is backed up to tape. The key questions to ask are “what data is being backed up”, “how often is this tape backup occurring” and “where are the backup tapes being stored”?

In many cases, these tapes are actually stored on-site or are taken to an alternative location, such as an employee’s home, with very little security or protection from the elements. If the office or employees home was damaged by water, fire or theft, your corporate information and data will be lost and this can completely cripple your business.

Many businesses fail to “test” their backup tapes to see if they actually work. Often, tapes are faulty, damaged or simply too old to be a reliable backup of your business information, rendering them totally useless. Moreover, many businesses fail to test the “restore process” in the unfortunate event that a disaster occurs. Sure, you may have a tape backup but if you haven’t tested the restore process recently, how do you know that it will work?

One of the most common mistakes businesses make is to backup the wrong data. People move data from one location to another; from one folder to another; install new software, then fail to point the tape backup to the new file location. In many cases, backups are taken of old data and new data stores are often missed completely.

Even if you are one of the 10% of small and medium size businesses that have a successful and tested tape back up process, you may not be completely away of the time it takes to restore your data in the event of a disaster such that you can continue your business operations as normal.

Here are some frightening statistics on how long it actually takes to restore data and to recommence business operations: 

1. Procure replacement hardware      2 days to 3 weeks
2. Rebuild the servers                           1-2days
3. Restore the Backups                        1 day
4. Catch up on Data entry                     1-2 days
5. Total Minimum time                           5 days of business impact or LONGER.
   

What is our Backup Solution?

Our Backup service provides a multi-layered approach to the protection of its customer’s information, enabling our Disaster Recovery service to recover from multiple levels of failure.

Firstly, at regular intervals, we take snapshot images of servers enabling us to quickly recover data and applications from servers to “specific points in time”.  In addition we employ some of the highest levels of fault tolerance at hardware and software by utilising disk protection technologies such as RAID and SAN replication to software and hardware based clustering and load-balancing.

Traditional backups are conducted daily to disk and then subsequently to tape to reduce backup windows and any performance impacts during core operating hours. Tapes are securely shipped off-site along with nightly off-site data replication to additional IntraPower data centres to ensure maximum data protection and peace of mind to our customers.

What are the Benefits of our Back up Solution?

Our backup solution as part of our Business On-Demand offering provides the following benefits:

• Multi-layer approach to ensure maximum protection
• Multiple disk based measures to reduce the time needed to recover data
• Hardware and software based protection
• Retention levels can be customised to cater for an organisations specific and regulatory requirements
• Offsite replication and tape storage to ensure recoverability in the event of data centre destruction