Backups need to be secure, securely transported and securely stored to comply with modern legislation and regulations. Documents also need to be reliably recoverable - often for a period of 12+ years.
The average failure rate of a tape based restoration is 30%. Over time this is likely to increase, as tape degrades unless stored under the most meticulous conditions.
Legislation/regulation includes:
Data Protection Act
FSA regulations
Human Rights Legislation
Inland Revenue
Customs & Excise
Trade / professional standards bodies
Failure to guard data effectively can lead to prosecution by/under the above. It also raises issues of Corporate Governance, due diligence and Directors ' Liabilities.
Our offsite backup system provides a more reliable, resilient and recoverable backup methodology. It is also simpler less costly and more effective to manage.
Furthermore it is 'hardware agnostic' - if it can 'see' data it can back it up. This means it can operate over several different hardware platforms and operating systems and backup multiple servers.
Managing tape backup systems is complex and time-wasting. Often it requires staff to attend 'out of hours ' to change tapes/loaders. It is also reliant on individuals to succeed - if that individual, e.g. due to sickness, doesn't attend and change tapes, the backup system becomes ineffective. Where several servers need to be backed up and where there are multiple platforms, the problem is amplified.
Tape systems are at their worst when it is required to find and recover an individual file. This can take hours, even days, and, because of the unreliability of tape, there 's no guarantee that the file will restore.
What 's more, tape systems are notoriously renowned for not reporting failure. It is not atypical to discover this only when trying to effect a recovery.
In comparison our system offers:
Automated
Multi-server
Multi-platform
Detailed reporting
Simple file identification & recovery
Multiple backup sets
Self-recovering and reporting
As data storage requirements have grown, tape systems have struggled to cope. It is now not uncommon for medium sized businesses to not be able to run the backup they require during the available night-time window available for this. As a result their resilience and integrity can be compromised.
The prevalent tape hardware has changed several times during the last 10 years to provide greater capacity and speed. In addition autoloader cassettes have been utilised to make several tapes available in rapid sequence. More software, greater use of IT, substantial year-on-year growth in email volumes, bigger email attachments and bigger data files have meant that tapes have failed to keep up.
Tape, because it has to spool, is a physically slow way to record and an even slower way to recover files. Tape is also complex. In contrast, our offsite solution offers the following:
Scalable from Gigabytes through multiple Terabytes of information
Utilises compression, single
file instancing and delta blocking technologies
-These reduce the size
of offsite storage and bandwidth requirements
Can be used over existing or new data connections
More flexibility in backup windows than tape technologies
The facility to run multiple backup sets with single file instancing
IT professionals are a key resource for many businesses. Sometimes it's only the utilisation and development of IT that provides a business with its competitive advantage. Managing backups, particularly of multiple servers and multiple platforms is unproductive use of their time.
This is exasperated when there 's a need to recover anything - form a single file to a server, or more. Our solution:
Provides a means to manage and automate all backups from one place
Enables automation of a reliable backup process
Can create detailed reports of data backed up
Automatically reports and alerts in the unlikely event of failure
Vastly speeds up file and server recovery times
Frees up valuable expensive IT staff time for productive use.
The whole raison d 'etre of a backup system is to provide resilience. A backup system that isn't resilient belongs in the 'chocolate fireguard ' museum of dangerous inventions. Dangerous? Yes, because at stake is the very existence of your organisation, the future of your employees, capital of shareholders and place in the market. It's proven that organisations that lose their data and which cannot make a swift and full restoration go out of business.
Offsite backup with us has been designed to provide swift secure and reliable backup and restoration for modern IT systems. Unlike lesser online systems and tapes, it means it works now and will continue to work in the future.
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