Data related problems

Backups and DRP

Data stored in your system are vital to the smooth running of your company. They contain your accounting data, your invoices (ERP), your client files (CRM), your business data, your Web site etc.

Depending on your business process, this data can be centralized on your servers, or scattered among your client PCs.

In all cases, you must manage the complex problem of full & regular data backup.

1. At a lower scale, you can encourage your coworkers to make their own backups on DVD or external hard disks,
2. At a medium scale, you can set up scheduled tasks which copy automatically (e.g. once a week) your data on external storage (tapes, disks),
3. At a bigger scale, you can buy specialized software deployed on your servers and your client PCs, able to consolidate a full backup of all your data on dedicated servers, potentially outsourced at a specialized SAN provider.

Only solution #3 with external SAN option offers you a solution close to perfection:

• Specialized software can make regular and "hot" backups of your servers (no service disruption),
• It also retrieves all hard disks contents from your client PCs if your coworkers usually work locally rather than on the network,
• Tape backup prevents from regular hard disk failures (which sometimes force you to ask for specialized data recovery companies (costful), which work in cleanrooms),
• Outsourcing your backups at a SAN providers guarantees you by contract of data availability, and saves you from disasters by geographically separating your data: fire, natural or technological disaster etc. The ideal being outsourcing these backups abroad.

But this solution is extremely expensive, and practically inaccessible for SMBs.

For them, by staying at level 1 or 2, the risk is important: backups can be partial (by omission or by difficulty to consolidate all data) and can be destroyed in case of a disaster.

Many companies should revise (or even establish if they do not have one) their DRP: disaster recovery plan, notably by estimating the time needed for activity recovery.

Storage size

Not only do your backups take lot of gigabytes, but data itself grows exponentially in the modern society of Information.

Product data (2D and 3D model for example), which is generated by your engineering department, is particularly greedy in this domain.

To stay away from limits, your IT must continously acquire new hard disks, generally long after the demand arose.

Therefore, your coworkers are regularly stuck in their need, which can even live for a short time.

Storage security

Your hard disks contain probably sensible data. You must then take into account and protect from physical intrusion risks (industrial property theft) or software intrusion risks (hackers through Internet). In this latter case, IDS software, or even Computing Security experts, are probably needed for a cautionous IT.

The solution

All these issues can be elegantly solved by Cloud Computing technologies.

For that purpose, deploy your data into the Cloud, and select the best offers from the various providers.

As the picture shows, your Cloud storage is:

• virtually infinite (it can grow on demand, you only have to specify a size in gigabyte)
• protected from hackers, because the Cloud Computing provider puts into place advanced firewall technologies, IDS and automatic security patches, and it integrates them into its solutions,
• protected from intruders, because the Cloud Computing provider certifies its datacenters according to restrictive norms such as SOX and SAS70; the precise datacenter locations are kept secret, they are protected by a security service with video recording and biometrical identification,
• and automatically replicated many times... thus, your data is automatically protected from fire or natural/technological disasters that the datacenter could suffer from.

Thanks to georeplication, providers also offer proxy solutions for distributing data close to the clients, in order to enhance response time of your Web sites. This solutions compares to historical Akamai's solutions, this latter having generally higher prices...

Of course, these offers are modular: all your data do not have to migrate into the Cloud instantly. For example, you can test in a first time backup solutions while keeping your data servers in your company.

Contact us to learn more.