A State of the Art Data Backup and
Disaster Recovery Solution that “bullet proofs” your data.
Highlights
of the Service:
·
A
complete solution that is designed to reduce any server down time with the use
of a specialized back up and virtual server appliance.
·
Allows
near real-time backups-as frequent as every 15 minutes.
·
Offers
offsite storage at an affordable cost
·
Provides
a low cost, speedy disaster recovery process.
·
Data is
encrypted so it is not accessible to anyone, either on the NAS or at the remote
storage facility without the passkey.
·
Eliminates
the cost and time of managing on-site tape backup. We monitor and manage the
entire process.
·
All
costs-frequent on site backups, on site virtual server, remote storage,
disaster recovery in the event of disaster and 24x7 management of the entire
process are bundled at a price that is comparable to the overall cost of buying
and managing tape backup.
Executive
Summary
A recent study discovered that,
of companies experiencing a “major loss” of computer records, 43 percent never
reopened, 51 percent closed within two years of the loss, and a mere 6 percent
survived over the long-term[1]
For small and medium-sized businesses (SMB’s) in particular, these statistics
suggest the necessity of crafting a Business Continuity Planning (BCP) strategy
grounded in a robust data backup and recovery solution.
Unlike enterprises, many
smaller companies cannot afford optimal in-house strategies and solutions in
service of BCP. These companies are consequently at an elevated risk of being
put out of business due to any major loss of data. Loss of data could mean
emails lost, accounting data lost, patient or client files lost, company
records lost, client legal records or orders lost and so on. This white paper
evaluates the scope of BCP for smaller companies, by examining their
challenges, range of existing solutions and their drawbacks. We’ll also discuss
how our solution overcomes commonly faced challenges to offer the most
comprehensive solution out in the marketplace.
Business
Continuity Planning for Small and Medium Size Businesses
BCP is the blueprint for how
businesses plan to survive everything from local equipment failure to global
disaster. Data-oriented BCP, an indispensable component of business planning
regardless of organization size, poses the following challenges. Smaller
businesses generally lack the in-house IT resources to achieve these demanding
planning, technical and process requirements. Therefore, many SMBs either
neglect to implement any data-oriented business continuity plan or else
approach data backup and recovery in a sporadic, rudimentary fashion that fails
to conform to the best practices of BCP.
Understanding
the risks of NOT having a plan
in place:
o
Understanding Regulatory Compliance requirements in your industry.
Regulations such as the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
(HIPAA) and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) and other laws- state and
federal.
o
Understanding how to
mitigate the risk of losing vital business data, such as customer records.
o
Being aware of the environmental hazards that the business
infrastructure is exposed to due to your geographical location.
o
Estimating time it would take to build the business back if
disaster strikes without having any BCP in place.
o
Understanding ROI for having a BCP in place.
·
Technical
Challenges:
o
Identify the lowest-cost, highest-performance data backup medium
(tape or disk) based solution and keeping abreast with the latest and greatest
in the industry.
o
Ensure that all backed-up data is encrypted and otherwise
safeguarded from theft.
o
Ensure that backed-up data can be restored to different kinds of
hardware.
o
Ensure that data backup continues even during active recovery
phases.
·
Operational
Challenges:
·
Identifying what data to back up.
·
Identifying how frequently to back up and related costs and ROI.
·
Retain the ability to recover not only the most recent data, but
also data from older time horizons, such as past quarters and years.
·
Retain the ability to monitor and manage the integrity of ongoing
data backup processes so that backup failures can be diagnosed and remedied
before adversely impacting the BCP lifecycle.
·
The need to hire Staff who can understand, design, implement and
keep a BCP running 24/7 and be available to get business back in action after
disaster strikes.
Traditional
Solution vs. Emerging Technology
Implementing a data-oriented
BCP strategy first requires designation of a specific data storage medium.
Magnetic tape and disks are the two leading media for data backup storage.
While magnetic tape is currently dominant, analyst Dave Russell of Gartner
believes that “Recovery will move to online disk-based storage in the future.
This will cause a major shift in the backup market during the next four to five
years.”[2]
Smaller Companies in particular
will benefit from the shift, as recent advances in design and manufacturing
lower the total cost of disk-based storage in terms of storage per bit.
Falling prices, combined with
the various performance advantages that storage industry analysts cite, render
disk increasingly attractive. Gartner Group highlights the suitability of disk
for these organizations by explaining that, “The need for high-performance
online recovery of data, combined with the availability of low-cost disk
arrays, has influenced enterprises and small and midsize businesses to adopt a
disk-based approach for backup and recovery.”[3]
Tape, in contrast to disk, is
physically delicate and easily compromised by environmental factors such as
heat, humidity, and magnetic interference. Moreover, tape cartridges must be
replaced frequently (every 6-12 months). Tape’s innate sensitivity contributes
to high failure rates, with analysts estimating that anywhere from 42 to 71
percent of tape restores fail. Even when magnetic tape backups are successful,
tapes themselves are subject to loss or theft, and may be in the possession of
an employee or vendor unable to reach a recovery site. Thus, even when physical
backup and restoration processes succeed, tape may not prove to be as timely
and appropriate a medium for data storage as disk. Time is a crucial
consideration because each hour of server, application, and network downtime
endured until data restoration comes at a high cost, especially to smaller
businesses.
Analyst Jon Oltsik of
Enterprise Strategy Group also points out that tape is seldom encrypted,
compounding the destructive impact of tape theft: “Very few people encrypt
backup tapes, which means that they rely on the security of the backup and
off-site rotation process.”[4]
Magnetic tape encryption, unlike disk encryption, has historically been too
costly for all but large enterprises: “Encryption of any data that is leaving
the security of the data center, in transit, has always been an option,
unfortunately, a very expensive option,” explains Clipper Group.[5]
Disk offers not only lower cost
encryption but also other advantages. In contrast to tape, “disks are more
durable, last longer, withstand more overwriting and you don’t need to clean
any heads,” according to Rinku Tyagi of PCQuest. Additionally, “When it comes to backing up
using disks, they are easier to manage. Disk backup systems include management
tools, often browser-based, for you to easily configure settings and check
status from anywhere.”[6]
HP enumerates other advantages
of disk storage, noting that “Data is backed up to disk much faster than tape,
which translates to less impact on production server availability. Disk is also
a more reliable media than tape and less prone to error, which translates to
less failed recoveries.”[7]
Clipper Group believes that the superior speed of disk storage is an enduring
advantage: “High performance disk will always be the choice for online
applications that require fast access.”[8]
While disk offers advantages
over tape, it is not a panacea. After installing disk technology, Companies
will still be responsible for monitoring and managing backup processes,
encrypting and safeguarding backed up onsite and offsite data, restoring data
to new hardware, and other functions. Without implementing a layer of
governance over disk-based data backup, these Companies court the danger of
failed backups and delayed restoration of data, thereby jeopardizing their
chances of successful recovery from major data loss.
Smaller Companies unable or
unwilling to invest in the human expertise and infrastructure support systems
necessary for data-oriented BCP can leverage our data backup and recovery
solution, which removes cost and complexity burdens from your staff.
A
Complete Solution that addresses all of your BCP Needs
Near Real-Time Backups: Our “Incremental Forever”
methodology captures all changes to the initial image in increments of 15
minutes. The Incremental Forever technology not only backs up recent datasets
but also allows end users to reconstruct the state of their data as it stood at
the end of various 15-minute restoration points. This level of forensic and
auditable data recovery may satisfy various regulatory requirements (such as
HIPAA and GLBA) for data retention and data record reconstruction, and also
serves stakeholders such as supply chain planners, warehouse analysts,
auditors, and legal counsel.
On-site Virtual Server: If any
of your servers fail, our server virtualization technology embedded in the
Network Attached Storage (NAS) allows customer servers and applications to be
restored and rebooted within two hours. As you may sometimes endure a wait of
several days in order to receive replacement servers from vendors, your NAS can
have your business up and running. The NAS multitasks so that, even while
functioning as a virtual server, it can continue to back up data from other
devices plugged into the NAS. Our technology thus allows you to remain in
business without any significant loss of data backup, server functionality, or
application downtime.
A Complete Image: We generate an image of all
hard drive partitions via an agent, which is warehoused on the NAS device
physically located at your location. The data is stored AES-256 bit encrypted
and compressed, reaching efficiencies as high as 2:1. We employ a block-level,
not file-level, backup, which means that data is captured at the level of 1s
and 0s. Block level data is raw data which does not have a file structure
imposed on it. Database applications such as Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft
Exchange Server transfer data in blocks. Block transfer is the most efficient
way to write to disk and is much less prone to errors such as those that result
from file-level backups. Additionally, block level backups are not affected by
open files or open databases. The block-level image is an exact digital
duplicate of the on-site server
Intuitive and Flexible
Restoration: A good backup system should allow for quick and flexible restores.
Our solution allows for recovery of files, folders, partitions,
mailboxes/messages, databases/tables using a quick and intuitive process. In
case of a complete server failure we do support a bare metal restore to new
hardware which has a different configuration, hardware and drivers as compared
to the failed server. Our 15-minute incremental based backup allows restores to
be done from any point in time, allowing for multiple versions of files,
folders, messages/mailboxes, database/tables to be restored.
Secure Remote Storage: After
imaging the servers to which it is attached, the NAS device then creates an
independent 256-bit encrypted tunnel and transmits the imaged data to a secure
offsite location where it resides in an encrypted, compressed format. That
remote site then replicates again to an alternate data center, creating a total
of three copies of the data in three geographically distinct regions. Since the
data is encrypted and only you have the key, no one has access at any of the
remote storage facilities.
Transmitting data to a remote
site is a key component of BCP. It guarantees that, in case of physical damage
to the client’s network or NAS, or even regional disaster, the data is safe in
uncompromised locations. Encryption is an important step in the process of
transmitting data between the NAS and the remote sites, because it greatly
reduces the risk of data loss incidents that plague magnetic tape and prevents
man-in-the-middle attacks during transmission. We employ the 256-bit Advanced
Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm because it has never been broken and is
currently considered the gold standard of encryption techniques and render
transmitted data immune to theft.
Secure, Bandwidth Throttling
Transfer: Transmission itself
occurs over your Internet connection, and can easily be configured to minimize bandwidth
consumption. Our NAS leverages Adaptive Bandwidth Throttling, which only
utilizes unused bandwidth or allows us to set an outbound limit. Our UDP based
smart transfer technology utilizes a host of innovative algorithms to speed up
data transport and resume from failure. We can therefore exercise fine control
over the data imaging and transmission processes.
24x7 Completely Managed
Solution: Our
300-person Network Operations Center (NOC) monitors your NAS units and the
attached servers 24/7. Failed processes generate immediate alerts to our engineers, who often remotely
correct errors within minutes of receiving notification. In case of more
serious NAS issues, we will conduct repairs at your site. If any NAS units are
irreparably damaged or destroyed, we will overnight ship
replacements—pre-loaded with all stored data—directly to your location.
Affordable Cost: We offer a pricing packaged
that is all inclusive of the complete backup and disaster recovery service-with
no hidden costs. All your costs are bundled and include the NAS, the
Incremental Forever Methodology, file restorations, file integrity checks,
secure data transmission and remote storage.
Virtual
IT Solution, LLC
Vault
Guardian Backup and Disaster Recovery Services
Telephone:
1.866.460.4055
References