A Save And Secure Medium Size Business Case Study

Alsters employ over 120 staff and are one of the largest independent legal
firms in the Midlands. After a system crash they were unable to restore data
from their backups and turned to Save And Secure as the solution to their
problems.

As a rule of thumb the minimum requirement for most business backup infrastructure should include:

1. Routine automated full system/ incremental daily backup

2. Duplicated data backup

3. At least one duplicated backup stored offsite

4. Ability to confirm what data has been backed up

5. Ability to undertake easy restore of data

6. Experienced professional managing data backup and restore

7. Encryption and safe storage of data

8. Access to long term archiving

9. Speedy backup and restore

 

The key process

Most people think of backup as the key process in data protection, however
data backups are virtually worthless if you are unable to restore it. Many
people fail to check what files have been backed up and when they
eventually come to restore wonder where their data has gone. Taking tapes
offsite each night is a risky strategy as tapes can be lost, stolen and subject
to corruption. The magnetic interference in a mobile phone can often corrupt
data on backup tapes if they come into contact with each other.

Alsters were using sophisticated onsite tape streamers and were rotating
tapes on a pre-defined cycle with backup tapes being taken offsite every
night. They felt that they had a secure backup policy in place; that was until
they had a system crash and tried to restore data from their backup tapes.
Although backing up their data daily, the tapes Alsters were backing up to
proved unreliable.

Corruption?

With no real way of knowing that the backup tapes were
corrupted they were unable to restore a large quantity of data when they
tried to repair their systems. Fortunately this time around the lost data was
not commercially critical, however it could have been and demonstrated to
them that they needed a more robust and reliable form of data backup and
restore. Alsters turned to the automated Save And Secure Online Data Backup
and Restore service.

Since using Save And Secure Online Backup and Restore, Alsters no longer have to
worry about their data and compliment their existing structure with the
Save And Secure service running on 4 servers. Each night the Save And Secure service
automatically backups up each server with all data being encrypted and
transmitted to the mirrored Save And Secure data centre.

System administration of backups has been cut by about 70 % and Alsters
have been able to strip away the cost of their backup hardware
infrastructure and ongoing maintenance. As Save And Secure is an offsite managed
service their IT resources are freed up to focus on the value added
areas of their business.

“Protecting the value of your business through secure data backup and restore”