The Risks

Business is heavily reliant on data. The loss of access to this data due to fire, flood, power outages, network connectivity problems etc. may represent a significant problem. In some cases for catastrophic loss of data this may mean the company will lose business and cease trading. It is all very well having insurance cover for new computers, furniture and other items when a major fire or flood occurs. However, if the stored data has also been destroyed together with the backup tapes then this would have a major impact on whether the company could continue in business.

There are lots of important categories of data, here are a few

• Personnel records
• Payroll data
• CRM databases
• Finance data
• eMail systems
• IT System configuration data
• Information associated with ongoing projects
• Information that is required to be retained as a legal requirement

… the list goes on. It may seem too complex to store elsewhere on a regular basis. The company may only have 1 office location, or perhaps other branch locations are many miles away, and couriers will require effort to organize and have significant costs, with all branch offices doing their own backups with nothing sent offsite.

There will also be knock-on effects – the customer database may be gone, and building up a new set of customers will be difficult. For customers who owe money – it will be difficult to remind them if their account records are gone together with amount owed. The partners with which the company trades will lose confidence in a company that does not look after their data. Then there is the media & press, if the company is well known, their reputation will fall together with share price if it is publicized that the company is in serious difficulty.

There may be cultural barriers -

• the company may be reluctant to store data over the internet into a remote storage facility or the “Cloud”.
• the data may be sensitive, and what if it is intercepted, stolen, read by others. What about the remote storage location, what if a hacker gets in and steals the data. It sounds risky, but the company still has the problem, all this data and how to protect it, and who to trust.

The Solution – Asigra Backup Software

Lakestyle is able to work with customers to devise data backup and archiving solutions based around the market leading Asigra Cloud Backup solution, including -

• analysing where the data is located and retention periods
• understand the sensitivity of data and additional controls that should employed.
• determine where local storage and DS-Clients should be located
• work with the client to determine whether the data is to be kept within the company and backed up across the company WAN, or whether an external 3rd party datacenter can be used

No company IT architecture is too large or small, ranging from Gigabytes, to Terabytes and above. The smallest deployment could be using the Asigra DS-Mobile Client installed on a single laptop / desktop backing up data to Lakestyle’s Vault at a secure datacenter in Manchester.

Larger companies require a more bespoke solution, and consultancy time working with the customer to develop a proof of concept architecture, in parallel to existing processes to build confidence, and demonstrate a working solution. Large customers typically have existing IT support teams for managing their infrastructure, and purchasing channels for IT hardware. Therefore for a large company taking a strategic move to use Asigra, additional hardware will need to be deployed to host the DS-Clients (perhaps DS-System), and local storage arrays. It is usually most appropriate that the existing service provider installs and maintains the hardware required for Asigra – however Lakestyle will ensure that all Asigra components are installed and configured accordingly. The licence model for Asigra does not care how many DS-Clients are deployed around the organisation, how many servers are to be backed up or how complex the infrastructure – Asigra costs are purely based around how much compressed data is to be backed up to the vaults on an ongoing basis. Customers will be invoiced based on the amount of vault space used each month.

It is worth noting that Asigra is an intelligent software solution, and the amount of data to be stored can be managed

• Data Retention Times – can be set e.g 5 years, such that data changes are backed up, but any files deleted from the master local storage with be removed from the vault after the expiry of the retention time.
• Compression – all data sent to the vault is compressed, and 1.5TB of data will typically be compressed to 1TB (illustrative – user situations will vary).
• De-duplication – files on IT system often get copied many times, and if say myfile.jpg is stored 100x on the local IT system then it will only be stored once on the vault
• Storage of block level changes – many files are large e.g. 100MB design file. If in a time period of 100 days, the file was edited and saved locally each day for those 100 days, and the customer rightly wanted to go back in time to restore the file from N days ago, then if complete versions of the file were stored this would equate to 100 x 100MB = 10 GB of data being stored. If the project ran over months or years then the storage would be significant. Asigra uses techniques to store the block level changes – this means with the example above that say 1MB of data was changed within the file each day then only the changes would be stored – so the storage for the 100MB file over 100 days would be 100MB + (100 x 1MB) = 200MB.

To find out more about Data storage , please contact Lakestyle . Request Callback