In simple terms, data security is the practice of keeping data protected from corruption and unauthorised access. The focus behind data security is to ensure privacy while protecting personal or corporate data.
Beyond protection from unauthorised access and change is the just as important requirement to safely store the data and protect from loss, whether it be from malicious act or system failure. Many companies are now required to
keep data for a period of years, and today company data IS the company. Many companies would find it almost impossible to continue in business if they were to irrevocably lose access to their key data, and in fact
50% of businesses that suffer major data loss never reopen, and 90% close within 2 years.
At Millennia® we can help you to protect your major company asset; be it through simple offsite backup procedures, replication of business systems to another site, security scans of your IT environment, or even
consultancy to help you meet regulatory requirements. Whatever the requirement, Millennia® have a service for you.
Cloud Backup
THE most important thing you can do is make sure your data is backed up so if disaster strikes you can get your vital data back. However if your data is backed up onsite and that disaster means you lose the site,
well we don't need to paint you a picture!
Therefore the second most important thing you need to do is get that data offsite. Traditionally this has been through tapes, but this requires a manual intervention and is therefore prone to missing vital data right
when you need it. Tapes have been known to fail too, especially if not stored properly.
With the increasing bandwidth capability of corporate connections to the Internet the best way to automatically protect your data at a regionally separate location is by utilising online backup systems.
These involve software that takes your changed files, compresses them, and takes them offsite in an encrypted form - so they are secure both from damage and from theft while offsite. This is where the LiveVault service from
Iron Mountain comes to the rescue.
LiveVault comprises an agent that runs on the server to be backed up, which scans the selected files to be protected and takes copies offsite as regularly as every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, without manual intervention. It
compresses the files to save bandwidth, and further saves bandwidth by then taking only the changed parts of files (deltas) in subsequent backups. So if only 1MB of a 2GB file changes then only that 1MB will be sent offsite, not
the entire 2GB again.
LiveVault also has an open file manger built in, and is application aware so can backup SQL Server and Exchange without any extra costly modules. The SQL Server module in version 7.20 and above is transactionally aware, therefore
it is possible to take fully transaction safe backups offsite, instead of the usual offsite agent method of taking a crash recovery image of the database at backup time. This makes sure your database is recoverable.
LiveVault prices are around £1 per GB of protected file data per month, regardless of number of servers as long as there is a minimum 10GB average per server being protected in the network. Less than this increases the charge to £1.25
per GB with no minimum, and for large scale volumes there are discounts available. By default the data is kept for 90 days, and this can be extended to 1 or 7 years. A £10 per month management charge provides a web interface for the customer, so that not only can the progress and status of backups be monitored,
but restores can be requested from anywhere back to their original server - great for centralised management.
The web management is not located on the customer site, so does not add to the requirement for external access to the corporate network. Data is sent offsite via the standard https port, so no extra firewall rules are required
except if security policies deny https access from servers. In this case we can provide the IP addresses of backup targets to lock down firewall rules.
Backups are sent to a UK datacentre ONLY (so compliance for sensitive UK data can be maintained),
and then copied again to a second UK datacentre. Therefore your data is held in at least 2 regionally independent locations for maximum protection. Note we can also send your data to a US datacentre if required, if the data
compliance is US only.
All it takes to set up the system are some billing details and then a userid for the web interface is provided. From this point you have full control of what servers and what data on those servers
is protected. This is a very cost efficient method of actioning the two most important data management practises any organisation should be doing.
Contact us for more details.
