SITOC - Specialists in IT Outsourcing and Consultancy

Archiving and backups

It is crucial to business continuity that you can recover your data when you need to, whether the reason for needing recovery is system failure, theft, fire, flood or simple human error. Two key tools in this are secure daily backups and appropriate archiving.

Archiving

If you are already using an online backup system, you will know that it has many advantages over your old tape-based system for backing up data. Any good backup system (such as our own DataSafe service) is secure, encrypted and mirrored to two locations. But you will also know that data levels and, because of this, costs, inevitably creep up. Your backups get bigger, take longer, use more bandwidth and cost more as time goes on.

You will also know that UK, European, and even US legislation now dicate that emails, electronic files and financial data have to remain accessible and available for several years – up to seven years after audit. This means that businesses risk legislative penalties if their archive files cannot be properly opened and restored as needed or on request.

This no longer needs to be the case. SITOC's archiving service allows you to have the best of both worlds. We take a snapshot of all data at any one time, encrypt it, and store it on a securely held USB drive. You can then choose to backup online only data from the last 12 or 9 months previous. Your backup costs are dictated by the amount of data on the platform. So, in one step, you can reduce backup costs by an average of 33%. Your data remain secure and recoverable.

Benefits

Preserves your bandwidth
Secure and encrypted data storage
Reduces data on your backup platform
Recently or regularly used files backup online
Archive data remain recoverable (charges apply)
Reduces regular backup costs by an average of 33%
Requires no maintenance from the user organisation

Further reading on data archiving from IT-Observer

Further reading on data protection ICO.gov.uk

Backups

Tape-based backup systems fail too often. Forgetting to change the tape on just one occasion can result in a long period of failed backups. Something that can so easily escape detection until a file needs to be restored, and it can't be. Tape wear and tear, hardware specificity, and human failure can all too easily leave data unrecoverable.

There is an alternative – one that ensures your data remain secure and, so vitally, that any file is easily restorable.

DataSafe is a secure, automated disk-to-disk backup and recovery service which is simple to use and ensures that all important data are regularly and automatically backed up over the network. The data are hosted in a highly secure disaster recovery data centre, encrypted, and replicated to a second secure centre, ensuring the highest levels of physical data security.

And we also have a schools' backup solution, with SIMS backup for your admin. Click here for our school pages.

Benefits

Resilient – Protects against local power failure, fire and flood damage
Effortless – Eliminates the hassle of traditional tape-based backup methods
Economic – No hardware costs; no employee time spent managing backups
Reliable – Automated schedules. Backups cannot be forgotten or neglected
Secure – Data encrypted and stored in 2 separate and highly secure locations
Safe – Data centre owned and managed by IBM Business and Recovery Services
Fast – Backups are quickly and easily accessible. Lost or deleted files recovered in minutes