IT Brief Australia - Technology news for CIOs & IT decision-makers
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Does your company have a 'courtesy car' in case of disaster?
Thu, 10th Mar 2016
FYI, this story is more than a year old

At some point, all computer hardware fails. Regardless of whether it is because of age or an accident, data loss is almost inevitable. This can cripple any business, from global enterprises to SMBs to one-man-band owner-operators.

It is impossible to predict what the future holds; hard drives can malfunction without warning, cyber-attacks are on the rise and natural disasters can come knocking at any moment.

Data storage and Disaster Recovery (DR) have come a long way. It's not so long ago that floppy disks were the international tool of choice, memory was measured in megabytes and smartphones were a mere glint in Steve Jobs' eye.

Punch cards, magnetic tape, floppy disks, CDs, USB sticks and external hard drives have all had their time in the spotlight, and while some of these solutions are still being utilised, none of these methods of storage have been able to provide fast, reliable and secure DR services.

However, this has all changed with the advent of the Cloud. It is now the preferred method of storage for many companies and its uptake is expected to accelerate substantially moving forward into the future.

One of the DR companies leading the charge in New Zealand with Cloud storage and DR is KeepItSafe. Essentially, what KeepItSafe is able to do is create a secondary site to which your primary site will fail over.

While some consider backing up data to be your 'spare tyre' in case a server goes down (one bursts so you swap to the spare and keep on driving), DR from KeepItSafe is like a brand new courtesy car with all the perks, as if your site is compromised, all your servers go down or you lose all your data, KeepItSafe can have you back up and running in less time than it takes to change a tyre.

It is literally measured in minutes, as KeepItSafe's Cloud-based DR systems are extremely high-tech with all Cloud environments being top-tier, SAE16 certified facilities. In addition, all the data centers are located within the country and redundant - there is no single point of failure in any respect.

Continuing with our analogy, it's also important for your car to be of a high quality, as given the broad range of disasters that could occur, you might want your car to work for more than a short while, not just 50 kilometres.

KeepItSafe is a global company that is ISO 27001 certified. They provide fully documented step-by-step recovery plans for servers, including precise restore instructions. There is also customer training for all processes to ensure clarity of roles and responsibilities during a crisis.

This isn't to mention the fact they perform annual testing and exercising of failover services to ensure your continuous peace of mind.

Robust and reliable, KeepItSafe DR is a fully-managed service that is also application-aware, thereby effectively protecting your mission-critical software in addition to your physical platforms and various virtual platforms via a single user interface.

This allows KeepItSafe to recover your application data from a block level to an individual file locally and across the WAN in just minutes.

They deliver advanced data protection with fast, image-based backups across virtual, physical and Cloud environments - effectively unifying backup, replication and recovery in one solution.

To ensure your data is truly secure, it needs to not only be backed up, but also quickly recoverable so that your downtime is kept to a minimum when the unforeseeable happens – which stresses the importance of having an effective Disaster Recovery (DR) plan in place for your business.

Regardless of your size, KeepItSafe can tailor a scalable solution for you.

If you would like to know more about KeepItSafe's DR solutions, click here or call the team on 0800 14 11 14 as they can provide a quick consultation on the phone.