In an increasingly uncertain world, business continuity and reliable data backup solutions are a must for any organisation. Despite recent advances, many organisations are still trapped in a cycle of escalating costs and complexity when it comes to data backup and recovery.
The majority of disaster recovery plans deal purely with a disaster situation but fail to realise the importance of business continuity. A business continuity plan is not complete just because a solution has been designed and the infrastructure deployed to the site. This infrastructure must be managed, software and data assets backed up and stored securely, plans must be tested and connectivity for remote access monitored.
Advanced 365’s managed backup service solution offers organisations complete protection of data in all circumstances with business continuity solutions tailored to meet the specific needs of the individual client. The service uses i365 software and enterprise level server and storage technology.
For a predictable monthly fee, Advanced 365 will ensure that all elements of your business continuity are thoroughly managed, ensuring that your business is maintained with little or no disruption after any invocation.
Advanced 365’s managed storage service is an additional complimentary service (at a fixed monthly cost based on a pay for use model) which integrates with managed backup and allows organisations to consolidate existing data, enabling better use of this information for greater competitive advantage.
The ability to share information between applications and meet regulatory requirement for data retention, facilitates growth, increases utilisation of the infrastructure and improves the overall management of the company’s data – all with no management overhead and therefore, less cost.
As with all Advanced 365’s managed service offerings, all aspects of Advanced 365 managed backup services are guaranteed by comprehensive SLA’s.
Advanced 365’s Managed Backup solution is a managed service offering designed to provide organisations with secure, reliable, disk based offsite data backup. Data is backed up from client servers using a local management device and either a dedicated WAN connection or the internet to two geographically diverse Advanced 365 Data Centres where the data is stored on a world-class storage infrastructure.
The Advanced 365 Managed Backup service is based on i365 software and enterprise level server and storage technology. An agent is installed on each server to be included within the backup environment: this agent then communicates with the Backup Vault on a pre-determined schedule. Any data that has changed since the previous backup is then transmitted to the Vault across the WAN or internet connection, with the transmitted data being compressed and encrypted.
Once the data has been securely stored in the primary Vault, it is then replicated to the secondary Vault in a geographically separate Data Centre using Advanced 365’s own resilient, high performance WAN infrastructure. Clients are able to restore data from the Vaults at any time using the Management Console that is provided as part of the service. Where large volumes of data are required for restore, or in the event of a disaster, Advanced 365 can provide customers with data from the Vault on portable media within in an agreed Service Level Agreement (SLA).
Advanced 365 monitor the environment report daily on backup successes and failures, with this information being available to customers via the Advanced 365 Managed Backup portal.
The service has three cost components that are aggregated to establish a predictable monthly cost. These costs are the cost for the connectivity between the customers Data Centre and the Advanced 365 Data Centre, the cost per server for every server added into the backup environment and the cost (per Gb) for the data that is stored within the Advanced 365 Backup environment.
The charge for the data stored within the Advanced 365 backup environment is based on the volume of data actually residing within the backup environment. The volume of this data is dependent on the level of compression of the original data that can be achieved and the length of time that the client wish to retain the data within the backup environment.
Clients can add servers at any time during their contracted term: additional servers will attract a cost per server for licensing purposes and the additional data will simply be charged at the agreed per Gb rate.
The customer’s agents are configured to relay backup data to a prescribed primary Vault: they are also configured to use a Secondary Vault in the event that the Primary Vault is unavailable for any reason. The Primary and Secondary Vaults are configured to replicate data between them so that the customer backup environment will be available up to a 99.999% availability SLA because the Vaults are split between geographically separate Data Centres. The Advanced 365 Data Centres are connected through a fully redundant fibre network providing high performance and availability of data between the geographically separate Data Centres.
Customers can determine a backup schedule to suit the operational requirements of their business. The Advanced 365 Managed Backup service allows for both time based and command based scheduling. Time based scheduling allows clients to set a pre-determined time for backups to occur: this may be a single time during a period or a number of times at a set frequency, for example, once an hour. Command based scheduling allows customers to set a backup process to trigger during a specific activity, for example, before and after a batch process.
The Advanced 365 Managed Backup service has a default standard retention policy of three months. This can be modified for any particular element of their environment. Extending a retention policy will result in an increase in the amount of data stored within the backup environment and raise the overall monthly charge for the data stored as this charge is levied on the volume of data held within the backup environment.
The flexibility of the retention policies is designed to allow customers to meet any applicable regulatory requirements concerning, for example, finance, HR or health and safety data. The initial costs contained within this proposal are based on the Advanced 365 Standard Retention Policy.
