Fitton Associates Chartered Building Surveyors has subscribed to the Hi-5 High Availability Service - a comprehensive data recovery suite from managed service provider (MSP) DATAFORT. The new disaster recovery service will allow Fitton Associates to comply with data storage legislative requirements, satisfy the requirements of professional indemnity insurers and mitigate against the risk of experience up to 48 hours of downtime, which is what would have been the case if relying on tape for the recovery of a failed server.
Fitton Associates is a firm of chartered building surveyors and project managers and as such regularly handles legal contracts, building specifications, architectural drawings and designs, often relating to projects valued at in excess of £40 million. Because of the nature of the information and its inherent ramifications, Fitton Associates is compelled to hold all client data for at least six years after the completion of a project, and in some cases as much as 12 years. Implementation of Hi-5 will provide as standard a complete, long-term data archival of the protected servers, thereby enabling Fitton Associates to meet industry regulatory requirements without incurring extra cost.
Hi-5 has been developed specifically to replace the traditional tape rotation strategy which is fraught with complexity, multiple points of failure and recovery speeds that are often too slow to meet the needs of modern business. In Fitton Associates case, the expected tape-based recovery time from full server failure will be improved from 48 hours to as little as 15 minutes when using the Hi-5 High Availability Service.
Furthermore, the implementation of the Hi-5 High Availability Service makes it possible for Fitton Associates to prove to their professional indemnity insurers that all electronic data is safely and securely stored, and is instantly recoverable in the case of a disaster. This is expected to result in a dramatic decrease in insurance premiums and could not have been achieved with the pre-existing tape backup strategy.
Jon Fitton, Managing Director of Fitton Associates comments, "The vast majority of critical client information is currently stored and transferred electronically, causing us to depend heavily on our computerized systems. As a result, we needed to have as rigorous a process and as high a confidence in our electronic data storage as we do with our physical file storage. Relying on tapes to backup our data was frankly untenable as we could not assure either ourselves or our insurers that all of the electronic client information could be recovered should we lose our on-site servers. We know that tapes degrade over the long term and could therefore not even be certain that all of our data was archived and in a recoverable condition. Without being able to prove such reliability and security, we simply could not comply with the prerequisites of our insurance - a potentially very painful situation!"
Should Fitton's server fail, a phone call to DATAFORT's support team will invoke a virtual image of the failed machine within minutes of the failure. The virtual image will be an exact copy of the server as it existed during the last image update - which will have been no more than 15 minutes previous. This is clearly a huge improvement on tape-based backup processes that are typically updated at best every 24 hours - often even less frequently.
Fitton concludes, "Given the importance and sensitivity of the information we deal with, it is unsurprising that our professional indemnity insurers are much happier with the Hi-5 solution than with tape backup. having a full image of our server stored both in our office and on an off-site financial-grade data centre gives us the confidence and security we need to reassure both ourselves and our insurers of the stability and speed of our backup and recovery processes."
About DATAFORT
DATAFORT provides dependable and secure data protection services that offer enterprise-level functionality with a focus on security and reliability. Its software and services are used by thousands of organizations worldwide, ranging from SMBs through to large enterprises and local government departments. Every hour of every day someone, somewhere backs up with DATAFORT. The company was founded in 2000, is headquartered in Guildford, UK and has offices in London and New York. For further information please visit www.DATAFORT.com or contact 0800 45 44 35.
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