See how cloud storage improves disaster recovery

When Bill McCown joined Situs six years ago, the Houston-based real estate firm was confident of growth prospects, and the company believed it was necessary to upgrade tape-based backup systems. Shortly after September 2008, Hurricane Ike attacked Houston. McCown, the company's IT director, recalls: "Our data center survived, but the office power supply hasn't been restored for a whole week." "Although employees who work in other locations have access to the data center, the headquarters is offline and unable to communicate."

When the McCown team weathered the initial turmoil caused by the storm, the company began to seriously consider improving its backup practices. "We realize that if the data center is offline, we've backed everything up to tape," McCown said. Although the data is well preserved, we cannot recall the backup tapes, so we have no way to use this information, and it is impossible to move the information to other locations without a power outage. ”

For the company, serious consideration of the solution to Remote Storage has become a real problem to be solved.

Cloud based storage is a timely and live

After evaluating several vendors in 2010, Situs decided to use Evault Backup technology and i365 services to build its own cloud-based storage solution. The latter is a California-based storage system provider for small and medium-sized Enterprises, and a subsidiary of Seagate. "The i365 company's relationship with Seagate makes it very attractive to CEOs," McCown said. He pointed out that he was looking for a firm with both technical strength and enduring service capability.

In addition, I365 also provides a cloud-based storage system and onsite storage systems, which is one of the reasons for adding points. Although McCown had hoped to use the cloud to meet all the storage needs of situs, the pure cloud strategy was not realistic, given the realities of the business. Although the situs company itself is not subject to laws and regulations, its clients, including many banks, financial institutions, investment enterprises, real estate investment trusts, as well as mutual funds, are subject to regulatory restrictions.

McCown explains: "If you put all the storage in the cloud, you have to face a lot of regulatory compliance restrictions." Whenever we introduce third parties that can access some of our data, we have to worry about the security implementation of these third parties and whether their practices will lead us to not be able to carry out our business efficiently. ”

As a result, Situs decided to keep most of the production data within the enterprise, using only a cloud-based remote Data system to perform backup and recovery functions, to handle e-mail and Citrix applications.

Situs's Hybrid storage method includes a disk-based evault device. The device is in the datacenter and is used to run backups, replacing the dozens of tape devices that the company originally used. Situs also relies on Evault services to implement replication and disaster recovery operations in the cloud. Unproductive data is sent from the device to the cloud via a VPN. To reduce security concerns, situs encrypts all data during the backup and is encrypted before being sent, and is encrypted at remote locations.

"We can keep the data locked and encrypted and make it inaccessible at any time," McCown said. This is consistent with our customers ' compliance and security requirements because they require that the data not be exposed. "In the event of a disaster, situs can use the Evault remote disaster recovery system to bring data back online."

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)