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Controlling your Cloud Data in the Face of Outages

It’s hard to imagine that one quick lightning strike could disrupt the business of several companies across Europe, but this is exactly what happened in the summer of 2011 in Dublin.

After a lightning bolt struck a utility pole, causing an explosion and fire, power supply was cut to several businesses and data centres in the surrounding area. According to Amazon and Microsoft — the two companies whose data centres were worst affected — the bolt disrupted power supply to their massive data centres. While Microsoft was able to kick start its services after a few hours, Amazon’s services weren’t resumed until a good 48 hours later. Amazon’s customers spent several frustrating hours waiting for Amazon to report on the status, as the company struggled to set things right and quickly restore their services.

You might say, this is an old news that happened more than five years ago, but this very instance shows how unplanned disasters can strike at any time. With this in mind, Backup Technology Limited (BTL) believes there are several lessons to be learnt from this and many other data centre outages.

Complete dependency on the service provider’s ability to maintain uninterrupted service is foolhardy, to say the least. Customers signing up for cloud services must ensure that they maintain control over their data by making local backups of their data in addition to riding the cloud for all the benefits that accrue from it. BTL urges its customers to take advantage of its Asigra powered software, a hybrid cloud backup solution that ensures full-proof data availability.

BTL is equipped with local and remote management features, which allow users to seamlessly perform local backups to their private cloud infrastructure or offsite backups to a public cloud. Even more beneficial, they can do so even while they’re away from the office. A web-based management console allows one to control and manage all backups and restores via an Internet connection.

To ensure full business continuity, BTL stresses the importance of performing both local and offsite, cloud backup. If backing up data to the cloud, BTL recommends that customers add disaster recovery and business continuity to their list of services.

Unlike larger cloud customers such as Amazon’s public cloud users, BTL users who backup data locally to their private cloud infrastructure, in addition to a cloud service powered by BTL, will not have to wait endlessly for reports about the restoration of services in the event of an offsite data centre disaster. They can connect their network to the local copy of the data and resume their business activities almost instantaneously.

When handling business data backup plans, smart IT admins look at all their options and will not hesitate to implement local backup AND offsite cloud backup with an MSP to ensure security and business continuity at all times. BTL recognises the ground realities surrounding data management by large third parties. This is why BTL focuses its attention on customer needs and urge its customers to build in an extra resilience and maintain data redundancy.

 

Essex County Fire & Rescue Service Procures Cloud Backup Via G-Cloud

Essex County Fire & Rescue Service (ECFRS) is using Backup Technology (BTL) to safeguard the data it generates as it protects local people and property.

ECFRS is one of the largest county fire services in the UK, protecting a population of more than 1.74 million. Its firefighters attend over 24,000 emergency incidents every year.  After its existing backup solution became too difficult to manage, ECFRS chose BTL via the UK Government’s Digital Marketplace for G-Cloud services, to provide an improved managed service.

Jan Swanwick, Head of ICT for Essex County Fire & Rescue Service, explained: “Traditionally procurement has been a long, protracted process. With G-Cloud it is very straightforward because all the supplier and product information has already been collated and validated.”

BTL, which is part of cloud company iomart, protects more than 22TB of data for the fire service using a Public Cloud Backup solution from Asigra.

Paul Hill, Assistant Chief Fire Officer for Safer Communities said: “Saving lives isn’t just about putting out fires and attending emergencies, it is about using the data we collect during our work to protect the people and property of our county. We spend a huge amount of time analysing the data we collect so that we can target our services in the correct and most efficient way. Knowing that this data is protected by Backup Technology is vital to the success of everything we do.”

Rob Mackle, Sales & Service Manager for BTL, said: “The fully managed solution encompasses every aspect of the backup contract from configuration and installation through to the daily monitoring and restoration support of the backups.”

Asigra is the world’s leading online backup software developer and BTL its largest global partner.

Eran Farajun, Executive Vice President of Asigra, said: “Essex County Fire & Rescue’s mission critical operation is a perfect example where data availability can have a real impact on an organisation’s quality of service. BTL understands this and relies on our award-winning data recovery software to provide customers with best-of-breed backup services. This recent deployment highlights the continued momentum of cloud-based data recovery throughout the region.”

To read the full case study click here

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