Asigra Helps Accountancy firm Recover from Data Loss

(03/03/2008)

Asigra Inc. has announced that its online backup and recovery software is being deployed by Qualitas-IT Limited for accountancy firm A Desaur & Co. Having permanently lost 20% of its data during a server failure in April 2007, A Desaur & Co. immediately sought a more reliable and frequent data backup solution that would provide the company with the peace of mind that all of the data will be recovered, should another server failure occur. A server crash that occurred Mid-October 2007 during a Windows update nearly wiped the company’s data again, but with the Asigra solution in place, A Desaur & Co. was ensured that any lost data, even from its remote laptop users, could be immediately restored.

A Desaur & Co. was using a tape-based solution when the server failure occurred in April 2007. The tape restore failed entirely because its IT support company had not carried out trial data restores, which would have revealed that the backups were not working. After an expensive and time-costly hard disk data restore, only 80% of the data was able to be restored, causing the company to permanently lose valuable historical data (accounts preparation) and work in progress (book keeping).

At the time, A Desaur & Co. was providing accounting services to IT support company Qualitas-IT, and, after hearing of the RESTOR-ME service (founded on Asigra’s software) that Qualitas-IT resells, chose Qualitas-IT to take over its data backups in order to prevent future data losses.

Alka Desaur, founder of A Desaur & Co, commented: “After experiencing the loss of valuable data to our accounting business, we realise how important it is to make sure we can actually recover lost data that is backed up. With Qualitas-IT’s deployment of Asigra’s online backup and recovery software, which also backs up our laptops whenever we connect to the network, we now have the peace of mind that even if our server fails and wipes all the data, we can immediately begin remotely restoring all of the data to our systems from any location to which it is safely backed up every day. We now realise that the most important thing to us is the information on our computers, not the computer hardware itself.”

Qualitas-IT resells Restor-Me UK Ltd’s RESTOR-ME service to A Desaur & Co., and RESTOR-ME is based upon Asigra’s Televaulting software. Through a partnership with Viatel, Restor-Me UK Ltd has Vaulting space at 17 highly secure locations all over the world, ensuring that end users’ backup data is stored in multiple data centres for extra protection, should a data centre disaster occur. RESTOR-ME provides customers with additional flexibility in being able to also have their data stored in offshore locations throughout Europe and the US.

A Desaur & Co also benefits financially from Asigra’s BLM (Backup Lifecycle Management) automated archiving service, included as part of the RESTOR-ME service. Data is automatically taken out of primary storage into a more cost-effective longer term storage medium after a certain amount of time (a maximum of 60 days), once it is less critical to the daily running of the business.

Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra, said: “The way our technology is architected gives resellers and managed service providers, such as Restore-Me UK and Qualitas-IT, the flexibility to serve companies of any size. The solution can be deployed centrally and doesn’t require proprietary agent-based software licenses, so adding new locations and servers to a backup solution is hassle-free and much less costly for the service providers and end-users. The software is designed to be compatible with all platforms and to expand as a business grows without the need for interference, resulting in ease-of-use and ease-of-deployment.”

At the A Desaur & Co offices, a single RESTOR-ME DS-Client discovers all servers (File Server, Exchange Server and Database Server containing accounts preparation software, MYOB’s Viztopia, and book-keeping software, Sage), desktops and laptops connected to the local network, and automates the backup of all local data assets. Agents are not installed on machines being backed up. Before the backup data set is transmitted to Restor-Me UK Ltd’s data centres, the primary one in Bracknell and the replicated one in London docklands (Telehouse), the software analyses the data, finds new and changed file blocks, eliminates duplicate files and blocks of files and further compresses the residue bytes to ensure the backup set is as compact as possible. The software then encrypts the data before sending it over an IP- WAN connection to a centralised RESTOR-ME DS-System server, located in Restor-Me UK Ltd’s primary data centre, which consolidates the backup data. Data is encrypted in-flight and at-rest.

Asigra Televaulting for Service Providers supports a broad range of platforms, including Windows, Linux, Unix, Novell, AS/400 and Macintosh, and protects Oracle, SQL Server, VMware and Exchange Server data. Back-end DS-System software runs on Solaris, Linux and Windows.

Related topics:  Data management and data security   Security threats and vulnerabilities 

Print version | Email to a friend | Related articles

Data breaches: Trends, costs and best practices gives you all the latest information on securing personal and corporate data, key recommendations for immediate action to improve data security, and how to respond to data breaches.

Other Security news and resources