Business Challenges
According to figures produced by DataLossDB, incidents relating to the loss, theft or exposure of data increased by 39% from 2011 to 2012*. Many businesses are facing increasingly difficult security and procedural issues to protect business critical data.

With so much sensitive and critical business data to secure it was imperative for Nova Laboratories to maintain its data backups, in case of a system error or disaster, such as a fire or flood. The company was running and managing four separate backup tapes every night. Regular and persistent failures were affecting the resiliency of the backup system and confidence with regards business continuity. Failures required internal technical personnel to troubleshoot the issues - a time consuming and disruptive exercise making the utilisation of tape backups both burdensome and unreliable.

The Solution
As the technology partner for Nova Laboratories, we recommended a disaster recovery and business continuity assessment, so that the resiliency of the current backup system and DR capability could be ascertained. We focussed on the company’s backup process and recommended S-Vault, an online solution, since secure storage of the data in an offsite location was confirmed as the first step to a full business continuity plan (BCP) for the business.

S-Vault is our online backup & recovery solution, (powered by EVault – an internationally recognised and trusted brand). S-Vault works by sending an encrypted copy of business data over the internet to offsite servers for safe storage. It offers state of the art encryption, so data is compressed, encrypted and always secure. Data is backed up to two secure data centres and the stored data can be accessed securely from any location. The speed of data recovery minimises downtime and the solution is highly scalable with no minimum or maximum storage limits.

The Benefits
The solution that Nova Laboratories implemented includes on-going storage of critical company data with daily assessments of backup jobs reinforced by a comprehensive Service Level Agreement from our Service Desk for any required file restorations. The company now benefits from quicker restores of recovered files because of granular backup and the ability to recover data through a web portal.

Since the implementation of the solution, Nova Laboratories has full confidence in the new backup system because it is fully managed and has a “zero” failure rate to date. The company is confident of the process because they know that if any failures do occur, they are automatically handled by our Service Desk and will be reported back to the organisation immediately upon discovery.

Importantly, the new system has seen an increase in productivity in other areas of the business as the availability of technical resource has improved, due to the managed system requiring no internal manual intervention in troubleshooting backup and restore issues. With less reliance on a single staff member to run backups and perform checks, (now managed by us), the on-going issues of staff availability (including absence for holidays and sickness) that were undermining the backup process are no longer a problem. 

“Previously we were relying on our in-house personnel to investigate issues with data backup and the time-consuming failures that were regularly occurring. We can now rely on an external team to manage the backups and we have a more secure, resilient and scalable data retention process. Not only has the S-Vault implementation freed up time to concentrate on the daily technical requirements of Nova Laboratories, but it has given us the peace of mind that the business critical data is secure and recoverable should a disaster occur. By planning our business continuity with Quatrix, we are confident of a managed and reliable service.”

Aaron Edge, IT Manager, Nova Laboratories Limited.

* Statistic provided courtesy of Open Security Foundation / DataLossDB.org