Technology Reseller v43

from reductions in hardware, storage, connectivity and so on; and a 95% reduction in management time. “Our IT Team management time has been reduced immeasurably; our Snapshot stun has all but disappeared; SQL log backups are replicated offsite numerous times per day, including production hours; backup jobs finish comfortably in their window; RTO and RPO can now be accurately determined; a single file restore has been reduced from 30 mins to 30 seconds, which sounds like a minor thing but has resulted in huge time savings; Forever Incremental Jobs mean that once an initial job has been completed all further jobs just copy changes, again a huge time saver – I could go on!” He adds: “We are so happy with our backup and DR strategy with Assured. The combined saving on data management time, backup speeds and reduction on our data centre footprint has been beyond what we expected. So, our plan for the future is just to continue with what we’re doing!” where we recover everything in a known and logical manner. We run what we call a run book; we understand what needs to come back first and, essentially, we script it; we automate the recovery of DR where possible to make it quicker and remove human intervention. We do that all for them as a service, so Ward Hadaway don’t have to worry about doing the DR test themselves; we do it for them, give them secure access, then they test it. That’s what companies like them really like, because they just don’t have the time or necessarily the skills to do it themselves.” Mackle adds that by wrapping a fully managed service around the Rubrik backup and data protection solution, ADP enables Ward Hadaway to get maximum benefit from the technology. “We do things like monitoring the backups 24/7. If we see a problem, we will report it, tell the customer and then fix it with them or for them, depending on their preference. We want customer backups to be 100% successful every day. In reality, backups fail, normally not because of the backup software but because of the customer’s environment. Things happen, passwords change, networks go down. The most important thing is seeing it, responding to it, fixing it and showing we have a clean copy of the customer’s backups.” The results Ward Hadaway’s Iain Richardson is delighted with the results so far, which include 50% quicker backups; an 80% smaller data centre footprint, ADP’s Rob Mackle points out that as well as being more efficient, this new solution has removed the burden of managing DR tests from Ward Hadaway’s IT team and given them the confidence that they will be able to recover their data in its entirety should they ever be required to do so. On-premise and hosted “Ward Hadaway has three different locations – Newcastle, where the majority of their data resides, Leeds and Manchester. We have given them a Rubrik cluster on premise, which backs up everything locally inside their network, encrypts it, compresses it and, most importantly, stores it on an immutable platform. The important thing then, to ensure they are compliant, is to get that data off-site to the Rubrik cluster in our primary UK data centre. Encrypted data is sent across the internet incrementally to our UK data centre. “Because we have their data sitting in our data centre, we can recover it very, very quickly. We do an annual DR test for them technologyreseller.co.uk 39 DISASTER RECOVERY Back-ups at risk of ransomware, warns Osirium UK-based privileged access management software vendor Osirium Technologies is advising UK businesses to do more to protect the backups and backup systems they would rely on to recover from a cyber-attack. Its warning follows a survey of more than 1,000 UK IT managers for The Osirium Ransomware Index , in which 56% said they don’t keep offline backups and only 35% take extra precautions to protect access to backups and backup management systems, even though 98% of those surveyed are aware that backups are a target of ransomware attacks. Four out of five small businesses surveyed said they rely on backups as a plan of recovery should a cyber-attack occur, with 63% of these using online backups as a preventative measure to avoid data loss. Osirium CEO David Guyatt said: “Online backups are at significant risk because, in the event of a ransomware attack, the backup system faithfully takes copies of the infected data and thus renders the backups useless. A multi-layered approach to managing these systems is needed. Keeping offline backups is key, but protecting access to the backup management system and related backup files is critical to prevent infection. Nearly three quarters (73%) of respondents stated that backups are a key element to recovery, so more attention need to be paid to protecting them.” Just over half (58%) of UK businesses feel ‘somewhat prepared’ for the eventuality of a ransomware attack. David Guyatt Ward Hadaway, Leeds Office Ward Hadaway, Manchester Office