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Address data protection concerns today

There needs to be a fluidity and flexibility to business continuity to cater for unsuspecting issues, says Michael Law, CEO of Attix5.


Johannesburg, 26 Feb 2015
Michael Law, CEO at Attix5
Michael Law, CEO at Attix5

The importance of having effective data protection and recovery solutions has again been put in the spotlight, by media reports this week of a server crash at the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality, resulting in traffic fines and other essential information being inaccessible.

"While hardware crashes happen, the municipality has reportedly been unable to access even its backups. Given the mission-critical nature of some of the information and services being impacted, the reputational damage to Nelson Mandela Bay is significant, without even considering the financial implications," says Michael Law, CEO of Attix5.

Given the connected nature of business today, companies can ill afford to lose access to their systems for a few hours, never mind a couple of days. And with load-shedding also a reality for the foreseeable future, companies need to have clear strategies and systems in place to deal with disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC).

"DR and BC are no longer nice-to-haves. Irrespective of sector and industry, these need to be completely integrated into the organisational strategy. Furthermore, these vital components cannot simply be passed on to the IT department with the hopes of them knowing which systems and data are essential to keep the organisation running. Business and IT need to work together to ensure that they are aligned in the event of a disaster, whether it is natural or man-made," adds Law.

A key part of this is to work with a trusted service provider who not only understands the business of the company, but also how to effectively integrate DR and BC into the organisation with the minimal impact on the day-to-day running of operations.

As with any ICT-based solution, there are a variety of options available, but the service provider needs to have the experience to guide the organisation in identifying and implementing a solution that best fit its requirements. Also, the approach has to be organic. There needs to be a fluidity to it to cater for unsuspecting issues and be flexible enough to grow with the organisational needs.

"The competitive landscape and real-time demands from customers are driving organisations to make sure they can keep operations going in the event of a systems crash. But there needs to be a willingness from the business to embrace what is required for effective DR and BC to work," adds Law.

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Attix5

Attix5 is a global provider of data protection software and cloud solutions to companies of all sizes - including listed enterprises and small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs).

The company was established in 1999 and has grown exponentially through the years in terms of actual size, in market share and as a recognised brand, designed to support network growth.

Attix5's focus is on security, virtualisation and the cloud as technology forces that continue to empower operations.

The company places a premium on the reliability, quality and practicality of solutions. To this end, it has invested heavily in de-duplication technology, and it also uses FIPS-compliant Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption for security.

Attix5's portfolio of services incorporates: connection to a public cloud-hosted platform for distributed clients, private cloud and LAN backups with an off-site copy in a hosted or DR environment, as well as full enterprise-wide private or hybrid cloud solution.

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