The business rules have changed. Over the last 18 months the issue of good corporate governance has shot to the top of the business agenda. With high profile accounting scandals and the introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, never before has so much scrutiny been placed on the way companies are run.
Unsurprisingly, the core focus for many recent corporate governance reports, such as the King II Report (South Africa) and the Higgs Report (UK), has been on how to minimise business risk in order to protect the interests of stakeholders. Aside from the obvious conclusions that financial accounting and reporting procedures must be tightened, the other major area of concern singled out for review has been IT systems.
Since electronic information is the lifeblood of almost every modern business (and in particular financial services firms), ensuring a company is fully protected against data loss in the event of a disaster has become a mandatory requirement for the board. After all, data is perhaps a firm`s most valuable asset (after staff and customers, of course).
Mutual & Federal, one of Southern Africa`s largest short-term insurance companies, decided to undertake a review of its data recovery and business continuity measures in Q2 2003. It already had various mechanisms in place to monitor conduct and ensure good corporate governance theory was matched by good corporate practice. However, it was planning to migrate to an upgraded network operating system and saw this as an ideal opportunity to review the technology it used to back up its critical business data.
The backup challenge
Mutual & Federal provides personal, commercial and corporate insurance services in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Malawi and Zimbabwe. It has an annual premiums income of over R5.6 billion and employs over 2,000 staff.
Given the size of its operations, the insurance firm generates an extremely large volume of data - just under two terabytes of data are stored across its IT systems.
Mutual & Federal operates a Novell Netware Wide Area Network (WAN), with distributed Groupwise, Sybase and Zenworks installations at four of its five primary sites, and seven remote sites hanging off these. Each office had a local tape backup device and tapes needed to be physically transported to offsite storage facilities. The total used capacity across the remote sites amounts to about 400 gigabytes.
Used capacity at head office totals about 350 gigabytes across various servers plus a 250 gigabyte Mobius server and a further 700 gigabytes on the Storage Area Network (SAN). Again, backup was to tape and transported offsite.
Ronald Roxburgh, group manager IT networks at Mutual & Federal, notes that the company initially looked at replacing its tape-based system with a similar, but more up-to-date one. "As we got deeper into the investigation we saw the cost putting another tape-based system together would be extremely expensive.
The use of tape-based backup technology, however, had a number of critical limitations:
* The legacy solution (ARCSERV) did not support Mutual & Federal`s planned upgrade to Novell v6;
* It also lacked the ability to manage locked or open files within Novell to ensure complete data backup;
* The backup process included manually-intensive procedures and these had escalated as data volumes had grown;
* Completing full backups overnight had become impossible to fulfil with the existing tape solution as the quantity of data increased;
* The ability to fully restore data within a 48 hour time frame was impossible to achieve;
* Offsite storage involved physical transportation of the tapes;
* There was no remote support for branch offices.
After conducting a full review, Mutual & Federal realised it needed to replace its legacy backup solution with one which:
* Would comply with the 48 hour mandatory time frame for full data retrieval
* Would be totally automated, reducing the burden on IT resources and limiting the margin for human error;
* Store data at a remote site;
* Use best-of-breed network and archival encryption to be absolutely secure;
* Be compatible with existing platforms and protocols so that existing infrastructure investment could be fully leveraged;
* Be centrally administered and monitored;
* Have predictable costs;
* And would not require considerable up-front investment.
Bits and bolts - finding a safe, reliable and secure solution Mutual & Federal decided to bring in Internet Solutions (IS), a long-term trusted supplier and South Africa`s largest corporate network services provider. Internet Solutions recommended switching to Attix5 Backup, the networked disk-to-disk enterprise-level backup service.
Attix5 Backup is based on Backup Professional, a software solution developed by South Africa-based Attix5. Backup Professional enables automated backup of information across the entire enterprise, whether it resides on servers, desktops or mobile computing devices such as laptops. Data is transferred to an Attix5 Storage Platform at each of the 5 major Mutual & Federal sites and mirrored to an identical device within the IS secure, remote data-storage facility. In the event of data loss due to a systems crash, failure, theft, virus damage, accidental deletion or disaster (e.g. fire, flood), files can be quickly and easily recovered to any computer at any location, enabling the smooth continuation of business operations.
Backup Professional ensures `bank-level plus` security of customer data, both across the network connection and on the storage device, through the unique use of two-factor user authentication technology from RSA Security. Customers` data is also stored encrypted on discs within the data centre, providing higher levels of security and performance. Data is mirrored to the data centre and at month end, that data is archived to tape and stored off site for 5 years.
The key benefits of Attix5 Backup include:
* The service is disk-based and as such avoids the substantial ongoing costs of tape replacement associated with legacy solutions;
* It is delivered as a fully managed service, meaning customers benefit from a guaranteed service level availability;
* The solution`s remote site management capability removes the need (and cost) for onsite support and maintenance;
* Restoration of data (mean time to restore) is significantly quicker than tape-based backup solutions as the data resides in an online environment, enabling the restore to happen immediately (and remotely) instead of having wait for the correct tapes to be physically located and loaded;
* The service is based on a pay-as-you-go model and requires no upfront capital investment in hardware or software;
* The solution can be seamlessly extended to cover desktops and laptops.
Ready, steady, backup
Mutual & Federal`s legacy system took an unacceptably long time to retrieve data. This meant that, in the event of a disaster, the insurance firm would be unable to trade for a lengthy period, be exposed to the threat of loss of business from dissatisfied customers and risk permanent damage to its corporate reputation - all potentially resulting in significant financial loss.
Before going ahead with the full rollout of Attix5 Backup, Mutual & Federal decided to run a pilot site. It set Internet Solutions/Attix5 the disaster recovery scenario of fully restoring four million files, totalling over 650 gigabytes of data, inside just 48 hours.
Using Attix5 Backup, Internet Solutions/Attix5 were able to complete the task well within the critical time limit - in fact, the audit revealed that the entire restore process only took 36 hours.
Getting backup online
Attix5 Backup was implemented in a phased approach. The roll out began with the HQ in Johannesburg, followed by Mutual & Federal`s other four primary sites in Cape Town, Durban, Pretoria, and Benoni.
In the first phase of the implementation, a complete backup was taken of all the data stored on the servers attached to the head-office Local Area Network (LAN). This `data snapshot` was captured onsite using a Data Recovery Box - a high-performance portable storage device. The Data Recovery Box was then transported to the data centre and the information uploaded to a secure storage account. This means that only incremental patch backups now need to be run - i.e. only data that has been newly created or changed is backed up across the LAN to the five individual sites, saving on time, network bandwidth and cost.
This process is replicated at the other four centres.
The mechanics of the solution required Mutual & Federal to install four new leased lines - between remote branches and the nearest IS PoP (Point of Presence). "Even with the cost of the additional [leased] lines, Attix5 Backup was more cost-effective than any tape-based solution would have been," says Roxburgh.
Data is trickle-fed across these leased lines to a mirror server [one for each branch] located at these PoPs. A daily [backup] job runs across IS` backbone to the data centre where a full backup is maintained.
"If a branch server fails, it`s simply a matter of shipping the mirror from the local POP, plugging it in and the branch will be up and running again," he adds. "Data is backed over the LAN to large data consolidators and then again replicated over the leased lines to identical server at IS. Server recovery is instantaneous from the on-site server and in the case of site failure, it it`s simply a matter of shipping the mirror from the local POP, plugging it in and the branch will be up and running again.
Attix5 Backup is a fully-automated, hosted, online backup service based on Attix5`s locally developed Backup Professional software solution. According to Gary Novitzkas, director of Attix5, the solution lends itself well to remote backup solutions.
"The fact that it is locally developed means that we can add functionality as and when required. For example, at Mutual & Federal, we developed high-performance plug-ins to enable full database backups of Sybase and Groupwise without necessitating that the applications be offline," he says. Once the roll out of Attix5 Backup is complete Mutual & Federal will be protected by one of the most secure and reliable backup solutions currently available. However, Attix5 Backup has greater implications for Roxburgh, "Electronic information is the lifeblood of any modern business and ensuring data is fully protected in the event of a disaster has become mandatory. The Attix5 Backup solution assists us in meeting our fiduciary responsibilities in this regard," he concludes.
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