A recent study found 43% of companies which have suffered a major computerised records loss never reopen. The study, Management Information Systems for the Information Age, published by McGraw-Hill Ryerson Higher Education, last year, added 51% of such firms close within two years, and only 6% will survive long-term.
Indigo Stone, a British company active in data management since 1996, last week demonstrated its HomeBase migration and recovery software in SA. The company promised that it will "save time and money, while reducing exposure to outages and disasters" on systems running platforms as diverse as Windows, Sun Solaris, HP-UX and IBM AIX.
Offering a disaster recovery (DR) solution is no longer enough, says the company. The market requirement has shifted from traditional DR to assuring business resilience. This requires the combining of production operations, security and recovery into a seamless solution.
Indigo Stone CEO Robert Shaw says: "Most companies have spent considerable time and money on protection mechanisms for the data their application servers create, but give little thought to protection of the server configuration."
Deficiencies
Yet, in a recovery event, the server configuration needs to be recreated before the application and application data is accessible to the end-user, he says.
All too often, the deficiencies of these methods are only discovered during a DR test or, even worse, during an actual DR event. Any undocumented changes, the slightest hardware dissimilarity, or a key technical person not being available can all prolong recovery times or cause it to fail completely, Shaw warns.
HomeBase automates the server configuration recovery process, which is why two global pharmaceutical companies use HomeBase to comply with increasingly tough legislation that requires them to keep track of data at all times in a way that can be externally audited, he says.
After installing HomeBase agents on their production servers, organisations are automatically notified of any change made to a server`s configuration and can take immediate action.
"They are assured that the recovery environment is configured correctly to meet production capacity requirements at all times and that production servers are in conformance with compliance standards," Shaw adds. "Point and click recovery is a reality now."
Shaw says a HomeBase server licence costs R210 000, a proxy server costs R14 000, a full server agent is priced at R14 000, while a PC agent requires an outlay of R630.
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