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Preparing for network meltdown
Iron Mountain is a leader in off-site data protection and disaster recovery in the UK, and has a nationwide infrastructure of secure vaults and vehicles with 90 locations. It describes itself as an information protection organisation with a broad range of services supplied to sectors such as public/financial.
A big part of Iron Mountain’s business revolves around business continuity – an increasingly important area when you consider that 90 per cent of companies who experience significant data loss go out of business within two years. Significant data loss for a police force, fire brigade, or ambulance service (think intelligence systems, crime databases) would be crippling and cost lives.
According to Nick Cater of Iron Mountain, a business continuity application is usually invoked on the basis of database/software corruption and hardware failure, rather than natural disasters. “But while natural disasters may be small by volume, by effect they are the largest and the average outage for a non-protected organisation is 60 hours as regards email. With the others you are looking at less than 24 hours.”
With data and email being the established mode of communication today, it is no surprise that Iron Mountain has a number of business critical services revolving around continuity and data.“By hording online back-up off site we can ensure failure of a site or network does not lead to data loss. We provide continuity for email, and can ensure that you’ll never be without email for more than a minute.”
In the event of a network failure, Iron Mountain can recover all lost emails – including attachments. “This is vital, because research suggests that a large proportion of critical data is sent around the world in email plus attachments.”
For one of Iron Mountain’s customers the company provides ongoing back-up for all PCs – wherever they are. “Our software sits on the laptop or server and automatically sends the data back, giving you a complete copy of that PC. In the event of data loss, everything is then recovered and in the event of a security breach, you know what you have lost.”
Increasingly, adds Cater, people expect to have email access 24/7 and that includes the expectation of zero data loss even when applications have disappeared. Off-site online back-up and archiving may mitigate risk, but it does bring up issues of security. “Security is the first part of our internal mission statement. All data is encrypted before it leaves a customer’s site, and it is only decrypted when it is restored.”
