Backups & Data Recovery

Surviving potentially fatal IT failures with effective data backup

CIT take time to fully understand clients’ business continuity requirements and then recommend tailored solutions that correspond with their particular needs.

Tape backup

The traditional method of tape backup adequately meets the needs of many clients wishing to secure data in their server environment. In such cases we recommend the industry leading Symantec Backup Exec Suite software. CIT have implemented data protection and recovery solutions based on Backup Exec for single tape environments right through to sophisticated tape library auto-loading environments.

Automated offsite backup

An automated offsite backup via the internet to our Data Centre in London’s Docklands is the ideal solution for clients wishing to hand over responsibility for their data protection and recovery to specialists in the field. With the additional failsafe of the data being replicated to a secondary data centre every fifteen minutes, and the encryption of all transmitted data, offsite backup provides an extremely secure method of data protection and recovery.

Server imaging

Entire servers can be duplicated using Acronis Trueimage and restored in under 5 minutes to different hardware if desired. This comprehensive server imaging and disaster recovery solution allows you to get back to business as quickly as possible, minimising downtime.

Microsoft Exchange Hosted Business Continuity

This service, managed directly by Microsoft, stores all incoming and outgoing email from the previous 30 days on servers at Microsoft’s data centre. This means that, in the event of your Exchange environment being unavailable, you will still be able to send, receive and access emails from the last 30 days via a web interface. Microsoft Exchange Hosted Business Continuity is easy to implement and a very cost-effective way to ensure the continuity of your email service.

Server High Availability

With Neverfail’s High Availability, a software or hardware problem will simply trigger a failover to a, local or remote, secondary server without any user or business interruption. The substitute hardware can either be local to the primary hardware or, utilising Neverfail’s Low Bandwidth Module, it can be located at another location connected via a WAN. All server roles can be protected, including File/Print Servers, SQL Servers, Exchange Servers, Blackberry Servers and many more.

Data recovery tests

We recommend that every client performs a data recovery test once a year to confirm that they can safely restore their entire data environment from their existing backup media. The service involves building the client a replica server containing the restored backed-up data. They then confirm that it includes all the data that they would require to be restored in the event of a genuine disaster. A report detailing the steps involved in recovering the data can then form part of the client’s data protection and recovery plans. 

Traditional data recovery services

As Sungard Partners, we have access to data recovery centres around the country where, in the event of your premises being unavailable, you can recover your entire IT environment, including servers, PCs and telephones, to one of the centres for a period of up to three months. Yearly data recovery tests are also carried out as part of the service.

VMWare software

VMWare software enables virtualisation of various Microsoft, Linux, UNIX and Solaris operating systems. Virtualisation is a way of running multiple operating systems on a single piece of hardware that allows you to recover data to any machine. This enables a rapid recovery from disaster while minimising hardware and maintenance costs.