Located on the eastern fringe of Melbourne’s metropolitan area, Yarra Ranges Council provides essential services to the community that need to be available and accessible at all times, even during a disaster.  Like many organisations undertaking a review of their business continuity and disaster recovery plan, Yarra Ranges Council identified that their existing level of disaster recovery was inadequate. The existing disaster recovery plan was based on sourcing and installing new equipment if a disaster occurred to re-establish its data centre. It relied on retrieving backed up data from tapes to rebuild the IT environment – a process which was untested, unreliable and would take weeks to rebuild and recover the environment. Accordingly, the current disaster recovery plan was identified as a risk for Yarra Ranges Council.

Business Outcomes required by Yarra Ranges Council for Disaster Recovery

The key business outcome required by Yarra Ranges Council was to be able to maintain uninterrupted essential services to the community in the event of a disaster. Every council service ultimately relies on IT systems to support their operation so in order to achieve this outcome, the Yarra Ranges Council business continuity plan identified that  full recovery of IT systems was required within 24 hours of a disaster occurring.

“The Council needs to be able to continue to access information that is required to provide services for aged residents, maternal and child care services and other critical services to the community” says Craig Whalley, Manger, Information Services for Yarra Ranges Council.  “We also need to be able to continue to respond to ratepayers requests and inquiries, especially in a disaster situation”.

Yarra Ranges Council partners with Global Storage for Disaster Recovery

Having recently virtualised their environment and reduced over 50 servers to less than 10, Yarra Ranges Council looked at duplicating their data centre by creating a second site. However, after identifying the costs to purchase hardware and software, the cost to maintain and upgrade a second site  and the cost to skill up and allocate the resources to implement and manage the solution, it was considered to be a prohibitive ongoing capital outlay and resource commitment.

Yarra Ranges Council compared this to outsourcing disaster recovery to Global Storage and found that the Global Storage solution offered improved benefits over duplicating their site. “The Global Storage solution was similar to what we had considered doing ourselves in isolation, but didn’t require us to take on the risk or the ongoing cost of doing it ourselves” says Craig

Yarra Ranges Council selected Global Storage to deliver EnvironmentReady™ Disaster Recovery Cloud Service as it delivered key cost and efficiency benefits over doing disaster recovery  themselves. As Craig explains “The Global Storage solution was cost efficient, used less resources, didn’t require us to skill up internally to manage disaster recovery and meant that we didn’t need to worry about the ongoing maintenance or replacement of equipment”.

Initially, disaster recovery was the driver for the project, but backup was included as Global Storage were able to offer an outsourced backup solution which also made sense from an efficiency, resource and cost perspective. With backup windows being stretched and the reliability of backups unknown, the combined solution was very attractive for Yarra Ranges Council.

EnvironmentReady™ delivers key business benefits to Yarra Ranges Council

Yarra Ranges Council required a disaster recovery solution that was timely, reliable and proven. The solution also needed to be able to cater for the different user access methods required by Yarra Ranges Council, including remote access. EnvironmentReady™ Disaster Recovery Cloud Service has enabled the IT team to deliver these benefits to the business.

Timely recovery of Environment in less than 24 hrs.

Yarra Ranges Council now have an agreed service level agreement of ‘Next Business Day’ with Global Storage, meaning that in the event of an outage or disaster, IT systems will be up and running within 24 hours. The benefit of this is that IT system downtime is minimised to less than 24 hours so the reliance on manual systems during a disaster will be negligible.

Reliable, guaranteed recovery of data

Yarra Ranges Council wanted to maximise the recovery of their data and required assurance that their data was recoverable if a disaster or an outage occurred. The agreed service level with Global Storage states that 99.99% of data will be recovered, so Yarra Ranges now have the peace of mind that the recovery of their data is reliable.

Recovery tested and proven to recover all data in less than 24 hours.

Yarra Ranges Council required that the disaster recovery solution had to be properly tested so that the recovery time and reliability has been proven. EnvironmentReady™ Disaster Recovery Cloud Service provides thorough disaster recovery testing which has been able to demonstrate to Yarra Ranges Council that they can fully recover their environment in their required timeframe. During testing, users have been able to connect to the recovered network from Yarra Ranges Council sites, remotely from off site locations and at the Global Storage recovery centre. This level of DR testing significantly mitigates risk for Yarra Ranges Council and makes the Global Storage managed services very attractive from an auditors point of view.

Business Stakeholders embrace Disaster Recovery Cloud Service

IT staff from within Yarra Ranges Council have embraced the cloud services for disaster recovery and backup. Outsourcing disaster recovery and backup has removed the pain of managing the day to day backup processes, which allows them to focus on other areas. The online backup system also enables users to restore data quickly and easily online. “When it comes to outsourcing, you expect staff to be cautious and a little concerned about the change, but our IT team love the Global Storage managed services as they no longer need to worry about tape backup processes, and find it easy to use if they need to restore data.” says Craig.

Risk managers and other stakeholders from within the Council are also impressed with the Global Storage solution as they have gone from creating a Business Continuity plan based on IT systems not being available for days and weeks to having a recovery time of less than 24hrs. Their Business Continuity plans can now take into account that IT systems will be available, eliminating the reliance on manual systems in a disaster.

Global Storage expertise in Disaster Recovery seen as a ‘value add’

For Yarra Ranges Council, one of the major benefits in partnering with Global Storage is the value add of having access to Global Storage’s expertise in data management, including disaster recovery, backup and archival. “Global Storage can look at our IT environment holistically and advise us on the best way to manage the protection and recovery of our data, instead of a piecemeal approach.” says Craig “As our managed service provider, Global Storage is our advisor for data management and provide a thorough, proactive, consultative approach.”

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Law firms are facing increased records management demands

Industry challenges in the legal profession such as an increased need to meet regulatory compliance, competitive pressures demanding faster access to client information, an enhanced focus on ethical conduct, and increasing requirements to adhere to client standards are driving law firms to manage and protect their client and internal records far more diligently, securely, and cost-effectively than in the past.

Failing to get it right can result in increasingly severe risks and penalties, including the risk of spoliation and non-compliance, loss of direct revenue and business, exposure to client lawsuits, and the resulting loss of market share and competitive leverage.

The transition to the electronic law practice has created run-away records growth and new risks

Recent developments in the legal profession including the transition to e-filing initiatives, matter centric collaboration (matter centricity), electronic litigation support systems, electronic trials (paperless courtroom), and other trends towards electronic processes have seen an explosion in electronics records growth being experienced in most law firms.

However this sudden growth in electronic records has raised its own set of challenges. An increased burden on staff resources, inadequate IT systems to handle peak workloads in storage and data protection, and inconsistent practices for storing, retaining and disposing of electronic records can result in critical information being lost, destroyed prematurely, or retained longer than it should be, increasing the risk of spoliation and non-compliance.

For most law firms these issues have meant the desired move away from paper records to e-filing has not been possible, leaving them with a fragmented, inefficient and costly records management practice reliant on both paper and electronic records.

Accelerate your firm’s transition to electronics records management/e-filing

With our comprehensive range of services in records management and data asset protection, Global Storage is well qualified to help your firm streamline and consolidate your e-filing records management and protection needs.

Global Storage’s Cloud based VaultReady™ Record Management Service  addresses the challenges of electronic record management and helps law firms to control costs, protect information, reduce risks, and guarantee the fast search, retrieval, and long term access to important business records.

VaultReady™ Record Management Cloud Service is compatible with the leading document management, litigation support, and e-filing applications used by law firms, providing a fully managed electronic records management solution for the long term storage and retention of important client and corporate information.

Ensure the safe long term retention and retrieval of client and business data

Global Storage’s VaultReady™ is a highly secure online storage vault designed specifically to meet the challenges of electronics records management. Stored records cannot be accidently deleted or overwritten, and are retained according to the specific retention and disposition policies defined by your firm. The VaultReady™ service replicates data offsite to two separate Global Storage data centre locations eliminating the need to separately backup or replication data for Disaster Recovery purposes.

Automatically classify, tag and apply retention policies

VaultReady™ provides the ability to intelligently and automatically classify and tag archived data and records. By automatically differentiating business-related content from non-business-related content, law firms retain only relevant data records and significantly reduce the burden on end-users to manually classify data.

Enhance productivity & records search with full text indexing & eDiscovery

VaultReady™ is designed to streamline online records storage, retrieval and access. With full text indexing of stored documents and email, auditors and authorised staff can search VaultReady™ online storage for documents containing specific words or phrases such as ‘environmental contamination’ to always find exactly what they’re looking for and to respond quickly and thoroughly to information requests.

VaultReady™ provides a single powerful eDiscovery tool for auditors and authorised staff to search across data types, place litigation holds, review data for responsiveness and export data out as a response to a discovery request.

Reduce costs and increase flexibility with Storage-on-Demand

VaultReady™ service delivers a fully managed online electronics records management service allowing your firm to safely make the transition to electronic filing. This allows your business to significantly reduce traditional record management costs associated with paper records management, IT storage systems, document search charges, and backup and disaster recovery systems.

VaultReady™ also flexibly caters for increases in case loads and new litigation events on a capacity on demand basis. This ensures your firm only pays for the records storage that it needs, when it needs it.

Compliance a key challenge for Superannuation Trustees

Vision Super is an Industry Superannuation Fund, run only to profit members. With over 100,000 members and $4 billion in assets, Vision Super’s trustees have a responsibility to protect the information required for the business to operate.

A key challenge for the trustees of Vision Super is to comply with the standards and guidelines set by the Australian Prudential and Regulatory Authority (APRA), the governing body for Superannuation Funds. APRA ensures that Superannuation funds meet standards for business continuity and comply with guidelines for IT security, information protection and recovery.

Recovery and Testing processes key to ensuring Compliance

Whilst Vision Super had invested in infrastructure and processes for the backup of data, the recovery of data was a largely unknown factor and was difficult to quantify. As explained by Richard Crow, Manager Information Technology at Vision Super “Our IT team is responsible for providing both Backup and Recovery for our business. Organisations only do backup for the purpose of one day having to recover the data, so a sound recovery process is crucial.”

Regular testing of the business continuity plan is a key part of compliance to APRA guidelines. Testing is required to be carried out at least annually with the outcomes reported to the board. Vision Super have previously found disaster recovery testing to be time consuming to plan and run and difficult to schedule outside of core IT activities. They have also found that trying to maintain procedures around Disaster Recovery testing is a complex and time consuming job.

Vision Super’s Business Outcomes for Backup and Recovery

The key business outcome required by Vision Super for Backup and Recovery was to meet regulatory obligations to protect and recover data. Vision Super required a comprehensive Business Continuity plan for all business activities to ensure that the business can recover the data that is needed operate.

As Richard explains “IT need to do what is necessary to meet regulatory requirements and be able to recover in the timeframe required by the business. We need to respond to the Business Impact Analysis outcomes that the business is up and running within the specified timeframe.”

An important business outcome required by Vision Super is the retention of its superannuation membership base. IT plays an important role in this process, providing information to the business units that are carrying out retention activities and campaigns. Vision Super recognised that by outsourcing backup and recovery, it would free up IT resources to support this strategic activity which is critical to the fund in retaining its members.

Information growth impacting on business operations

In addition to regulatory requirements and strategic initiatives, the rapid growth of business information was also driving Vision Super to outsource backup and recovery. Vision Super had reached the limit for what their current infrastructure could cope with for backup and recovery and needed  to invest more in hardware to support the data volumes.

Resource efficiency was a further consideration for Vision Super to outsource disaster recovery. They recognised that in the event of a disaster, the entire IT team would be required to work around the clock for approximately 5 days to be able to recover the IT environment. This was considered to be too risky, as people might not be available in a disaster and it wasn’t appropriate to have people working under that level of duress.

Vision Super outsource Disaster Recovery to deliver key business benefits

Vision Super selected Global Storage to deliver a fully managed Cloud Service for Disaster Recovery as it seemed to be simpler, easy to understand, easy to implement and easy to use. “The Global Storage solution seemed to be the cleanest and simplest from a set up and ongoing maintenance point of view. Other solutions are more fragmented with different reporting tools for different system. If a disaster occurs, we want one central place to go to.” says Richard.

Vision Super looked at other outsourced concepts for disaster recovery but selected Global Storage on the basis that they had done more thinking on the importance of getting a business back up and running following a disaster and include it as a standard part of its services.

Richard says “We had confidence that Global Storage truly understood the end to end process of Disaster Recovery including testing, and the invocation process including both failover and failback. No one else seemed to understand what is involved in failback and the importance of having this included in a Disaster Recovery Solution.”

Resource  & Cost Efficiency in Outsourcing Disaster Recovery

Vision Super recognised that in the event of a disaster it would be far more efficient and expeditious to have a specialised outsourced provider responsible for bringing their environment back online. This enables IT resources to be utilised as the liaison point between the business trying to get back up to speed and the Disaster Recovery service provider.

As Richard explains, “IT knows what its customers need and it is far better to have IT focused on coordinating the process of getting the business up and running and being a liaison point for the business rather than doing the raw recovery. IT creates greater value by doing this role and leaving the recovery to an outsourced specialised team.”

Cost efficiency was also identified as major contributing factor for outsourcing disaster recovery. Richard says, “Global Storage not only offered a better technology solution but was more cost effective and affordable than the other options we explored.” 

Compliance obligations met with Managed Disaster Recovery

The Global Storage solution has enabled Vision Super trustees to meet their responsibilities with respect to APRA’s requirements for Business Continuity. With guaranteed SLAs for the recovery of data and a timeframe of less than 24 hours for recovery, the business has been able to quantify and guarantee recovery.

Disaster Recovery testing fully managed and documented

As part of this compliance, Vision super is now able to satisfy APRA’s requirements for disaster recovery testing. Whilst APRA requires annual testing, Vision Super now has the capability to conduct full testing every 6 months which is thoroughly documented. Environment Ready Disaster Recovery Cloud Service has made the testing process simple and efficient. The testing process is managed by Global Storage which ensures testing is completed without having to put on more resources or divert attention from core IT activities. Full results of the completed testing can now be reported back to the board to give Trustees and Auditors the peace of mind that compliance obligations have been met.

Outsourced disaster recovery provides scalability for business growth

At the time Vision Super was looking at a disaster recovery solution, they were looking to grow the business through merger. This would mean that they could get bigger quite rapidly and they needed a solution that could provide the scalability to deal with this. The scalability of the Global Storage disaster recovery solution aligned well with the business strategy to expand through merger and now gives them the agility required to do this whenever necessary.

Yarra Ranges Council key challenges for Disaster Recovery

Located on the eastern fringe of Melbourne’s metropolitan area, Yarra Ranges Council provides essential services to the community that need to be available and accessible at all times, even during a disaster.  Like many organisations undertaking a review of their business continuity and disaster recovery plan, Yarra Ranges Council identified that their existing level of disaster recovery was inadequate. The existing disaster recovery plan was based on sourcing and installing new equipment if a disaster occurred to re-establish its data centre. It relied on retrieving backed up data from tapes to rebuild the IT environment – a process which was untested, unreliable and would take weeks to rebuild and recover the environment. Accordingly, the current disaster recovery plan was identified as a risk for Yarra Ranges Council.

Business Outcomes required by Yarra Ranges Council for Disaster Recovery

The key business outcome required by Yarra Ranges Council was to be able to maintain uninterrupted essential services to the community in the event of a disaster. Every council service ultimately relies on IT systems to support their operation so in order to achieve this outcome, the Yarra Ranges Council business continuity plan identified that  full recovery of IT systems was required within 24 hours of a disaster occurring.

“The Council needs to be able to continue to access information that is required to provide services for aged residents, maternal and child care services and other critical services to the community” says Craig Whalley, Manger, Information Services for Yarra Ranges Council.  “We also need to be able to continue to respond to ratepayers requests and inquiries, especially in a disaster situation”.

Yarra Ranges Council partners with Global Storage for Disaster Recovery

Having recently virtualised their environment and reduced over 50 servers to less than 10, Yarra Ranges Council looked at duplicating their data centre by creating a second site. However, after identifying the costs to purchase hardware and software, the cost to maintain and upgrade a second site  and the cost to skill up and allocate the resources to implement and manage the solution, it was considered to be a prohibitive ongoing capital outlay and resource commitment.

Yarra Ranges Council compared this to outsourcing disaster recovery to Global Storage and found that the Global Storage solution offered improved benefits over duplicating their site. “The Global Storage solution was similar to what we had considered doing ourselves in isolation, but didn’t require us to take on the risk or the ongoing cost of doing it ourselves” says Craig

Yarra Ranges Council selected Global Storage to deliver EnvironmentReady™ Disaster Recovery Cloud Service as it delivered key cost and efficiency benefits over doing disaster recovery  themselves. As Craig explains “The Global Storage solution was cost efficient, used less resources, didn’t require us to skill up internally to manage disaster recovery and meant that we didn’t need to worry about the ongoing maintenance or replacement of equipment”.

Initially, disaster recovery was the driver for the project, but backup was included as Global Storage were able to offer an outsourced backup solution which also made sense from an efficiency, resource and cost perspective. With backup windows being stretched and the reliability of backups unknown, the combined solution was very attractive for Yarra Ranges Council.

EnvironmentReady™ delivers key business benefits to Yarra Ranges Council

Yarra Ranges Council required a disaster recovery solution that was timely, reliable and proven. The solution also needed to be able to cater for the different user access methods required by Yarra Ranges Council, including remote access. EnvironmentReady™ Disaster Recovery Cloud Service has enabled the IT team to deliver these benefits to the business.

Timely recovery of Environment in less than 24 hrs.

Yarra Ranges Council now have an agreed service level agreement of ‘Next Business Day’ with Global Storage, meaning that in the event of an outage or disaster, IT systems will be up and running within 24 hours. The benefit of this is that IT system downtime is minimised to less than 24 hours so the reliance on manual systems during a disaster will be negligible.

Reliable, guaranteed recovery of data

Yarra Ranges Council wanted to maximise the recovery of their data and required assurance that their data was recoverable if a disaster or an outage occurred. The agreed service level with Global Storage states that 99.99% of data will be recovered, so Yarra Ranges now have the peace of mind that the recovery of their data is reliable.

Recovery tested and proven to recover all data in less than 24 hours.

Yarra Ranges Council required that the disaster recovery solution had to be properly tested so that the recovery time and reliability has been proven. EnvironmentReady™ Disaster Recovery Cloud Service provides thorough disaster recovery testing which has been able to demonstrate to Yarra Ranges Council that they can fully recover their environment in their required timeframe. During testing, users have been able to connect to the recovered network from Yarra Ranges Council sites, remotely from off site locations and at the Global Storage recovery centre. This level of DR testing significantly mitigates risk for Yarra Ranges Council and makes the Global Storage managed services very attractive from an auditors point of view.

Business Stakeholders embrace Disaster Recovery Cloud Service

IT staff from within Yarra Ranges Council have embraced the cloud services for disaster recovery and backup. Outsourcing disaster recovery and backup has removed the pain of managing the day to day backup processes, which allows them to focus on other areas. The online backup system also enables users to restore data quickly and easily online. “When it comes to outsourcing, you expect staff to be cautious and a little concerned about the change, but our IT team love the Global Storage managed services as they no longer need to worry about tape backup processes, and find it easy to use if they need to restore data.” says Craig.

Risk managers and other stakeholders from within the Council are also impressed with the Global Storage solution as they have gone from creating a Business Continuity plan based on IT systems not being available for days and weeks to having a recovery time of less than 24hrs. Their Business Continuity plans can now take into account that IT systems will be available, eliminating the reliance on manual systems in a disaster.

Global Storage expertise in Disaster Recovery seen as a ‘value add’

For Yarra Ranges Council, one of the major benefits in partnering with Global Storage is the value add of having access to Global Storage’s expertise in data management, including disaster recovery, backup and archival. “Global Storage can look at our IT environment holistically and advise us on the best way to manage the protection and recovery of our data, instead of a piecemeal approach.” says Craig “As our managed service provider, Global Storage is our advisor for data management and provide a thorough, proactive, consultative approach.”

Business records can be both an asset and a liability for your organisation

Electronic records often hold the complete history of your organisation, including important customer information, financial records, and unique intellectual property.  As such, electronic records are considered as ‘business assets’ and carry operational, financial and legal value.

Yet with the rapid growth in electronic records coupled with new regulatory and compliance demands, safely storing, searching, and accessing these electronic records also represents a ‘business liability’ with associated risks, costs, and management challenges.

Protect your data assets and effectively manage your electronic records over their lifecycle.

Global Storage offers complete electronic records management and data protection solutions for Enterprise and ASX200 organisations, with the experience and processes to address your data governance, data protection and disaster recovery needs.

Global Storage’s VaultReady™ Records Management Cloud Service is a comprehensive records management cloud service designed specifically to help companies manage their electronic data assets, achieve new levels of compliance and ensure business and customer digital information is safely stored for its full lifecycle.

By managing the protection and storage of your important business records from creation, long term storage and retention, through to final destruction, Global Storage helps you to manage your organisations most critical data assets and ensures your business can respond to information requests by guaranteeing the fast search, retrieval, and long term access to important business records.

VaultReady™ provides a full range of options for the capture of business information in any format at any point in its lifecycle. The capture process can be manually controlled or automated using VaultReady™ archive policies. During the capture process corporate policy for retention and disposition can be applied.

Ensure the safe long term retention & retrieval of customer & business data

VaultReady™ ensures that stored records cannot be accidently deleted or overwritten, and are retained according to the specific retention and disposition policies defined by your business. The VaultReady™ service replicates data offsite to two separate Global Storage data centre locations eliminating the need to separately backup or replication data for Disaster Recovery purposes.

Automatically classify, tag and apply retention policies

VaultReady™ provides the ability to intelligently and automatically classify and tag archived data and records. By automatically differentiating business-related content from non-business-related content, organisations retain only relevant data records and significantly reduce the burden on end-users to manually classify data.

Enhance productivity & records search with full text indexing & eDiscovery

Global Storage’s VaultReady™ Records Management Cloud Service is designed to streamline online records storage, retrieval and access. With full text indexing of stored documents and email, auditors and authorised staff can search VaultReady™ online storage for documents containing specific words or phrases to always find exactly what they’re looking for and to respond quickly and thoroughly to information requests.

VaultReady™ provides a single powerful eDiscovery tool for auditors and authorised staff to search across data types, place litigation holds, review data for responsiveness and export data out as a response to a discovery request.

Reduce costs and increase flexibility with Storage-on-Demand

VaultReady™ Records Management Cloud Service delivers a fully managed cloud based records management service allowing your organisation to safely make the transition to electronic filing. This allows your business to significantly reduce traditional record management costs associated with paper records management, IT storage systems, document search charges, and backup and disaster recovery systems.

VaultReady™ also flexibly caters for increases in work loads or business growth through mergers and acquisitions on a capacity on demand basis. This ensures your organisation only pays for the records storage that it needs, when it needs it.

Are there cost benefits for outsourcing Disaster Recovery over traditional in-house methods?

Choosing between creating a disaster recovery solution in-house or outsourcing disaster recovery is a fundamental part of creating a Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery strategy. The in-house approach may be tempting, but is it cost effective? According to an IDC study, companies that leverage in-house DR sites spend 32% more than those opting to outsource.

To identify the cost benefits that can be delivered from outsourcing disaster recovery, it is critical to understand the true costs associated with running these areas of IT internally. However, cost alone, will not drive an organisation to move to an outsourced service, so efficiency gains and a technologically superior solution are needed to create a compelling argument for outsourcing Disaster Recovery.

Once cost, efficiency and technological comparisons between in-sourcing and outsourcing can be made it is then relatively easy to determine if an outsourced Disaster Recovery services will work for your organisation.

There are five key areas that need to be looked at as part of this process:

• Upfront Technology and Storage Costs
• Ongoing Expenditure
• Resources & Operational Efficiencies
• Enterprise Technology & Infrastructure Benefits
• Data Centre Facilities, including Power & Cooling requirements

CONTAINING UPFRONT TECHNOLOGY & STORAGE COSTS

Significant upfront cost savings can be realised from an outsourced service as customers do not have to purchase, own or manage the hardware, software, and recovery infrastructure required for Disaster Recovery. An outsourced service charged as a monthly payment from operational expenditure avoids upfront capital expenditure to set up hardware and software and allows customers to pay for capacity on-demand. Additionally an in-house solution requires the organisation to plan for and purchase infrastructure to cater for the maximum potential capacity required for Disaster Recovery. Whereas the capacity on demand model offered by Cloud providers means a business only pays for what it needs, providing greater flexibility to cater for ebbs and flows in business demands.

MANAGING ONGOING EXPENDITURE

Outsourcing Disaster Recovery can help manage ongoing expenditure by eliminating the ongoing costs associated with hardware maintenance, software subscription and support services. Additionally ongoing costs associated with full technology refreshes and upgrades are no longer relevant with a hosted Disaster Recovery service. These elements are provided as part of the monthly service cost for an outsourced service and allows companies to easily and accurately budget for new projects and organic growth with a simple cost model.

IMPROVING RESOURCE & OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY COSTS

Outsourcing Disaster Recovery can deliver improved efficiency for resourcing and operations. A hosted solution delivers resource efficiencies by freeing up internal resources and enabling organisations to improve the utilisation of existing staff. With the management, monitoring and testing of Disaster Recovery being taken care of by the outsourced provider, resources can be better used for revenue generating activities.

Outsourcing Disaster Recovery also enables organisations to streamline operations to improve operational efficiency. Outsourced services provide guaranteed SLAs on recovery of data which will deliver better recovery times, reduced downtime and better business service in the event of an outage or disaster.

LEVERAGE ENTERPRISE CLASS TECHNOLOGY & INFRASTRUCTURE

Outsourcing Disaster Recovery provides customers the ability to leverage from existing investments in enterprise class technology, infrastructure and facilities for Disaster Recovery. Typically outsourcing will offer significant gains over trying to build a Disaster Recovery environment in-house and provides best practice recovery processes and methodologies.

IMPROVE RELIABILITY & AVAILABILITY WITH TOP TIER DATA CENTRE PERFORMANCE

Data Centre space, power and cooling are key considerations when planning for any major project as the price and availability of high quality data centre space has become problematic. Outsourcing disaster recovery eliminates the need for a customer to go out separately for their own data centre space. The outsourced provider should provide purpose built facilities with N+1 redundancy across all power and cooling systems and a guarantee that systems will be available when needed most.

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For many organisations, the growing cost and complexity of storing, protecting, and recovering business data assets, takes focus and resources away from supporting critical business processes and new IT initiatives.

Global Storage’s MTSM Assessment provides organisations a detailed breakdown of the different tiers of data and applications that exist within their IT environment with respect to their importance, value and ongoing use to the business.

By understanding this breakdown, Global Storage can identify a suitable data storage, recovery and archival strategy, specifically aligned with the organisations data growth trends, application types and recovery objectives.

The end result is a structured and proven approach to ongoing data management that drives down cost, improves efficiency, reduces business risk, and improves resource management.

ASSESSMENT & DATA CAPTURE

This first stage in the MTSM Assessment includes an onsite workshop run by Global Storage’s business continuity and recovery team to identify data and application types within the Customers IT environment and map their relationship to business processes and departments.

During this stage data discovery tools are also used to collect information and statistics on key data areas across the IT environment and an assessment of current protection and recovery capabilities is carried out. Customer data tiers are broken down into three key categories: Tier 1 – Mission Critical, Tier 2 – Business Critical and Tier 3 – Important and Historical data.

ANALYSIS & REPORTING STAGE

The second stage involves analysing the captured information and data to indentify current key storage usage and growth patterns and to document any areas of exposure or risk to the business.

Data and application types are classified into appropriate tiers of importance with a particular focus on the breakdown of data type, size, age, and importance to the business.

FINDINGS & RECOMMENDATIONS

Upon completion of the assessment, customers are presented with the final assessment and key findings, including a recommended approach to implementing a multi-tier storage management, recovery and archival strategy for the organisation. Additional key storage recommendations are also made during this presentation together with cost estimates.

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Global Storage will be focussing on their Multi-Tier Storage Management approach to data protection at this years EMC Inform Event to be held at Crown Towers on May 27, 2010.

Global Storage deliver a Multi-Tier Storage Management approach to data protection, which enables organisations to manage, protect and recover their data based on the value it has to the organisation. This assists customers to backup less, archive more and secure mission critical data.

Global Storage will be offering organisations a Multi-Tier Storage Management Assessment to assist organisations to identify and classify their data according to tiers of importance, to determine the most cost effective protection and recovery solution for each tier of data.

The Global Storage solutions which are part of this approach include:

• EnvironmentReady Oracle Replication Service
• EnvironmentReady Managed Disaster Recovery Service
• DataReady Managed Backup Service
• ArchiveReady Managed Archival Service.

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