9 questions to ask your Backup provider

Before entrusting any Backup provider with your company’s data, it’s important to know that they are reliable and to understand exactly what service you can expect.

Here at Surrey IT Solutions we offer Clunk Click Online Pro, which we consider a comprehensive offsite Backup solution on the market.

For any company considering online Backup we encourage lots of questions. We thought we’d share and answer the 9 most common ones we get on a daily basis.

1. Is your Company and Backup service reliable?

Yes – Surrey IT Solutions have been providing professional IT Solutions to businesses in Surrey for over 11 years. With Clunk Click Online Pro, our customers are notified of their Backup status on a daily basis as reassurance that their solution is working properly and to ensure that any issues can be sorted promptly.

2. Do you offer Disaster Recovery as well as Backup?

Yes – we offer two main types of service: Data backup and Disaster recovery (Warm DR and hot DR).

Data backup means that we backup your files to our datacentre. In the event of a data loss you can access them immediately and we could restore those files as soon as you have somewhere for them to go (Desktop, Laptop or Server).

For Warm DR we still backup your files but we’re also able to do a full system backup which allows a full system recovery. We would backup your files as well as your server’s different settings and configurations. This means that we restore your data and the other settings and configurations creating an exact replica of what it was when it was last backed up. If you are fortunate enough to have a spare server lying around, we could do a full system recovery onto your spare server. Alternatively, we could spin you up a Virtual Machine (VM) in our datacentre for you to recover and restore to.

Hot DR is very similar to Warm DR but each time we do a backup to our datacentre, we would also do a restore to a VM in our datacentre as well. The benefit of this is that it will reduce your Recovery Time Objective (how long you can cope without access to your data for) as it cuts out the recovery process in a disaster situation.

3. What will our costs be now and in the future?

We offer a tailored service so the cost is dependent on a number of different factors including the volume of data you have and how quickly you would want to restore the data in an event of data loss.

For data backup you would pay per gigabyte. As your volume of data increases, the cost per gigabyte would reduce. For a DR solution you would pay for data backup and a monthly cost for the VM.

4. What Cloud security measures are in place?

Data is encrypted before leaving your computers, is encrypted in transit, and also at rest in our two geographically dispersed datacentres – the encryption used is Military grade AES 256. This ensures that your data is secure at all points of the backup and recovery process.

Our datacentres carry multiple accreditations including:

• ISO 27001
• ISO 9001
• ISO 14001
• OHSAS 18001
• EU Code of conduct for data centres
• PCI DSS
• Carbon Trust Standard
• The Green Grid

5. What user security measures are in place?

Each backup account has a secure encryption key that can only be accessed by you or your designated account administrator: Surrey IT Solutions staff cannot access your encryption key or data.

6. Where is our data stored and backed up?

Your data will rest in our two geographically dispersed UK datacentres. Your data is mirrored between both datacentres which means that in the unlikely event that something should affect your data in the one centre, there is an identical copy in the second datacentre. They are both physically secure centres that require registration and multiple security checks before access is granted.

7. What is the service availability and quality?

We endeavour to achieve 100% service availability. As such we offer a service-level agreement which dictates that should availability of the service drop below 99.5%, a service credit would be given, representing 25% of total costs per month.

Should service ever drop below 95% (which it never has) we would refund 75% of monthly fees!

8. Do you follow industry best practices and industry standards?

Yes. Encryption, data validation, data versioning (giving the option to restore an historic version of the same file), accreditations, location of data (i.e. UK for UK customers) are all adhered to.

9. Can I easily get my data out?

Yes. You can access your data at any time via our web access portal or via the application on your device – providing you have your encryption key because, as mentioned, we don’t!

If you want Backup now click below so we can take a few details and we’ll call you to discuss your needs further.