The importance of Backup & Disaster Recovery planning
With increasing regulatory requirements on data protection, companies cannot afford to lose data anymore. More than ever, businesses and enterprises must be aware and prevent becoming a victim of the next major security breach. Whatever the cause, a natural disaster, a human error or a cyber-attack, data loss is expensive and extremely risky for any business.
GITS PSF has learned that most Small and Medium sized businesses do not have a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plan in place. Often this is due to not knowing the true value of such a plan or just due to missing the internal knowledge to implement such security safeguards. This article lists some benefits to show why these security solutions are so important to keep organizations protected against loss of business-critical data.
Protect against natural disasters
There are uncontrollable circumstances that can cause downtime to a business. Research shows that over 90% of companies who experience downtime for more than seven days because of services in a data centre do not function will go bankrupt within one year.
Although a backup and disaster recovery plan will not prevent natural disasters, it will protect data and minimize downtime to ensure that it does not have a serious impact on business’s continuity. Disaster Recovery in the GITS Cloud offers faster recovery times and multi-site availability at a fraction of the cost of conventional disaster recovery. It ensures that the end of one data centre does not mean the end of backups and availability of the services.
Disaster recovery is a combination of data backups and solutions designed to ensure uptime, minimize data loss and maximize productivity during an attack, natural disaster or other undesirable situation.
Secure your customer’s data
Abuse and interception of your customers data is a serious threat. Recent examples of major security breaches that impacted many prominent organizations show the importance of protecting companies against loss of sensitive data and reduce risks of reputational and financial losses.
In order to reduce these risks to a minimum, GITS PSF has implemented state of the art security measures such as advanced firewalling and Intrusion Detection Systems. We can leverage the latest encryption technologies to encrypt data in transit and important backup data at rest.
Data protection does not stop with the implementation of technical measures. It is also important to stay in compliance with data protection regulations. The penalties for not following data protection regulations are growing, and secure data protection is a must for any business owner that is serious about maximizing revenue and preventing unnecessary losses.
Humans are not perfect and make mistakes
Even the most cautious persons can forget a step in an important process causing data loss or the wrong data to being entered. While very common, these mistakes can often be the hardest to prevent and correct.
Often the most important way to prevent human error is in process improvements and quality assurance activities. In addition, the training of employees and actively promoting security awareness within the organization helps. Having a disaster recovery plan including backup and restore management policy helps when data loss actually occurs.
Hardware and systems fail
Finally, while modern IT hardware and cloud systems are fairly resistant to failures we know that these hardware, machines and other systems can fail. That is why it’s important to have backups and a disaster recovery scenario in place to get back to a recent backup or automatically act on failures in the most precarious situation.
While it can be costly for a company to eliminate any single point of failure in an existing IT infrastructure, having a disaster recovery plan that covers this is the only way to ensure that a failure doesn’t interrupt your service or causes data loss.
The less expensive and more sensible option would be to have your data backed up regularly to the GITS Cloud. Ideal, and more cost-effective than building your own top-of-the-line IT infrastructure, would be to outsource your entire IT infrastructure to a leading managed cloud service such as GITS PSF.
Protect your organization
Cyber-attacks, disasters, system or server failures or human errors are not (completely) preventable. You can safeguard your business from costly data loss by investing in a solution that helps with the protection of data, such as backup and disaster recovery.
One approach is to leverage cloud architecture alongside an existing IT environment for secondary workflows such as backup, archiving and disaster recovery. Or, like many of our clients, move complete IT environments to the cloud or leverage some form of hybrid or private cloud model that safeguards your business-critical data and services.
The GITS Cloud offers greater efficiency for IT, and great reliability for the business with improved security for data. On top of our cloud’s default security measures, GITS PSF offer added value solutions such as backup as a service, disaster recovery, and infrastructure as a service that can save businesses from one-half to one-third of their traditional costs. Our dedicated team of professionals successfully implement and manage backup and disaster recovery solutions for our customers. Interested to learn how we can optimize your current IT environment? Please fill out the form below and we will contact you as soon as possible.
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Private, public or hybrid cloud – what is right for my business?27.07.2017
Nowadays everybody has touched or worked with a cloud solution for private or business use. Many are convinced of the benefits of the cloud; such as better business agility, flexibility, transparent recurring costs, and quicker access to new technologies. But when you have decided to make the transition to the cloud for your business, how do you know which is the right solution? A quick understanding of these concepts should provide the guidance necessary to start deciding what solution is right for your situation. Public Cloud A public cloud is normally owned and operated by a third-party service provider. Today's commonly known public clouds are operated by Microsoft and Amazon. Leveraging a public cloud can be ideal for small and medium sized businesses, or businesses that have fluctuating demands. The primary benefits of the public cloud include the speed with which you can quickly deploy standardised IT resources and the ability to pay only of the services and resources you use. And, due to the huge size of these public clouds, you can scale compute power up and down as business demands, within a matter of minutes. Private Cloud These types of clouds are usually owned and operated by larger enterprises or service providers having access to data centre facilities and computing resources. A private cloud involves a distinct and secure (multi-tenant) cloud based environment in which only one specified customer can operate. Like with other cloud models, private clouds will provide computing power as a service within a virtual environment using an underlying pool of physical computing resources. However, under the private cloud model, the services running in this cloud are only accessible by a single organisation, therefore providing that organisation with greater control, data security and privacy. Hybrid cloud The hybrid cloud allows you to combine on premise, public cloud, private cloud or combine multiple private clouds to leverage the best of what each has to offer to meet business and operational needs. Businesses regularly use the public cloud for non-sensitive operations, including applications, workloads and data that are not under regulatory supervision. The private cloud scenario is ideal for hosting business-critical operations, and incorporate existing dedicated resources to achieve a highly flexible, agile and cost-effective solution. Our experience Most of our customers choose to take advantage of the security and privacy benefits of private and hybrid scenario's. Meaning, staying in control of their workloads and data. The trend we see is that our customers are migrating workloads from on-premise environments into our data centres. Usually in a combination of dedicated private cloud solutions and a managed support services model. The public cloud has a reputation for being affordable but when a company has to heavily invest in of knowledge of managing their own IT in a public cloud, this could become an additional heavy cost. And Besides, even though the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) created possibilities to host workloads and data of Professionals of the financial sector (PFS) on public clouds, it is a time consuming task to prove compliance to the regulator of those services and solutions hosted and managed on those public clouds. GITS PSF assists in finding the right hosting solution for any business case by leveraging best of all worlds. Customers stay in control and decide which business process, workloads or data they want to have migrated and hosted where. In addition, when a company puts data in the public cloud, it no longer has total control over it. The only way to truly guarantee the security and privacy of sensitive data is to keep it either in house, under the organisation's direct supervision, or to outsource the management of those workloads and data to a regulated managed service provider such as Global IT Services PSF. Control, compliance and security The outsourcing of IT services to a private cloud allows you nearly all the same benefits of hosting it in the public cloud, but more so. A private cloud scenario delivers all the agility, scale-ability and efficiency of the public cloud, but also provides greater levels of control, compliance and security. This is making it ideal for regulated businesses or those with strict data, regulation and governance obligations. Another key benefit of private cloud is the ability to have a bespoke solution that best suit your specific IT requirements, something that cannot be achieved so easily in the public cloud environment where most services are provided out of the box. Most important, the management by a service provider like GITS PSF will provide even more added value: greater level of efficiency, compliance, knowledge and security, making it ideal for businesses that do not have an internal IT department or do not want to heavily invest in acquiring this knowledge. For businesses that handle sensitive (financial) data, outsourcing IT to a private cloud environment is in our opinion the best solution at hand. Setting the first step towards a new IT or cloud environment is not easy. Global IT Services PSF managed many digital transformation projects over the years. Are you interested to learn how we can optimise your current IT environment or help you with your next IT project? Please fill out the form below and let us contact you as soon as possible.
Global IT Services PSF – An Introduction26.07.2017
Global IT Services PSF (GITS PSF) is an independent Luxembourg based service provider regulated by the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF). We are managing complex IT environments for our clients since 2005. Every day, with our dedicated team of 20 professionals, we earn their trust, by providing technical and operational excellence, compliance, data security and innovation. GITS PSF operates a highly secure and state of the art dedicated hosting and cloud platforms from the Luxconnect Tier IV datacentres located in the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg. These platforms hosts tailor made solutions and capabilities to provide highly secure, flexible and affordable private IT environments. These solutions leverage the latest technologies and are deployed and managed according to the highest standards possible. Our experience For many years, we are specialized in end to end IT outsourcing for Professionals of the Financial Sector (PFS). Cloud services and platforms are managed by a highly driven and knowledgeable team of 15 dedicated network, system and support engineers. Together with our strategic partners and technology providers we are able to develop innovative IT and cloud solutions that contribute to our client’s business results. Due to our comprehensive solution and services portfolio we can deliver bespoke solutions for any small and medium sized businesses. Among our clients, we are proud to have fiduciaries, fund administrations (AIFM, ManCo), banks, asset management and substance companies, mostly subject to regulatory supervision, with a global reach. Our aim is to make our client’s organizations smarter, better, compliant and more secure with IT and cloud solutions that are build based on the highest standards and backed by tailored Service Level Agreements. The GITS CLOUD The GITS Cloud hosts a wide range of solutions and services that are reliable, tailor made, secure and cost efficient. See it as a One-Stop-Shop for managed hosting, cloud services, business continuity, security, data protection and connectivity solutions. Leveraging the latest state of the art technologies and believing in the endless possibilities IT and Cloud have to offer. GITS PSF is the cloud and managed services provider of the future… Private cloud & hosting solutions Today, our clients move their complete IT environments to the cloud or leverage some form of hybrid or private cloud environment. GITS PSF are able to offer improved security, compliance, data access, analysis and utilization for any cloud or hosting scenario. The solution portfolio provides for a wide range of managed private and hybrid cloud capable hosting services such as Hosted Email, virtual desktops, virtual servers, and (SaaS) applications. We can host any type of application while guaranteeing complete segregation. Private & Hybrid cloud solutions Managed Server hosting Workspace hosting Hosted Exchange email hosting GITS-Box (secure document sharing) Application hosting Business Continuity solutions To prevent data leakage, or a compliancy breach, GITS PSF solutions and services per default are protected by end-to-end multi layered security solutions on datacentre, network, application and infrastructure levels. We protect our client data via a twin datacentre strategy and a clustered multiple firewall layers, intrusion detection systems, 2 factor authentication and certified encryption. Online Backup and long-term retention Disaster Recovery Data Protection services (GDPR ready) Business Continuity Planning Monitoring services Connectivity solutions We have many years of experience managing, building and securing our own redundant high-speed network backbone in Luxembourg. It offers high-capacity and low latency connectivity solutions to clients and guarantee end-to-end availability of our services and solutions. Built on this foundation, and together with our trusted connectivity partner (LuxNetwork) we offer a sophisticated catalogue of connectivity, fiber and network related services. Network security solutions Network monitoring Fiber connectivity Internet bandwidth Virtual Private Networks Point-to-Point connections (local & international) Managed Services Our wide range of managed services optimize the performance of any environment and act as an extension or replacement of any existing IT organization. Global IT Services PSF is your partner for the operational IT management. Service Level Management Design, Audit and reporting 24×7 Active Monitoring Cloud Optimization Change Management Incident Management Patch Management Hardware acquisition Software and license management Consultancy and Audit Advisory services GITS PSF acts as a long-term partner for the management of any project and support of your strategic and operational challenges. Following industry standards while giving special attention to service, data protection and security according to the quality and confidentiality standards set by the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF). We deliver high quality and performance for the right price. Interested to learn how we can optimize your current IT environment? Please fill out the form below and we will contact you as soon as possible.