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London: 23rd January, 2007 – SecurStore today announces how it can reduce its customers’ data storage costs and help them to comply with data retention laws, with the deployment of a backup lifecycle management (BLM) storage solution. SecurStore’s service is based on Asigra’s Backup Lifecycle ManagementTM (BLMTM) software. A case study of its provision of BLM to the National Land Survey of Iceland (NLSI) is included further below.
SecurStore manages data during all backup archiving processes, separating the data into varying levels of protected data: current critical data, which is permanently stored online for fast recovery; and archivable important data that may be needed at a later time but is not likely to be accessed in the near future. Backup data stored in an archive means it is not immediately retrievable like backup data stored online, but it is significantly more economical than storing it online.
Alexander Eiriksson, CEO of SecurStore, says; “As every company’s digital data is growing at an increasing rate, companies are experiencing mounting storage costs, so they are looking for cheaper storage options for their less critical backup data. Asigra BLM allows us to offer customers a lower cost service for archiving long-term backups, which can be quickly retrieved from the BLM archive back to the customer. BLM also allows us to help customers with their data compliance requirements, as the software manages the movement of the different types of data as well as assigning dates for the final destruction of specific data, along with issuing destruction certificates.”
In order to save on storage costs, companies often and mistakenly choose to store the less critical backup data offline in their own vault, while their critical backups remain online in the vault of their service provider. Alternatively, they opt to delete the non-critical data altogether. However, there are many problems associated with both of these options:
- The customer can never retrieve the data that has been deleted.
- The customer may be in breach of data compliance laws if the data is deleted.
- It is cumbersome to manually separate the critical backup data from the long-term backup data.
- If the customer wishes to retrieve archived backup data from their own vault, the data cannot be transported back to the online storage medium from where it is easy to restore the data.
SecurStore can negate these problems for customers with its BLM service. The tool meta-tags the less critical or older backup data before it is archived offline, so that archived backup data can easily be restored to the online medium. BLM also intelligently manages the movement of data from the online storage to the BLM archive, whereby backup data which is no longer critical (i.e. not required day-to-day, older and perceived as less valuable) is automatically moved to the archive, but is still accessible. The end user benefits from a cheaper storage solution that manages the data for them and allows easy access to the archived data.
Alexander Eiriksson continues; “BLM is now forming an integral part of our customers’ risk and compliance management systems. It also gives us the flexibility to attract a wider range of customers to our data back up and recovery services, such as educational institutions, which have a lot of long-term data to store but have a relatively low budget.”
Case Study: National Land Survey of Iceland
SecurStore provides the National Land Survey of Iceland (NLSI) with an online and offisite backup and recovery service, which uses Asigra’s software. SecurStore is finding the Asigra BLM solution of particular benefit to its customers that have a lot of backup data to store and are worried about the mounting storage costs.
Brandur Sigurjonsson, IT Manager of NLSI, comments; “By storing the huge amounts of our long-term backup data offline in cheaper storage, we can realise massively reduced data storage costs while at the same time reap the benefits online data backup has over tape-based backup. SecurStore’s BLM service also helps us to comply with the data retention laws, as we can ensure that data is archived for a specific amount of time and also assigned an end date, so that we also don’t hold onto data for longer than is stipulated by the retention rules.”
Companies in the E.U. and the U.S. are today required to comply with more strict rules and regulations regarding the safeguarding and use of personal data, such as The UK Company Act and Basel II. They are required to respond quickly and with ease to e-discovery requests of archived data such as financial data and e-mails.
About National Land Survey of Iceland (NLSI)
The National Land Survey of Iceland creates the official maps of Iceland and also produces statistical information, such as geographical information (e.g. vegetation, lakes, rivers, glaciers, fishing area limits and distances to nearest countries), road distances, population calculations and sizes of municipalities. The history of the National Land Survey of Iceland can be traced back to the turn of the 20th century, when the surveying branch of the Danish General Staff began mapping the country. The National Land Survey of Iceland became an independent institute under the Ministry for Communications in 1956, and from 1990 it has been under the auspices of the Ministry for the Environment. The National Land Survey of Iceland began working with digital maps in 1992. One year later a new Datum, Ísnet 93, was measured using GPS technology. More information can be found at http://www.lmi.is/landsurvey.nsf/pages/index.html.
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