Managed Service Providers are realising the potential of offering customers hosted data protection, storage and security services. These services are less time critical, and when considered in terms of “busy hour” traffic patterns in the network, provide excellent opportunities to generate additional revenues.
StorTech’s focus, specialisation and long-term relationships with premier vendors in the data protection and storage fields (Symantec, SUN and HDS), have made us the premier data protection player in the South African market.
Managed Services Offerings
Desktop Laptop Data Protection Service
This service is geared towards single laptop and home office desktop users, as well as mobile enterprise workers. The service allows users to back up their data to a central site as well as restoring data when required. To enable this service, StorTech uses Symantec’s DLO software suite, which enables de-duplication and continuous incremental backup to optimise bandwidth at all times. Monitoring and management of the service is done from the central hosting site.
Remote Office & Branch Office Data Protection Service
This service is targeted at medium to large enterprises that have any number of branches and have difficulty in managing backups. StorTech enables this service with Symantec’s PureDisk software suite and uses the same de-duplication and incremental backup features for bandwidth optimisation as the DLO suite.
The service should be preceded with a professional service engagement to establish what data needs to be protected, how much, and at what intervals? Per T/B billing is supported as well as comprehensive SLA’s in support of Business Continuity and Recovery Time and Point Objectives.
Enterprise Class Data Protection Service
This service includes the ROBO service as well as Data Center Data Protection Services. It is based on a combination of Symantec’s PureDisk and Enterprise NetBackup suite. These solutions are highly scalable and are able to meet the most stringent Recovery Time and Point Objectives. The infrastructure requires high performance SAN infrastructure as well as Virtualised storage, Tape as well as Physical Tape for off-site Vaulting. Centralised monitoring, Professional Storage and Backup profiling services are a prerequisite in order to develop and support the most stringent SLAs.
Policy Compliance Data Archiving
Data archiving is driven by regulatory and corporate governance imperatives, retention policies as well as the ability to recall the “correct” data if and when required. Due to the nature of policy-based compliance, archiving a tiered storage infrastructure is used. This means that as the data becomes older it will be progressively move to lower cost storage medium, ultimately landing up on tape - which is the lowest cost form of storage. This technique of storage is often referred to Information Life Cycle Management (ILM)
Hosted Backups and DR – Traditionally, the maintenance and upgrades of backup infrastructures are expensive and it is usually low down on the priority list. Due to this overall view, keeping your backup environment up to date has become a major concern for most IT Managers. By offering a hosted back up and Disaster Recovery Solution all of these issues can be addressed and resolved at a monthly fee. All the client’s data protection pains can be offloaded to a third party and all risks moved to a group that is highly skilled and a leader in the market when it comes to data protection and risk mitigation.
Hosted Virtual Enterprise Vault - Hosted archiving and compliance archiving has become a major issue for most IT organisations. By engaging a hosted service, clients ‘outsources’ the compliance factor as well as the risks associated with it. The EV environment is a tiered architecture to enable support for small business all the way up to enterprises. The environment has been architected with HA and security forming the base. The virtual route will allow extremely fast deployment as well as superior scalability.
Hosted PureDisk - In most cases looking after, upgrading and maintaining a backup infrastructure is a costly and backup burner event. Due to this overall view, keeping your backup environment up to date has become a major tooth ache for most IT Managers. By offering a hosted back and DR solution all of these issues can be addressed and resolved at a monthly fee. All the client’s data protection pains can be offloaded to a third party and all risks moved to a group that is highly skilled and a leader in the market when it comes to data protection and risk mitigation. A online hosted data recovery solution has now been developed that will allow a IT manager to move the responsibility and accountability away from his organization and into the hands of a SP who is uniquely skilled and specialises in data protection. Implementation is simple and the environmental impact is extremely low.
Hosted PureDisk Back-end - Traditionally, the maintenance and upgrades of backup infrastructures are expensive and it is usually low down on the priority list. Due to this overall view, keeping your backup environment up to date has become a major concern for most IT Managers. To ensure that the hosted data protection solution is 100% disaster recovery orientated, the entire solution will be protected by a Netbackup 7 back-end. The solution is protected by means of storage tiering where the final data position will be on Tier 3 storage - namely tape. Tape media will be kept at an off-site location for compliance and risk mitigation reasons.
These services are a natural fit where an organisation requires archiving of data for compliance reasons - such as email archiving. Whilst these services can be offered as stand alone services, they often go hand in hand with BC protection services when considered as part of the overall ILM philosophy.
This service always requires a prior Data Classification and Storage Assessment engagement in order to establish what data needs to be archived and for what period. Once the data profile is understood the optimum price for the service can be established.
Managed Storage Services
With Managed Storage Services, customers gain the benefit of StorTech’s partnerships with a multitude of network, storage and server vendors enhancing the business value of solution care in their storage environment. The StorTech Managed Storage offering consists of a number of building block components which can be offered either individually, all, or in combination to satisfy different customer requirements. This service can also include or exclude the provisioning of the required infrastructure. This service provides businesses with the confidence that their most valuable asset – information - is always accessible and secure.
StorTech removes the burden of highly complex change and configuration management and at the same time, avoids the costs of maintaining and developing an IT department.
The storage service offering is based on the following modules:
Storage Health Services - managing the daily health of SAN, tape, and disk storage. StorTech monitors the key components of the customer’s environment, including capacity planning and utilization, storage performance and availability, backup events and compliance, and SAN topology. In addition to 24 x 365 monitoring and reporting, StorTech offers detailed inventory, event, and basic configuration management.
Data Protection Services – StorTech takes full responsibility for daily management and success of a customer’s backup and restore environments i.e. Veritas NetBackup, Legato Networker and TSM. Services include backup configuration, backup and restore management, offsite vaulting, full configuration management and problem ownership.
Storage Infrastructure Services - Storage Infrastructure Services assumes the responsibility for daily management and success of a customer’s disk storage volume management. Services include storage capacity and disk performance management, full configuration management, problem ownership, and customer control and interaction. Customers have access to deep storage expertise, a robust set of management processes and state-of-the-art tools. Our team of experts will keep the storage infrastructure running smoothly around the clock.
StorTech Managed Security Services (MSS)
Whilst StorTech’s Managed Security Services can be offered as a free standing service they also form a critical component of our overall Managed Storage Solutions offering. Functions of a managed security service include round-the-clock monitoring and management. By working in combination, these components provide the Managed Service Provider the ability to provide a complete secure service environment for any end-user.
Four main security elements are addressed:
Perimeter Security - Any Service Provider that is looking to offer managed services where customers have access to data, SLA information or general access, need to protect their perimeter. StorTech views the technologies involved as “standard” for most organizations. Anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-malware, firewalls, IDS and IPS are pre-requisites for any business looking to conduct online activities.
Identity and Access control - StorTech service offering utilises Authentication Manager tools to positively identify authorised users by means of strong, two-factor authentication.
End-Point control - Positively identifying the user is only half of the equation. If that user is utilizing an insecure log-on point, then identity and access management is made redundant. StorTech’s service ensures end-point security by tying the device to central policies and enhancing the inherent capabilities of the traditional perimeter security technologies in a proactive way. This is done by combining Symantec’s Sygate product portfolio and the Symantec Incident Manager for centralized security alert control.
Security Activity Management - While end-point control deals with threats from outside the network, internally data still needs to be controlled. StorTech’s services have built-in encryption and, with the authentication tools can control identity and access. However, this does not protect malicious activity from rogue users. In the same way that Symantec Incident Manager can manage the logs and alerts from perimeter security technologies, RSA EnVision can do this for applications and internal devices. This not only removes a lot of false positives inherent in logging systems, it can ultimately track users by activity. What are they actually doing on the systems? Is it unusual? Is it illegal? Who should be alerted?
Managed Business Continuity
Managed Business Continuity is a comprehensive services offering that provides real-time, centralised, end-to-end monitoring and operational management for the customer’s complete backup/recovery technology environment.
The offering provides operational proactive, interactive and re-active support services based on ITIL standards and best practices to maximise the value add to business operations. This alleviates the customer from the risks associated to loss of data, and keeping staff for day-to-day maintenance and overall quality of service management.
This service is performed while maintaining client security and ensuring successful recovery minimising client risk within IT service objectives and goals of the business.
This service provides organisations with an additional option to combat the increasing complexity of managing Enterprise Backup & Recovery environments in an integrated and cost effective manner.