Managed Back Ups

For the last 20 years, CMS have been talking to our customers and understanding their issues. We regularly speak to IT departments that have no real backup strategy and have no immediate plans to rectify the situation.

This is mainly down to priorities. Backups never feature high on any IT administrators list of things to do. That is, until disaster strikes and critical data is lost!

CMS have built a Managed Backup solution that takes the day to day pain of backing up away from the IT department and allows the responsibility for full backups and restoration of data to rest with ourselves.

We use solutions from world class vendors such as Symantec, Microsoft and Veeam to help manage our customer’s backups on their behalf. We work to strict SLA’s and enter into contractual terms with our customers to ensure that we deliver maximum value.

MANAGED BACK UP EXAMPLE
Through first-hand knowledge of the CMS Managed Cloud and our virtual hosting platform, CMS tap into VMWare’s backup technologies to provide robust, efficient and easily recoverable data backups. Utilising a backup solution from Veeam software, snapshots of each virtual machine are taken on a nightly basis on a reverse incremental basis. This process effectively replays the most recent snapshot onto the backup, creating a full backup every night and also maintains incremental backups going back 7 days from this point. These 7 days worth of backups are kept on disk within the CMS data centre, primarily for quick restorations of any data within the last week. If a user requests a restore, for example due to deleting a file, the CMS team can quickly restore it without requiring any change of tapes. Due to backups being at VM level, CMS can restore individual files or folders, or complete virtual machines should a configuration change or service pack cause a major failure.

In addition to this, the full backup is transferred daily, weekly and monthly to tape and stored offsite for completely data security. All tapes are stored offsite by Storage Management Ltd, based in Warrington. Tapes are picked up on a daily basis by a secure courier and transported, using steel briefcases, back to the storage facility in Warrington. On a normal day, daily tapes are changed and taken offsite. In addition, every Friday a weekly backup is put to tape which is kept for a 4 week period before being overwritten. Finally, on the last working day of every month a monthly backup is put to tape which is kept for a 7 year period before being overwritten. This rotation allows for full recovery of any day in a week, then any week in a month and finally any month in a year for up to 7 years.