Johannesburg, 06 Apr 2006
Betterbond, one of the leading players in the South African mortgage originator market handling transactions with a value of close on R2.8 billion per month, has implemented Attix5`s Backup Professional networked disk-to-disk enterprise-level backup service.
According to Damon Cavanagh, IT manager at Betterbond, the company took a decision earlier this year to move from its partner banks` switching and front-end online bond application submission system to an in-house-developed solution that catered for its individual needs.
"This system went live in April and we are currently close to completing roll-out to our branches in Pretoria, Mpumalanga, Germiston, Durban, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Boksburg, Bloemfontein and Nelspruit.
"At the same time, realising that the system would serve as our de facto operational database, we decided to improve our backup and recovery capabilities. We investigated a number of options before settling on Attix5 BackUp Professional on the recommendation of Internet Solutions, our network services provider," he says.
Backup Professional is an automated server suite, which backs up data to a secure offsite location on a daily basis. Once an initial full backup has been performed, the server process only backs up the daily changes, cutting down on bandwidth while still preserving the entire state of a server.
Adds Jan Sipsma, account manager charged with key customer development at Attix 5: "Backup Professional enables automated backup of information across the entire enterprise, whether it resides on servers, desktops or mobile computing devices such as laptops.
"In the event of data loss due to a systems crash, failure, theft, virus damage, accidental deletion or disaster (eg fire, flood), files can be quickly and easily recovered to any computer at any location, enabling the smooth continuation of business operations."
In addition, Backup Professional ensures `bank-level plus` security of customer data, both across the network connection and on the storage device, through the unique use of two-factor user authentication technology from RSA Security.
"Customers` data is also stored encrypted on discs within the data centre, providing higher levels of security and performance. Data is mirrored to the data centre and at month end, that data is archived to disk and stored off site for five years," says Sipsma.
The key benefits of Attix5 Backup include:
* The service is disk-based and as such avoids the substantial ongoing costs of tape replacement associated with legacy solutions.
* It is delivered as a fully managed service, meaning customers benefit from a guaranteed service level availability.
* The solution`s remote site management capability removes the need (and cost) for onsite support and maintenance.
* Restoration of data (mean time to restore) is significantly quicker than tape-based backup solutions as the data resides in an online environment, enabling the restore to happen immediately (and remotely) instead of having to wait for the correct tapes to be physically located and loaded.
* The service is based on a pay-as-you-go model and requires no upfront capital investment in hardware or software.
* The solution can be seamlessly extended to cover desktops and laptops.
Betterbond, says Cavanagh, is a Microsoft shop with most branch users running PCs and a few notebooks. The server environment is sourced from Dell, IBM and HP. "Here, the users don`t work with business-critical data, it`s usually Excel files with client contact information and client presentations which are saved on their individual PCs` hard drives. In the case of a hard drive crash, with Backup Professional, we are now able to recover any lost data without a problem," he says.
"Implementation of the solution was seamless and, to date, we`ve not had to call on Attix5 to deal with any maintenance or problem solving issues," he concludes.
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