To successfully address its disaster recovery requirements, financial services company, Anglorand Securities, has installed HP Autonomy LiveVault, a secure, compliant and automated private cloud backup solution, as well as its TurboRestore Appliance for Rapid DeltaRestore, which was supplied by Altonet.

Anglorand Securities provides a wide range of financial products and services to a diverse client base that includes financial professionals such as stock brokers, portfolio managers, futures and online traders.

With its head office based in Johannesburg and regional offices in Durban and Cape Town, the company is regulated by the JSE Limited (JSE), South African Futures Exchange (SAFEX) and the Financial Services Board (FSB) of SA.

According to Wade Shaw, IT manager at Anglorand Securities, the company required an off-site backup and recovery offering that provides secure storage of its business-critical information and databases of its main trading platform, TradeCIS, to a private cloud.

“Previously, all backups of the five servers at our head office were backed up to tape, done manually and stored on site. This posed a significant business risk, not only in terms of theft, but also data loss through error-prone backups.

“It was also important for us to have long-term storage capabilities for sensitive data, such as our voice recordings of all our customer interactions, which is a requirement for any financial services company that does business with the JSE,” says Shaw.

After researching backup products and engaging with various backup and data recovery experts in the industry for more than a year and a half, Shaw says Altonet’s fully managed “storage as a service” and support offering, using HP Autonomy LiveVault, was the most compelling.

Altonet did a complete analysis of Anglorand Securities’ current storage requirements to back up each server, and compiled an overview of proposed backup policies and procedures.

Altonet recommended the TurboRestore Appliance, an onsite device which enables local network speed backups and restores of Anglorand Securities’ servers. The appliance dramatically reduces data recovery times by backing up all data to this local device, which then replicates the data to Altonet’s off-site data storage located in data centres in Isando and Midrand.

The data which is sent to the vaults is programmed to replicate backups as they complete, so not to interfere with the overall bandwidth requirements of the company’s network. Typically such replications are completed after business hours and over weekends.

Gareth Tudor, CEO of Altonet, explains that “HP Autonomy LiveVault greatly reduces Anglorand’s complexity of managing server backups and ensures that data is secure and accessible when they need it. It is literally a ‘set and forget” solution. With strong encryption settings, the solution also addresses their compliance challenges when dealing with the retention, deletion and recovery of their transactional voice data.”

Tudor says that even the recovery process is automated. “The administrator simply uses a web interface to select the data to recover from a list of archived file versions and restores the data to the selected location,” he adds.

“Later this month we aim to meet with Altonet to simulate a disaster recovery scenario and migrate our data onto a completely new server, so that we are aware of the procedures and time frames should the unthinkable happen.

“That said, since the installation we have not experienced a single problem and with Altonet, we have access to expertise that can meet the evolving needs of our environment, ensuring that if any issues arise they get solved very quickly,” concludes Shaw