Sensitive and high-level strategic documents and information can be secured in virtual and cloud environments to meet information security regulations, as virtualisation of business information technology (IT) environments, especially the use of cloud services, and use of automated backup and recovery systems continue to increase.

International best practices around backup and recovery are increasingly important as most companies are expected to always be on and their systems must be permanently available to users across the world. This also places significant pressure on mean times to repair any faults, while tested and working backups are required to ensure recovery of lost data and reduce the impact of IT system faults.

Data protection specialist company Veeam focuses on backup quality and security, which extends to storing data on at least two separate physical media and in at least one separate physical location, and on backup testing to ensure that any data can be recovered rapidly to reduce and potentially eliminate business downtime.

Many international companies must function at all times, which means that the window to conduct backup outside of business hours is no longer available and necessitates a real-time backup and recovery solution, says Veeam Software Southern Africa regional manager Warren Olivier.

“Our wide area network (Wan) acceleration solution, which is part of our backup system, dramatically reduces the bandwidth required to do complete and granular backup by reducing data duplication and redundant backup traffic. This solution only accelerates Veeam backup data across the network, owing to intelligent caching and proxy packet verification.”

Veeam’s system can also be deployed as part of a company’s cloud services in private, hybrid or public cloud environments. Its solutions are also augmented by the NetApp and HP Snapshot technology, which can store a backup copy of the entire production environment in a company every 15 minutes, and makes item-level recovery fast, easy and reliable.

“Data loss is not tolerated by businesses or their customers anymore, regardless of the underlying infrastructure or the amount of data, and companies, consequently, are looking for ways to ensure continuity of business processes and applications at all times,” he explains.

Further, Veeam users can use new ways to do item-level recovery for application-specific file requests, such as recovering data without viewing recovered documents to maintain compliance with regard to data and information accessibility regulations. Customers within a user’s environment can also be allowed to do data recovery themselves, reducing the pressure on the helpdesk and empowering the client.

Veeam’s Version 7 of its backup and recovery system uses a 256-bit encryption system, which secures data at the source, in flight during backup, as it enters storage, at rest and on subsequent retrieval, ensuring that data remains secure at all times.

“Executive officers, directors and board members regularly handle sensitive documents, the leaking of which could open their companies to risks, such as insider trading allegations or penalties, reputational harm, loss of tenders or intellectual property, and listed companies must conform to King III regulations, which stipulate corporate IT systems governance rules.”

Veeam automatically upgrades its clients to the latest version of the system, currently Version 7, and has found sustained success with its subscription model, concludes Olivier.