Swiss Financial Services Group

Hedging its Bets Against Data Loss

Customer Challenge:
Protecting the data of three of its global offices.

“In one view, I am able to see that the backup is being properly
done at all of our global offices. Not only that, but if data needs
to be recovered, I can initiate a restore to a server in the U.S.
while I’m in Switzerland.”
Karl Gysin, Director, Swiss Financial Services

Disaster Recovery Across Branch Offices
Backup and recovery can be a tricky proposition for a company with offices dispersed across the globe. The goal in any disaster recovery plan is to get operations up and running again with speed and efficiency. However, for companies whose offices are thousands of miles apart, if one office were to suffer from fire or flood, the prospect of getting the data to another location is perilous at best. The sheer distance can mean a transportation delay of two to three days—or even longer—if shipments get held up in customs. Shipping tapes risks damaging the media and with failure-to-restore rates from tape as high as 50 percent, companies can lose significant time and productivity. This directly affects their ability to serve customers and earn revenue.

Swiss Financial Services Group is a hedge fund administrator providing accounting and administration services for hedge funds. The company has offices in Naperville, Illinois; Waterford, Ireland; Nassau, Bahamas; and Zurich, Switzerland. Despite the firm’s global reach, it is a small company whose IT strategy is focused on strong partnerships with IT specialists. This enables Swiss Financial Services to focus on its core competencies without the need of a large IT department. When it evaluated its disaster recovery plan, the company needed a robust way to continuously protect its business-critical data and ensure seamless transition to another office in case of disaster. Yet it still didn’t want to burden its staff with IT tasks or pay a large price tag.

Reconsidering Data Backup
Up until 2003, Swiss Financial Services used tape-based backup to protect its data. However, this method of data protection was very time consuming and restoring data was problematic. Tape-based backup also didn’t fit Swiss Financial Services’ criteria of having a solution that could quickly restore data to a different location— for example, to Naperville—if a disaster occurred in Waterford.

“Tape just wasn’t a reliable way to protect our data, and we even had one incident where we couldn’t get our data back, because the tape backup didn’t run properly,” said Karl Gysin, director of Swiss Financial Services. “Restoring from tape was also too time-intensive, and as a result, we often ended up just recreating our data because we could do that more quickly.”

After researching other data protection options, Swiss Financial Services found the best solution in the LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service. LiveVault is currently being used at three of Swiss Financial Services’ locations, in the U.S., Ireland and Switzerland. The service provides a real-time data protection solution that automatically takes Swiss Financial Services’ data securely offsite and makes it immediately recoverable in the event of a disaster.

A New Way to Protect Data
“We were very impressed by how much LiveVault goes above and beyond the capabilities of tape-based backup,” said Gysin. “LiveVault provides a hands-off method of data protection, so it doesn’t tax our staff. At the same time, it protects our data on a continuous, rather than nightly basis, and automatically gets our data securely offsite. LiveVault really eliminates the headache of backup for us.”

LiveVault works by automatically and continuously backing up business server data via a secure Internet connection and storing it in a secure offsite facility, where it is available for immediate recovery in the event of a system failure, virus, human error or other disaster. The service operates on a continuous, as well as scheduled, basis. This means that Swiss Financial Services, by selecting the continuous backup option, can recover data up to the minute of the data-loss event, rather than up to the last time someone remembered to do a tape backup.

Gysin says he initially expressed doubt about the ability of an online service to back up all of his critical data, given that Swiss Financial Services does not have very high bandwidth.

“After our initial trial of the LiveVault service, all my fears went
by the wayside. LiveVault’s technology is able to easily back up
our data on a continuous basis via our DSL connection, since only
changes in data are trickled back to LiveVault.”

The LiveVault service is designed for customers whose servers reside outside of major data centers. These customers are often small and mid-sized businesses or enterprise remote or branch offices, who have primarily relied on in-house tape backups to keep their data safe. Industry analysts estimate nearly 50 percent of tape-based backups for these distributed servers fail to fully recover, which exposes these businesses to significant risk. Conversely, LiveVault guarantees recovery of all business-critical data and assures that companies will return to the state of their business prior to a data-loss event.

Unifying its Data Protection Under One Service
One of the things that Swiss Financial Services most enjoys about the LiveVault service is its ability to unify data protection under one application. By using LiveVault’s Web-based interface, Gysin is able to monitor the backup and restore processes at all three locations.

“In one view, I am able to see that the backup is being properly done at all of our global offices,” said Gysin. “Not only that, but if data needs to be recovered, we can initiate a restore to a server in the U.S. from Switzerland.”

Plus, if a physical disaster were to occur at one of Swiss Financial Services’ offices, the company could easily migrate that office’s data to a new location, ensuring business continuity.

Using LiveVault Beyond Backup and Recovery
In addition to using LiveVault for backup and recovery, Swiss Financial Services is also finding additional, innovative uses for the service. Because users can select the time from which they recover data, Swiss Financial Services can recover previous versions of existing documents.

“Often times, our staff will be revising an important spreadsheet, but will receive changes from a client on a previous version of the spreadsheet,” said Gysin. “Rather than recreating the entire document, we can easily restore a previous version and make the changes to that copy. LiveVault saves us tremendous amounts of productivity time, beyond disaster recovery, per se.”

All in all, LiveVault is an integral part of Swiss Financial Services’ disaster recovery plan and is helping the company save time because of the service’s speed and ease. Gysin says, “We used to often not bother restoring data from tapes, because the process was so cumbersome. LiveVault is so easy, though, that we’re using it several times a month, and not only for critical restores. The service just works perfectly.”