Frank Hirth moves to protect business critical data

From NetworkComputing Magazine Vol 17 Issue 01 - January/February 2008


The Challenge
Frank Hirth is an accounting consultant based in London, specialising in expatriate tax compliance for individuals and organisations. It generates sensitive financial data that needs to be securely stored and easily retrieved, so the ability to guarantee the highest level of data security is critical. Frank Hirth was using tape-based backup, which was cumbersome, time-consuming and unreliable. Due to the business-critical nature of its data, Frank Hirth wanted a backup and recovery system that could be relied upon, even in a crisis moment, such as a server breakdown, or an office disaster.

The Solution
To fulfil its requirements, Frank Hirth opted for Asigra Televaulting, because of its agentless and online backup and recovery capability. The Asigra software solution is delivered as a service by hSo, a managed IT solutions provider, through hSo:VAULT. The software analyses the data, finds new and changed file blocks, eliminates duplicate files, and further compresses the residue bytes, reducing the cost of the backups.
The data is encrypted before sending it over an IP- WAN connection, to a centralised Asigra Televaulting DS-System server, located in hSo's data centre, which then consolidates the backup data. As an additional level of data protection, hSo has configured the DS-System server to replicate the vault to a second, secure back up site.

The Benefits
Mike Jackson, IT manager of Frank Hirth, said, "The ability to protect our internal and client data is of the utmost importance for us, as we constantly handle very sensitive financial data. Once we had trialled Asigra's strong encryption and data protection, we knew that the hSo:VAULT service would ensure that our data would be secure and capable of restoration at all times."
Asigra's technology is used by hundreds of service providers worldwide, who offer backup managed services to companies ranging from small businesses to Global 2000 enterprises. The solution provides simple, centralised management of the data protection process, while eliminating the capital and operational expenses associated with agent-based solutions. hSo provides a range of IT solutions as well as the backup solution, including VoIP and data centre storage. The Sunday Times recently named hSo as one of its 'Tech-Track 100' companies, which are ranked as Britain's fastest growing, privately owned technology businesses.
Frank Hirth has now moved to extend the service to include backup of its highly sensitive UK and USA tax return data, because of the strong level of encryption. Frank Hirth is now using hSo:VAULT to back up email and critical data generated from thirteen servers and one hundred and ten desktops. The service ensures all critical data backups are secure, immediately restorable and accessible. Moreover, hSo provides Frank Hirth with a constantly flexible and scalable service that adapts to the company's evolving backup and recovery requirements.
Mike Jackson continues, "The ability to stream data across the internet is far more efficient for us given our breadth of international clients. The added benefit of the reliability of the hSo service and the Asigra software has made our entire backup and recovery procedure far more effective and easier to manage than the previous tape based solution."
"Frank Hirth generates and backs up extremely critical data and the ability to guarantee each of its clients the highest level of security, puts the organisation one step ahead," commented Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra.
The Frank Hirth IT department has found that an added benefit of the Asigra software is the generational backup. The IT department can now easily retrieve past versions and even deleted documents upon request, using the explorer-like interface. Chris Evans, managing director of hSo, comments, "Asigra's technology has an agent less architecture, which enabled us to integrate hSo:VAULT into Frank Hirth's existing system with little fuss, as well as being able to minimise its management costs." NC