Kronicles has launched, in Singapore, a new Backup-as-a-Service solution for small and medium businesses (SMB).
The solution includes both on-site and off-site backup and promises enterprise-class reliability and fast recovery at affordable subscription-based pricing starting from S$5,000 per month (before government subsidy).
Kronicles BaaS includes both on-site and off-site backup.
Only last week, I wrote about EMC’s “Disaster Recovery Survey 2012” which found that “81% of businesses in the Asia Pacific and Japan might NOT be able to recover lost data and systems in the event of a disaster”.
“71% of all organizations had lost data or suffered systems downtime in the last 12 months” – Vanson Bourne interview of 2,500 IT decision-makers.The results point to outdated backup and recovery infrastructure in businesses in Japan and the Asia Pacific.
Kronicles has come to the rescue with their new “Backup-as-a-Service” (BaaS), powered by technology from Quantum.
In the customer’s office, a POD (Periphery Onsite Device) backs up 30-days worth of data from a customer’s email and application servers.
The POD provides on-site backup for quick recovery.
The POD provides quick recovery of files over the local network, which is typically faster than an Internet connection.
Every day, during off-peak hours, data is copied over a dedicated link to Kronicles’ secure data facility for off-site protection.
In Singapore the data resides in-country within Starhub’s Tier 3 data center.
At the end of each month, Kronicles provides a copy of the data on an LTO tape, which can either be returned to the user or stored at a secure third=party location that can be returned on demand.
At any one time, there is a local copy of data for everyday operations, one stored on Kronicles’ cloud for business continuity, and one copy on tape for long-term archival.
Following today’s launch in Singapore, the service will be launched next in The Philippines and Malaysia.
Pricing
In Singapore, SMBs can leverage the Productivity and Innovation Credit Scheme from the government, which will reduce the customer’s S$5,000 monthly outlay for the Gold package to only S$1,600 per month, after offsetting tax benefits.
Three price packages are available. The basic Gold package – at S$5,000 per month – includes 200GB to 1TB of data backup, support for three to 10 Windows servers, up to 30-day history.
The Platinum package – at S$8,000 per month – includes 1TB to 2TB of data, three to 10 Windows servers, and up to 60-day history.
Customers with even more stringent requirements can discuss the Platinum Plus package with Kronicles.
Is the data secured? “Yes, data is encrypted with up to 256bit encryption when the data is ‘in flight’. At the data center itself, the data is not encrypted but protected,” says Pramotedham. The data on the back-up tapes are also not encrypted.A War Room for DR and BCP
Piti Pramotedham, Group CEO of Kronicles, described something that caught my attention during his presentation.
He described how a “War Room” can be set up in StarHub’s Media Centre should a customer’s premises be gutted by, say, a fire.
The customer, together with its partners, can set up shop in the War Room while their IT servers are re-constituted from the backup servers.
Is the data of one customer physically compartmentalised from that of another customer? “Yes, at the data center, it’s like a bank vault – so you see a whole wall of storage dedicated to one customer, separate from that of other customers,” say Piti.This can be completed in a matter of hours, after which, the customer and its partners can resume “business as usual”.
The aim is to suffer minimal disruption in times of disaster.
Pramotedham says that Kronicles insists that customers practise this once a year to ensure everything is well-rehearsed.
For SMBs that doesn’t yet have any Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity Plans (BCP), this is like having DR and BCP thrown in together with the BaaS.
Key personnel from the new Security Systems unit in IBM updated CIOs and key IT managers on the numerous reports of data leaks, Denial-of-Service attacks, and social Hacktivisim in 2011.
