Cloud-Based Storage Improves Disaster Recovery at Situs
Since real estate consultancy The Situs Companies moved to a cloud-based storage system in 2010, the company has dramatically improved the speed and reliability of backups and significantly reduced IT costs.
Fri, August 26, 2011
CIO — When Bill McCown joined The Situs Companies six years ago, the Houston-based real estate consulting firm was anticipating growth, and the company figured its tape-based backup systems would need to be upgraded. Then came September 2008, when Hurricane Ike slammed into Houston. "Our data center stayed up but our office didn't have power for a week," recalls McCown, who is the director of IT for the firm. While employees in other locations had access to the data center, the central office was offline and out of the communications loop.
Once McCown's team got past the initial disruption caused by the storm, the company took a hard look at its backup practices. "We realized that if the data center had actually gone offline, we had everything backed up to tape," McCown says. "The data was stored and secure but there was no way to recall our backup tapes, and there would be no way for us to get at any of that information, or get it out to another location if the power was down."
It was time to look in earnest at solutions that would enable data to be stored off-site.
In 2010, after evaluating a number of vendors, Situs made the move to cloud-based storage with EVault backup technology and services from i365, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based provider of storage systems for SMBs and a subsidiary of Seagate Technology. The relationship with Seagate "made i365 an easy sell to my CEO," says McCown, who noted he was looking for a vendor with solid technology and staying power.
It also was a plus that i365 offered both cloud-based and on-premise storage systems. While McCown would have liked to turn to the cloud for all of Situs' storage needs, the reality of the company's business makes an all-cloud strategy impractical. While not regulated itself, Situs' clients—banks, financial institutions, investment houses, real estate investment trusts, mutual funds and the like—are subject to regulations.
"There were a lot of compliance issues around putting all of our storage in the cloud," McCown explains. "As soon as we introduced a third party with access to some of our data, we had to worry about how they were doing their security, and whether it would become a situation where it was going to keep us from being able to do business efficiently."
As a result, Situs opted to keep the majority of its production data in-house and utilize an offsite, cloud-based data system strictly for backup and recovery purposes for servers that handle email and Citrix applications, among others.
