All too often, multiple copies of the same files are made on unreliable media, with no criteria and no verification: that does not protect you from disasters, viruses, data loss or corruption. Data must be saved methodically, of course, but first of all you need to understand what to protect and how. We start from the value of your processes.
How it works
- Analysis and policies: data classification, backup criteria, retention and encryption
- DPaaS (Data Protection as a Service): copies of data, servers or your entire infrastructure in our Green Data Center or in other data centres you trust
- Periodic restore checks: a backup is only worth anything if it can be restored
- Careful management of storage space and the resources used
Benefits
- Pay-per-use subscription: costs always under control, no upfront investment
- Opens the way to Disaster Recovery even for those without the budget for major projects
- Protection consistent with the GDPR and your corporate policies
- Data held in a zero-emissions data centre
Who it is for: any organisation that regards its data as an asset — from the SME starting with managed backup to the large enterprise replicating its entire infrastructure.
From backup to business continuity: the RPO–RTO continuum
Data protection is not a product: it is a position on a continuum. On the left, the question “how much data can I afford to lose?” — that is the RPO (Recovery Point Objective), which looks backwards from the moment of failure. On the right, “how quickly must I be up and running again?” — that is the RTO (Recovery Time Objective), which looks forwards. The definitions are those of the ISO 22301 standard, and the trade-off is structural: the closer the two objectives get to zero, the higher the costs and complexity. The art lies in placing each service at the right point on the curve — not the whole company at a single point.
Backup / Restore
Tiers 1–4, on the Core Site: backup, continuous backup, asynchronous replication. Modest costs, back up and running in days or hours. This is DPaaS territory: the first step on the continuum.
Rapid Data Recovery
Tiers 4–6, towards the DR site: software and synchronous replication, standby servers. Back up and running in minutes or seconds, for services that cannot wait.
Continuous Availability
Tiers 6/7, with a BC site: inter-site high availability and zero data loss systems in a tri-data-centre architecture. No data loss, at the highest cost.
Seven tiers, one common language
The framework behind the diagram comes from the seven tiers of disaster recovery defined in 1992 by SHARE — the historic IBM mainframe user group — and later developed with IBM's contribution: from Tier 1 (off-site copies, recovery in weeks) up to Tiers 6/7 (synchronous replication and zero data loss systems). The model is more than thirty years old, but it remains the common language in which business and technical teams agree on capabilities and costs.
The guided path
Moving along the continuum is not a single technological leap: it is a progression to be governed. Our consultancy service supports this progression in five phases:
- Assessment and Business Impact Analysis — an inventory of systems, classification by business value, RTO and RPO defined per criticality level: it is the BIA that sets the objectives, not the technology catalogue
- Target architecture design — positioning on the tiers and site topology (Core / DR / BC): robust protection for critical systems, lightweight solutions for workloads that can wait
- Security integration — resilience is not the same thing as security: ISO/IEC 27031 acts as the bridge between continuity (ISO 22301) and information protection (ISO/IEC 27001, whose control 5.30 in the 2022 edition requires precisely a planned and tested ICT readiness)
- Implementation and testing — simulations and drills against the clock: an untested plan is not a plan
- Continuous improvement — the whole programme follows the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, the same one as our method: objectives and architecture are revisited as threats and requirements change
The result is to turn “we want to be more resilient” into measurable, sustainable objectives, placing each system on the appropriate tier.
