When you sign up for Backup, you’re entrusting that provider with your business’ data. Ensuring they’re reliable and that your data will be secure is paramount, and you need to know exactly what to expect from the service.
Here at alphatech we offer Offsite backup. We’re always happy to answer your questions, but we thought we’d share our 7 most asked ones.
1. IS THE SERVICE PROVIDER AND THE SERVICE ITSELF RELIABLE?
Yes – we’ve been providing quality IT services for over 20 years. Throughout this time, we’ve built up an excellent reputation for offering first-rate customer service, and top-quality equipment and support. Further to this, all our offsite backup customers have a daily notification to confirm successful backup(s), and if there’s any issues, they will be sorted promptly.
2. WHAT ARE YOUR COSTS, AND WHAT WILL THEY BE IN THE FUTURE?
We offer a tailored service, so the costs depend on the volume of data you’re backing up, and the speed at which you’d require access to that data in an event of data loss. We price per gigabyte, and as the volume of backed up data increases, the cost per gigabyte reduces.
3. WHAT SECURITY MEASURES ARE IN PLACE?
Your data is encrypted at all stages of the backup and recovery process – before leaving your computers, in transit, and also at rest in our datacentres. The encryption is Military grade AES 256. Each customer is given an encryption key that needs to be used to access their data. Only customers have access to this; our staff cannot access your data.
Our datacentres have many accreditations including:
- ISO 14001
- ISO 9001
- ISO 27001
- EU code of conduct for data centres
- PCI DSS
- OHSAS 18001
- The Green Grid
- Carbon Trust Standard
4. WHERE IS OUR DATA BACKED UP TO AND STORED?
Your data will sit in our two UK datacentres that are geographically dispersed for added resiliency. Your data is mirrored between both of our datacentres which means if something should happen to one, your data is safe as there’s an identical copy in the other datacentre. Both datacentres are physically secure requiring advance registration and multiple security checks to gain access to them.
5. WHAT IS THE SERVICE AVAILABILITY?
We strive to achieve 100% service availability. To this end we have a service-level agreement which states that should the availability of the service fall below 99.5%, a credit would be given to our customers representing 25% of the total monthly costs.
If the service drops below 95% (which is yet to, and hopefully will never, happen) we would refund 75% of the monthly costs.
6. DO YOU FOLLOW INDUSTRY BEST PRACTICE AND STANDARDS?
Yes. Data versioning (the option to restore historic versions of files), data validation, encryption, location of data (i.e. UK data storage for UK customers), accreditations etc. are all adhered to.
7. CAN I GET MY DATA OUT EASILY?
Of course, you can! We offer this as a managed service, we hold your encryption key, so we would get your data out on your behalf.