What Are It's Risks?

Four major IT disciplines relating to risk management can be applied to the storage environment:

• Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
• Backup and Restore
• Security
• Capacity Planning for Scalability and Availability

CST Data CAN HELP!
Customers realize a storage infrastructure that supports all four of these IT disciplines related to risk management. CST Data delivers affordable, near-real-time off-site data backup, review of event logs for accuracy, pre-built front-end replicas of applications, and the use of thin-client architectures. This can primarily address risks # 1 and 4 above: we help you gain disaster recovery planning and needed capacity in your system. In addition to the risk mitigation, a cost reduction often occurs by avoidance of added capacity requirements.

MITIGATE THE RISKS
Mitigate the risk of data loss by replicating the information within and outside the walls of the datacenter. Since storage plays a crucial role in managing risks associated with disaster recovery planning, and since effective disaster recovery brings the enterprise back as quickly as possible from a systems outage, wise disaster recovery plans use storage to lessen the effects of every kind of outage. Unplanned outages include:

Failure of a hardware component and the consequent loss of data is still a common cause of an unplanned outage. Failure of the disk drive component and the resulting data loss was problematic for enterprises in the 1970s and 1980s. The introduction of RAID technology, which became commercially available in the early 1990s, mitigated this risk. Despite what vendors would have you believe from brochures, hardware failure still happens, but RAID protection ensures that access to data, and hence processing, continues even though a disk drive fails within a RAID group in a storage array. Other storage technologies, such as distance replication products, guard against data loss. These products write I/Os to two different locations, usually through independent I/O links and controllers. Planned redundancy is a kind of risk management. With these "insurance" products, if one controller fails, the data can still be accessed on the other controller. Remote replication not only provides data protection against the loss of a controller, but also provides access to data during a datacenter catastrophe caused by loss of electrical power, fire or flood damage.

CST Data provides comprehensive offsite data storage facilitating disaster recovery and business continuance that help you get back up and running fast, including:

Regular Backups

You choose how often you want to back up your files, daily, weekly, or monthly and send us a backup tape regularly.

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Archival Storage

Keep older, unused files with CST Data, freeing up capacity you can use for more utilized data.

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"Hot" Data Center

We use your backup to restore your data and customized MIS software to a "hot" server in our Application Service Provider (ASP) hosting facility. Since we use the ASP, your staff can work anywhere there is a connection to the Internet, in the office, from any temporary facility you choose, on the road, or from home.

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Get Back to Work Fast

In most cases, we can get you up and running in one day. Then you can use the ASP for up to two months at no additional charge. If you need more time, you can stay in the ASP as long as you need to at our regular low monthly rates.

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Annual Test

When you sign up with CST Data, and once a year after that, we do a test restore. After all, backups aren't much use if they don't work when you need them.

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A Word About HIPAA

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) adds privacy and security requirements for health information that will be difficult for healthcare enterprises to meet without a centralized data archive solution. An overwhelming concern in healthcare, HIPAA promises to significantly impact the IT and healthcare industries by requiring a new, more stringent focus on privacy and security of healthcare information.

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