Hosting & Business Continuity
VSc Solutions have hosted high availability mission critical applications software for numerous clients from the 7GLOBAL data centre situated in Liverpool for the last seven years.
7GLOBAL operate a Grade “A” Data Centre, located in a former Bank of England bullion vault. It is certified to ISO 27001, the internationally recognised Standard for Information Security Management.
Hosting Services
7Global and VSc Solutions together provide the following services which will apply to their support hosted systems:
- Total security of client’s data
- Total security of the hosting system infrastructure
- Database management and administration required to maintain application up-time
- Maintenance of user names and passwords
- Maintenance of user accounts
- Maintenance of all hardware elements used to support the hosted applications
- Conducting the elements of system and database maintenance that require down-time for the client in pre-agreed time windows
- Initiating change control and test processes
- Specifying acceptable use policy
- Engineering file storage capacity and backup routines as needed to ensure security and integrity of the databases
- Engineering recovery and rebuild of systems and databases following failure, including the client’s disaster recovery options.
Disaster Recovery
A number of separate measures can be taken to reduce the risk of catastrophic loss of data or access to it. The very fact that data will be hosted at a data centre reduces the risk of hosting it at a client site significantly, and data security is one of the principal benefits of hosting.
Under standard procedures, rigorous backup regimes are in place that entail programs and data being stored in two places in the data centre, and involve on-site copies being stored in water-proof and fire-proof repositories before being moved to custom off-site facilities.
Enhanced Disaster Recovery can be provided at a level consistent with the target time needed to recover, the level of service required, and the potential cost of downtime. The full extent of guaranteeing continuity of full service could consist of a separate hosting system located at a secondary data centre operating as a complete replica of the live system. The secondary site would be regularly synchronised through a persistent network connection between the data centres, and use of the secondary system would be “kicked in” upon declaration of a disaster affecting the primary site. The secondary site would be run and owned by a party unconnected with 7GLOBAL, so risk would be spread.
