Preventing a Disaster Before It Happens
Laura Hunter, Sr. IT Specialist, realized she had a problem the minute she saw firetrucks with lights ablaze outside her office on Walnut Street at the University of Pennsylvania, Student Financial Services. Laura is responsible for the backup of the computer system that manages the student financial aid process for the University of Pennsylvania’s 20,000+ undergraduate and graduate students.
Like most universities and companies, Laura employed a tape-based backup system that required her to periodically remove the tapes from her building for safe-keeping. Being a diligent employee, Laura kept to a strict schedule of tape rotation, dutifully switching her tapes on a regular basis. As Laura watched the grim-faced firemen converge on her building, she realized that emergencies, such as the one that brought the fire engines to Walnut Street that evening, respect no one’s schedule. Her first thoughts as she watched the events unfold that night were that she wasn’t supposed to take her backup tapes off-site until the next morning.
Fortunately, there was no fire that night. It was a false alarm. There was no data loss, no lawsuits, no business interruption, no loss of reputation, and in Laura’s case, no need to explain to her boss why they lost several days' worth of critical data. Laura had seen enough. The fact that one of her department’s most irreplaceable assets –the data in the department’s computers-could have gone up in flames the previous night prompted her to get in touch with IPR, a leader in managed data protection.
DataGuardian To The Rescue
University of Pennsylvania Student Financial Services processes student financial aid and its computer system houses thousands of financial documents on its servers in addition to highly sensitive student and family tax records in its document imaging system. Their main priorities were choosing a vendor that gave them an offsite electronic backup, got them off of tape backups and made restoring data easy. They also looked for a vendor that emphasized security as a main component of protecting their sensitive financial data.
They selected IPR’s DataGuardian On Demand which provides fast, online disk-to-disk backup of all of their data, while automatically storing a primary and secondary copy at secure IPR vaults. On Demand also gives them 24x7 access to all backed up files and folders with a simple point-&-click. Further, the backed up data is all encrypted so that the data is safe from the moment it leaves the university’s servers.
No More Tape
DataGuardian On Demand’s disk-to-disk technology is key for Laura and her boss David Domico, Assistant Director SFS, Advanced Technology. Both were eager to get away from tape-based backups because neither trusted tape as a backup medium. “I danced a happy dance the day the tapes went away,” said Laura.
Since working with IPR, University of Pennsylvania Student Financial Services hasn’t lost any data and restores are easy. DataGuardian On Demand has even helped Laura quickly migrate data from old servers to new servers, further adding value.
David added, “IPR allows us to rest at night without the worry of our backup media going bad.”
