Data protection for financial services

Business continuity planning and disaster recovery in financial services are not new concepts. However, given new rules around regulatory compliance and the unpredictable nature of our world, large-scale planning has become a higher priority. As a result, proven technologies are emerging as a new solution for these immediate needs. Are you disaster-prepared?

Business continuity planning and disaster recovery in financial services are not new concepts. However, given new rules around regulatory compliance and the unpredictable nature of our world, large-scale planning has become a higher priority. As a result, proven technologies are emerging as a new solution for these immediate needs. Are you disaster-prepared?

• Will your customer stick with you if you can't access their account records?
• Who will pay the price when SCA, SEC, FDIC and GLB regulations aren't met?

Breathe Easy. With Double-Take Software solutions offering real-time data replication, you can ensure up-to-the-minute access to business-critical data instead of relying entirely on the tape backup from last night. Thousands of companies including over half of the Fortune 500 protect their data with Double-Take. Many like Chicago-based MidAmerica Bank use it today, instead of tape to provide cost-effective, up-to-the-minute remote data protection and disaster recovery for their headquarters and branch offices. Imagine if:

• Data access is assured. You can rely on the fact that your data is continuously being protected and will be immediately available in the event of a crisis.
• Data protection exceeds regulation. Double-Take real-time replication meets the highest standards and regulations for data protection, ensuring you the ability to stay compliant.

Disaster recovery and business continuity planning
Business continuity planning and disaster recovery in financial services are not new concepts. However, given new rules around regulatory compliance and the unpredictable nature of our world, large-scale planning has become a higher priority. As a result, proven technologies are emerging as a new solution for these immediate needs.

Critical steps toward preparedness
In this brief column, we will discuss the top three steps you need to direct your attention to in order to achieve disaster preparedness.

1. Identify and understand your business-critical systems. Understanding and assessing your environment is the first step toward planning for a disaster. You will need to begin by identifying critical servers, business continuity objectives, and mandated requirements.

2. Plan for the rapid recovery of business operations following an unplanned outage. Look for a solution that compliments your tape backup strategy by providing immediate failover capabilities. The overall goal is to minimize business disruptions and maintain a high level of confidence in the ability of your firm to resume working in a timely manner. A risk assessment process can help prioritize the most important applications.

Create a detailed plan to address the following (but not limited to):
• Books and records back-up and recovery
• Financial and operational assessments
• Alternate communications with customers and employees
• Business constituent, bank and counter-party impact
• Regulatory reporting
• Communications with regulators

3. Maintain a high level of confidence through ongoing use and testing, to ensure critical internal and external continuity plans are effective and compatible. Practice, practice, practice. The top mistake most companies make is creating a plan but not revisiting the crucial steps to make that plan work.

Mitigate risk with a feature rich replication and high availability solution
Planning for the rapid recovery or high availability of business-critical applications can be as simple as installing the latest data replication technologies from NSI Software, Inc (NSI®). Double-Take® by NSI combines continuous realtime replication and failover to provide high-availability, centralized backup and disaster recovery for financial services organizations. Double-Take protects data and applications including Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle and many more enabling our customers to replicate and protect business-critical data that resides throughout the organization.

Several of Double-Take software's features enable the highest level of protection for your firm while maximizing your existing application and infrastructure environment.

• Unlimited distance replication over standard IP networks. You can replicate data as far away as necessary to minimize your vulnerability.
• Software and hardware independence, Double-Take runs on any hardware you have from virtually any application.
• Minimizes performance by putting a cap on the bandwidth used based on your productivity requirement with our flexible bandwidth scheduling feature.

Double-Take puts customers first by combining the most relied upon software solution with a team of business continuity planners in our Professional Services organization. Our hand-picked Professional Services consultants can provide you with best-practice solutions from initial assessment and technology deployment to ongoing health checks. Our technical support teams, many of which are Microsoft® Certified professionals, have a broad range of product and industry knowledge and hands-on experience.

A proven solution with proven savings

Thousands of companies including over half of the Fortune 500 protect their data with Double-Take; many like Chicago-based MidAmerica Bank use it today, instead of tape to provide cost-effective, up-to-the-minute remote data protection and disaster recovery for their headquarters and branch offices.

CASE STUDY:

Double-Take® Software Customer Profile
Company: Sharjah Islamic Bank
Business: Banking
Offices: Sharjah
Needs: 24x7 access to data and systems.

Business

Sharjah Islamic Bank is one of UAE's leading financial institutions, and Sharjah's biggest bank. We provide innovative financial products and services, within the context of Islamic Shari’ a laws, to individuals, small and medium-size businesses and corporations across the United Arab Emirates and beyond.

Customer Challenge
Deploy a cost efficient Disaster Recovery solution in order to ensure the integrity and availability of its IT systems so that it could maintain high quality tools and resources for its own staff and clients deliver a level of service that its members are used to in their professional lives.

Critical Need for Cost-efficient Accuracy

• 25 Sources to 5 Targets for Disaster Recovery
• (Wan environment)
• For SQL and Swift (Bank account of customers)
• Cost of downtime of millions in case of crash
• RTO of 0 minutes required
• 10 other sites to protect for DR
• BAZEL II Regulation: Risk Management.

Interested in learning more about Double-Take? We invite you to view the Double-Take product flash demo, request a free trial or visit our website www.doubletake.com.

Double-Take® for Windows from Double-Take® Software goes beyond periodic backup to provide affordable data protection, ensure minimal data loss, and enable immediate recovery from any system outage. Double-Take continuously captures byte-level changes as they happen and replicates those changes to one or more alternate servers at any location, locally or globally.

Don't sacrifice performance for protection
By replicating only the bytes that change, Double-Take uses the minimum bandwidth required. Plus, features like Flexible Bandwidth Scheduling and Intelligent Compression allow you to control how much bandwidth Double-Take can consume at different times.

Double-Take: Proven data protection that fits your infrastructure and your budget.
Defend Your Data

Continuous, asynchronous, byte-level replication over any distance
Double-Take monitors changes to all protected files and replicates only the bytes that change. Replicate to a disaster recovery site as far away as you would like, over standard IP networks, for maximum protection against data loss. Improve performance by compressing protected data before it is sent.

High availability and failover
Choose between either application-level or full-server failover to configure an alternate system to take over for your production server in the event of an outage.

Point-in-Time Recovery
Double-Take integrates with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service to allow you to schedule and recover from up to 64 point-in-time copies of data on your Double-Take target.

Supports Clustered Deployments
Protect up to eight nodes in a single cluster; replicate to or from MSCS clusters of up to eight nodes, and automatically respond as cluster resources move from node to node.

Centralized Reporting and Analysis
The Double-Take Reporting Center feature offers detailed, custom analysis and reports of your entire Double-Take environment. The rich reporting and dashboard views of the Double-Take Reporting Center make it easy to manage even the largest Double-Take deployments.

Protects Exchange, SQL Server, Virtual Systems, SharePoint, and more
Bulletproof your business continuity, data migration, centralized backup, and server consolidation operations.