Telecom Ottawa has devised a backup and recovery service that the company says spells a serious reduction in data restoration times for Ontario businesses.
According to Dave Dobbin, Telecom Ottawa’s chief operating officer, lost data that used to take up to 2,000 hours to restore can now be recovered in less than a half hour. That speedy reinstatement comes from Telecom Ottawa’s recently introduced Enterprise Data Backup and Recovery service, which allows data restoration at speeds of up to 1Gbps over a secure VLAN network.
Using Telecom Ottawa’s fibre optic network, corporate data is transmitted to a secure offsite location for back up. Clients are guaranteed data recovery within two hours.
“We needed to make sure that the data transfer speeds and data capacity that we felt were required to make this a true disaster recovery service could actually be achievable,” Dobbin said.
Telecom Ottawa’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet backbone is currently the largest and the fastest metropolitan-wide network in North America, Dobbin said.
The Enterprise Data Backup and Recovery offers various levels of service. One is a primary disk service that backs up a corporate hard drive offsite accessible anytime at a cost of $1.25 per gigabyte.
Other services include a 28-day, one-year, or seven-year backup support that provides unlimited capacity for data storage.
Depending on data volume and customer requirements, the cost for this new backup service is significantly less than the amount companies will spend setting up their own data storage and recovery systems, Dobbin said.
Telecom Ottawa manages all aspects of the service from data transfer to security management. Customers are also given the option for data encryption.
“Our data centre is not accessible from the Internet. It’s fibre optic-connected so there are no external holes in it,” Dobbin said, adding that only one in four customers opts for data encryption.
Through Telecom Ottawa’s utility partners across the province, the Enterprise Data Backup and Recovery service is also offered in various cities across Ontario such as Windsor, Sault Ste. Marie, Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, Hamilton, St. Catharines, Burlington, Oakville, Mississauga, and Sudbury.
