Toronto-based LOGiQ3 is not a large company. Ian Sanderson, vice-president of technology at LOGiQ3, said that because a lot of its business as “an insurance services company includes audits and underwriting,” employees at LOGiQ3 spend a lot of time on the road.
Due to the nature of the insurance industry and conducting audits, Sanderson said full and partial system back-ups are both necessary and a “challenge (because) many of our users are out of the office for 200, 220, 260 days a year.”
Sanderson said the company then came up with a workable solution that utilized Redmond, Wash. based-Microsoft Corp.’s Sharepoint but suffered due to the fact that, “in reality, you know that there’s some users that rarely did it, there’s some data that rarely got backed up and there was data that had never been backed up.”
This, he said, was not OK. Having or not having access to data, and its history can be “the difference between having to pay multi-million dollar settlements and not having to.” Even though they are just auditing the companies involved in the suit, Sanderson said “as the auditor, if our findings are incorrect, we may even be on the hook for certain risks.”
So, Sanderson looked for a more automated solution that would allow quick and frequent back-ups to the cloud anywhere his users could find an internet connection.
LOGiQ3 turned to Toronto-based Asigra for its back-up needs.
“The backup we’re doing now is an acknoweldgement that some people won’t completely follow the process because they don’t understand the significance of all the elements,” said Sanderson. He added that “we have to make sure the data is recoverable to any point in time that is necessary and we also have to make sure where we are storing it so it is available to only authorized users.”
Working in the insurance industry makes all of the data handled by LOGiQ3 a privacy issue. “All our data has to do with people’s life, health, finances and their person,” Sanderson said.
A selling point for Asigra, however, is its security. Eran Farajun, executive vice-president at Asigra, said one of the ways they proved this is that “we’ve gone through the laborious and expensive task of getting our solution certified by a third-party vendor. It’s a U.S. government body called NIST.”
NIST, or the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is a regulatory body in the U.S. that creates standards for security of network products. Farajun said Asigra received the FIPS 140-2 certification to put security concerns to rest. “The whole point is that, when customers ask about, ‘is your solution secure, is the service secure?’ we can say, ‘yes’ and it’s not just Asigra saying yes, it’s been vetted.”
This put Sanderson at ease, to the point where he feels confident defending the security of the cloud stored data. He said “in IT, there’s many things we have to do to make sure our deployments make regulatory requirements and under no circumstances can we allow privacy data to become available by anyone but those who have need of the data.”
That, and using Asigra, has lightened his workload where back-ups are concerned. Instead of having to monitor employees closely to ensure they’re using back-ups, he said “my process is (now) every morning, 20 minutes reviewing the back-up log and communicating with the users that didn’t have it on yesterday to make sure we get a back-up.”