Announcing the Canadian Red Cross Community Healthcare Services as its first client last December, Traxion Technologies Inc. has launched business continuity and disaster recovery services targeted at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) seeking to secure their critical business systems and information against outages.
President and CEO Michael Roncon reports the Toronto-based company has the scale to offer enterprise class services that typically only large firms could afford.
Traxion’s services range from secure online data backup to restoration of normal business operations at the client’s site or at any one of Traxion’s 70 facilities across Canada.
Traxion supplies its own servers and technology and keeps clients’ data resident at two of their 21 redundant data centres – three data centres in Canada, 18 in the U.S. – sharing among clients the bandwidth and storage arrays. Traxion does the tape back-up replication, then charges per gigabyte stored.
Traxion has trademarked “Warm WorkSites” which Roncon explains is intended to evoke “what those facilities are: up and running 7/24, you step in, identify yourself and it gives you access to your facility room for whatever seats you have under contract with us; you authenticate online and you start running your business. That becomes your temporary facility for a period of time you’ve got committed with us.”
Beyond enterprise-scale physical site security, Traxion uses 512 encryption capabilities and their own developed “SecureKey” which gives client-only access to a set of rules or permissions around the software doing the replication backup. Roncon describes SecureKey as “an electronic lock box so we have a key to access the data but the customers only have the key to read the data as it sits on our resident technology. They are the only ones that have a view to it. So in replication mode, if they went to one of our sites to restore their business, they are the only ones that can actually initiate that. We don’t want to have access to that data other than just to grab it from their system and downstream it to our data centre. We can’t read it, nor can anyone else.”
In storing and protecting the health care records for the Canadian Red Cross, Traxion first took their computers to the client’s site where they backed up the Red Cross’ information to their computers. Traxion then loaded the data in the computers onto servers at a Traxion data centre. Once loaded, Traxion “streams” in real time, taking snapshots of the Red Cross’ computer content every couple of minutes.
Traxion uses “delta block” technology, so that once Traxion has a client’s full back up loaded at the data centre, only what has changed in the files at the client’s is transmitted downline to Traxion. Roncon explains that “the implications are twofold: there’s the cost perspective on bandwidth – you’ve minimized costs for sending down data – and security is heightened because if an intruder in the transmission grabs the delta block, they get what seems like gibberish since it is out of context.” www.traxion.ca
