Data Protection Services Allow a Leading Healthcare Solutions Company to Enjoy High Availability and Security

Business Need

In a bid to safeguard the growing volume of critical business and customer data, the software and solutions provider was facing several issues in storing, managing, and maintaining their data. The client was also particularly concerned about the security of data, as they deal with sensitive customer and health data. Keeping pace with an ever-evolving regulatory landscape was also a challenge, which required them to implement solutions across data protection including disaster recovery and business continuity.

The client was looking for a partner who could provision the required computing resources, cater to their data storage requirements, and provide innovative data protection services.

The client chose Synoptek as a hosting solution provider and entered into a service agreement for a period of three years which has been renewed multiple times over the years. To meet the data storage and protection needs of the client, Synoptek provided virtual servers and workstations, enterprise block storage SANs and hosted data protection services for every customer-authorized server.

Solution and Approach

Synoptek conducted a thorough assessment of the client’s data landscape to identify data requirements, ascertain current data protection challenges, and implement solutions to improve data access and security.

As part of the hosted data protection solution, Synoptek conducts the following tasks:

• Configuring every customer-authorized server for Hosted Data Protection Service (HDPS) and provide support for backup, databases and VMware images.

• Provisioning disk-based storage in local data center as the backup target media and configure backup policy for each protected server.

• Carrying out disk-to-disk backup for all primary storage to a secondary storage system located in the same data center as well as from on-site HDPS secondary storage system to an off-site storage located in another company-managed data center.

• Performing data restore requests during the first year from existing tape archives and populate HDPS data stores with full backups.

• Installing and configuring backup software agents on designated physical or virtual machine servers according to the Backup Configuration Form and using Default backup configuration and retention period, unless otherwise specified by client.

Synoptek also provides a host of other recurring on-site HDPS activities:

• Create Incident Ticket for each actionable alert according to the escalation plan

• Troubleshoot and resolve backup failures

• Install critical software updates essential to basic operation of backup solution and perform client-requested configuration changes

• Configure HDPS service to replicate backup data from the primary data center repository to remote data repository – at least once per day

• Monitor data replication process and troubleshoot and resolve replication failures

• Provide Microsoft SPLA licensing for all systems hosted in Synoptek Data Center

• Provide 24x7x365 Service Desk support for all services – remote as well as on-site

For disaster recovery, Synoptek offers the following services:

• Bi-annual failover testing and client-declared disaster failover of replicated data from primary protected facility to a designated failover facility

• Creation and ongoing maintenance of client-specific Disaster Recovery Run Book that contains list of Protected Servers, RTO and RPO requirements, and disaster notification procedures

As part of connectivity, Synoptek performs the following activities:

• Provide dedicated firewall service that includes connection to 1-2 VLANs in the shared virtual environment, unlimited site-to-site IPsec VPN connections and monitoring and remediation services

• Maintain current point-to-point IPsec VPN tunnels between Firewall and VPN endpoint

• Configure firewall monitoring and alert thresholds and resolve problems as they occur to maintain uptime

Business Results

With Synoptek’s hosted data center, data protection and connectivity services, the client is able to:

• Get access to resources on demand and meet the evolving data storage and compute needs – with ease

• Effectively and efficiently backup all critical data and have configuration changes made – without roadblocks

• Replicate data to secondary data centers, enjoy high uptime and availability of data, and minimize the chances of business disruption in the event of a disaster

• Get issues resolved on-time – either remotely or through on-site support as required – through Synoptek’s 24×7 Service Desk

Synoptek’s data hosting and data protection services allows the client to keep pace with data growth and improve operational efficiency through effective data management. Since all data backup related activities are taken care of, the client is able to focus on the core task of providing comprehensive healthcare software solutions.