Solutions
In today’s global environments, the continuous operation and availability of key business functions is absolutely critical. This drives the need for not only high-availability computing strategies, but also the need for swift, predictable, dependable recovery.
Business and IT organizations are dynamic, and recovery strategies must keep pace with the dramatic changes occurring every day that impact recoverability, including:
- Changing data locations
- New middleware and interdependencies
- New hardware
- New applications
- New initiatives, such as virtualization
21st Century’s Recovery Assurance™ technology helps you achieve recovery objectives and ensure the continuity of your business. Our Recovery Assurance solutions span the scope of your organization's mission-critical platforms, applications, and data, improving availability and recovery while containing costs.
We deliver Recovery Assurance by automatically and continuously identifying all application data and business dependencies through a dashboard that allows you to analyze the recoverability of applications, processes, and dependant data, helping your organization to:
- Meet current and future Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO)
- Align availability and recovery goals with business objectives
- Support strategic IT initiatives, such as virtualization, automation, and consolidation
- Enforce critical data management disciplines such as systems, storage, performance, application, and data management
Our Recovery Assurance solutions address the following areas:
- Regulatory Compliance
- Disaster Recovery
- Data Center Management
Regulatory Compliance
Meeting regulatory compliance directives and sorting through the challenges regarding your data management options—while making sure that you get the most impact for your dollar—is a growing challenge for even the most knowledgeable continuity managers and planners.
In the wake of compliance requirements and the competitive exposures that come along with them, you need to prove that your processes and workflow are recoverable through on-demand audits and verification reports. That means establishing a documented process for monitoring critical applications and files, tracking their backup location, and providing a critical path for the immediate recovery of those resources when needed.
Thankfully, we can help you meet these challenges by helping you to ensure that your regulatory compliance systems are transparent, comprehensive, and reliable.
We offer regulatory compliance solutions for the following regulatory bodies:
Sarbanes-Oxley
Corporate financial management has never been more critical than today. As the spotlight focuses squarely on the accounting and management processes of organizations of all sizes, IT departments are under pressure to provide the resources and infrastructure that comply with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations.
Under Sarbanes-Oxley guidelines, management's annual internal control report must contain:
- A statement of management's responsibility for establishing and maintaining adequate internal control over the company’s financial reporting
- A statement identifying the framework used by management to evaluate the effectiveness of this internal control
- Management's assessment of the effectiveness of this internal control as of the end of the company's most recent fiscal year
- A statement that an auditor has issued an attestation report on management's assessment
Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance with 21st Century Software
While these requirements may sound overwhelming, the solution doesn’t have to be. Accepted frameworks such as COBIT outline best practices that IT organizations need to comply with the ruling. Among these are the security, protection, and recoverability of financial data.
Our Recovery Assurance solutions fit nicely within the COBIT framework and easily fulfills backup and recovery requirements. In addition, the built-in tracking and reporting features of our solutions provide a wealth of information that can be used to identify, verify, and document financial data safeguards.
HIPAA
Health care providers are dedicated to the health and welfare of their patients. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was passed to ensure these organizations display the same level of care for their patients’ personal information.
HIPAA requires that IT departments of health care organizations develop and implement effective enterprise-wide security programs, specifically for electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI). In addition to establishing solid data security practices, this rule requires organizations to maintain effective contingency plans for:
- Permanent loss or corruption of ePHI
- Temporary loss or unavailability of medical records
This rule extends beyond simply having documented recovery procedures, to forcing organizations to audit these procedures regularly and provide sufficient proof that they would be effective during a crisis.
HIPAA compliance with 21st Century Software
21st Century Software’s solutions offer proven, effective schemes to assure the recoverability of the critical data guarded by HIPAA regulations. We bring intelligence to data protection to create significant efficiencies in the data recovery process. Plus, our tiered recovery feature enables prioritized restoration of critical files, allowing the less critical to be recovered at your convenience.
Gramm-Leach-Bliley
Today’s electronic economy requires more than speed and bandwidth—it requires trust. With delicate financial information regularly shared among trading partners and financial institutions across the value chain, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley (GLB) Act was developed to inform consumers about their privacy rights when dealing with these organizations. While privacy notices are a big part of the GLB Act, there are several data management topics that figure heavily into the language and spirit of GLB:
- Provisions apply to the storage, transmission, and maintenance of consumer financial information
- Accounting and tracking of consumer data
GLB compliance with 21st Century Software
21st Century Software’s solutions contains detailed audit and tracking reporting you need to meet GLB regulations, making it an invaluable aid in determining where data is located, which applications require it, and whether it’s properly backed up.
Disaster Recovery
While most companies have documented recovery procedures for retaining and recovering information across the enterprise, those processes often fail during testing and real-life recovery efforts. The primary reason is the lack of knowledge in physical and virtual systems, storage, applications, and data, as well as their interdependencies.
In addition, those DR plans do not usually highlight the most critical and sensitive applications and processes that would be immediately required after an event. Nor do they prioritize those applications for immediate recovery so that the business can continue these operations. That means the critical applications and data you believe to be backed up and recoverable may indeed be a major exposure to your continuity.
Our DR/VFI solutions provide validation and assurance that your critical applications and data can be recovered in the event of a disaster or loss of primary data processing locations. Our process for validating recoverability is built right into DR/VFI. This helps you to:
- Monitor file use in real time to define file backup requirements
- Align your backup and recovery plan with file usage patterns
- Ensure storage resource volume and connectivity through simulated backup
- Demonstrate recoverability through simulated recovery
- Validate your Recovery Assurance capabilities through assessment and analysis reporting
Our disaster recovery technology covers three main areas:
- Real-Time Monitoring
- Simulations
- Cross-Platform Support/Executive Insight
Real-Time Monitoring
DR/VFI Real-Time Recovery Assurance Monitoring and Analysis continuously and accurately monitors file usage across all applications and builds a database of applications and data that are most critical to business recovery.
This process helps you to identify and continuously monitor critical applications and data throughout your organization, find the interdependencies between those applications and data, and ensure those assets are retained by the most secure and efficient strategy.
Recoverability Simulations
Recoverability simulations help you gain immediate validation and verification that your data is recoverable. These simulations help you gauge preparedness for a disaster and give you the ability to run “what if” scenarios that evaluate your backup and recovery status for immediate feedback.
By simulating your backup, restore, and recovery capabilities, we help you avoid the costs associated with scheduling and executing a live disaster recovery test. Our disaster recovery simulations help you determine what you need to recover, while providing you with the time needed to make corrections to your processing so you can be ready for full recovery before a disaster occurs.
Our simulations evaluate your backup, restore, and recovery capabilities, and enable you to understand:
- When and how much data needs to be retained
- Interdependencies between applications, data, and locations
- Storage requirements by location and type
- Number of jobs that need to run to recover critical workloads
- Recoverability by application, system, or file
- Recovery readiness under various conditions, such as month end, year end, weekdays, and holidays
The final step in the simulation process provides you with an assessment and analysis of your recovery capabilities in the form of complete reports you need to confirm your recoverability—and gain peace-of-mind.
Cross-Platform Dashboard
Our DR/VFI solutions feature the industry leading cross-platform support that helps you ensure the recoverability of critical applications, processes, data, and their ever-changing interdependencies across Mainframe, UNIX, and Linux platforms.
This cross-platform technology allows you to monitor and analyze critical data and applications across both mainframe and open systems through a single pane interface you can customize by user, type, and function to deliver the right information in the right format.
Mainframe, UNIX, and Linux platforms have vastly different operating environments, and are typically managed by separate IT teams within an organization. Using cross-platform technology improves knowledge at the executive level by enabling storage administrators, recovery managers, and line-of-business managers to monitor their recoverability status in real-time across any platforms running in their environment.
Additionally, the integration of business recovery assurance strategies across platforms helps you meet recoverability demands and achieve more aggressive Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).
Data Center Management
Many continuity processes are based on legacy systems and applications that have not changed in several years, which means they may not include the integrated applications and servers needed to support new business initiatives. While it’s great to have a technology investment that puts your continuity planning on the cutting edge, the reality is that updating a host of systems and applications may not be in your budget.
Our complete line of data center management solutions can help you improve recovery processes throughout the back end of your organization, utilizing your existing infrastructure, with emphasis on the following areas:
- Cost Reduction
- Mirroring/Replication
- Tape/Virtual Tape
- ABARS
Cost Reduction
Our solutions reduce CPU cycle consumption, free tape drives for other work, and return valuable processing time for business use.
Our intelligent tape backup technology enables you to backup only the files that are vital to application recovery. This capability significantly reduces the amount of data transferred to removable media, giving you fewer tapes, which means reduced handling, labor, transportation, and off-site vaulting costs.
By minimizing manual involvement, our tape backup software reduces or eliminates human error and avoids costly reruns. What’s more, after using our tape backup technology, customers report tape reductions that average between 40 and 50 percent, though some have even reported reductions as high as 70 percent.
DR/VFI also reduces CPU cycle consumption, frees tape drives for other work, and returns valuable processing time for business use. The reduced strain on your resources means mirroring or replication systems can be used more effectively, thus reducing redundant storage requirements and minimizing their expense. Additionally, this technology can even help you postpone expensive equipment upgrades, or possibly eliminate them altogether.
Mirroring/Replication
Don't mistake availability with recoverability – be sure your high availability systems are also rapid recovery systems.
Simply put, mirroring, or replication, is the process of creating redundant copies of disks or disk files. It has become increasingly popular as a high availability or business continuity solution for many large enterprises that require uninterrupted processing for their business systems. In the event of an unplanned outage, a current or near-current copy of this data is safely tucked away on the redundant disks, usually at a remote location.
Because of their inherent recovery capabilities, our solutions are the perfect complement to mirroring or replication technology. They work to reduce mirroring and replication costs by identifying the business-critical files—usually some 40 to 60 percent of files are required to maintain high availability—you need for disaster recovery. This helps you limit mirroring costs by aligning the protection of non-critical data with your standard backup procedures.
Tape/Virtual Tape
21st Century’s virtual tape backup systems simulate traditional tape transports and processes—but with faster, more reliable media and connectivity. These systems store data on disks instead of tapes, while preserving an external tape interface through a seamless virtualization that is transparent to existing applications, which interact with the system as though it were a physical tape library.
You benefit from faster disk performance, without making significant changes to your existing tape-based backup methodologies. Additional advantages include:
- Shortened processing time
- Limited changes to the existing backup structure
- Improved performance when compared with physical tape
- Enhanced reliability of your backup-and-restore infrastructure
Virtual Tape Needs Backup Too
Our DR/VFI technology provides a simple method of backing up the critical tape data to remote tape pools or transportable media for off-site rotation. Original data remains on-site for production accessibility, while stacks of high-density media reduce the number of tapes stored off site. The tape copy process calls for tapes when they are not being used in production and creates a copy of this data.
Additional features include the capability of halting a tape copy in process when any production application is waiting for the volume being copied, minimizing any contention that could slow down production processing. The restart capability of the tape copy task will re-attempt the copy once data is available. This unique functionality ensures that offsite copies of critical data are always available at a recovery processing location.
HMS/ABARS
Our ABARS technology features a comprehensive set of tools that help you effectively monitor and maintain your aggregate environments.
A standard feature of our solutions, ABARS technology enables effective management and monitoring for an aggregate environment, providing you with capabilities that otherwise would not exist, such as selective recovery and threshold monitoring.
ABARS provides you with online reporting that tracks all aggregates within your enterprise and allows you to view them from a global perspective, increasing knowledge and improving decision making.
ABARS can be easily installed in your data center without altering the aggregate environment or requiring any system hooks to perform its tasks.
