The data held by individuals and businesses is often highly critical to the business, may be confidential and / or contain sensitive information about people.
Whether the files are documents, photographs, spreadsheets or databases they are often critical to the operation of a company and will almost always be covered by the Data Protection Act.

The Data Protection Act (2018) replaced the original 1998 Act and introduced the concept of GDPR (general Data Protection Regulation). This Act governs how people and companies use personal information, and covers everything from what data you can keep, potentially how long you can keep it for, and most importantly how it must be kept safe.

One of the most important aspects of keeping company data safe is the requirement for a good backup. In the past data was often backed up to floppy discs, then tape drives and maybe portable hard drives.

Given the huge amount of data companies and individuals now hold, only hard drives have enough capacity to store backed up data. To save costs, some companies may opt to copy the data to a portable hard drive each day. Firstly this often involves manually triggering a backup, and secondly it involves a person taking the portable hard drive out of the building.
While the data is on a portable hard drive it must be considered to be very insecure. For instance you could leave it unattended and someone may steal it. The portable hard drive may be very cheap but the implications of the data being leaked could be VERY expensive !
Some people run these backups but then fail to remove the drive from the building, or worse still leave the backup drive plugged into a computer (server or workstation) permanently. If a fire were to happen then the equipment could all be destroyed, including the backup. If a virus were to strike the machine(s) it could encrypt and wipe out the data AND the backup.

The simple solution to all of these issues is a remote, offsite backup. Yellowstone offer a simple solution based on a licenced product we house in our private clouds. These private clouds are not held in commercial data centres, but are held in secure locations separated from each other by several miles, and fed by a system of high speed leased lines.
All of our backed up machines (whether they are servers or workstations) are backed up once a day (usually in the evenings) or sometimes several times a day if the customer requires it.
The software firstly works out which files have been modified since the last backup, then encrypts the files using 256-bit AES encryption and sends it out to one of our backup locations.
The software then sends out either a confirmation of a successful backup, or a message to our tech support team telling us what went wrong and why.
Our monitoring team check the emails from each customer’s (successful) backup at least once a week and records the information about the amount of backed up data onto our control sheets.
Failed backups are checked out by our support team each morning and rectified accordingly. Sometimes there are simple reasons for failures such as a power failure at the customer’s site, or a broadband outage. These will all be investigated to ensure that the next night’s backup is successful.

Often having this sort of offsite backup is insisted upon by a customer’s insurance company, and some insurers won’t give you insurance without this sort of backup being in place.

We are proud to say that we have not had any customer lose even a single file due to cryptoviruses, accidential deletion or malicious deletion is over ten years since we introduced the backup system.
Many customers have suffered from cryptoviruses (where the whole system data gets incrypted and a ransom demanded) but each time this has happened (to a customer on our backup services) we have always been able to recover ALL of the lost data, with no ransom being paid.

The costs of the service vary depending on how much data is being stored on the customer’s behalf. For further information or a quotation to suit your needs, please contact our sales team.