Every business today has important data they can’t afford to operate without, from simple spreadsheets to entire physical servers. That data has strategic business value, and by keeping it protected, Kobargo allows clients to focus on what matters most, growing a thriving business, by delivering a simple installation process, automatic backups, off-site storage, scalability, and 24/7 file restoration.
What is K-Cloud Unlimited Backup and Recovery Kobargo’s K-Cloud Unlimited Backup and Recovery Service is a fully managed cloud backup solution designed for companies of all sizes that operate in high-profile verticals such as education, finance, government and healthcare, and are required to comply with industry-specific regulations such as HIPAA, GLBA, FINRA, PCI-DSS, just to name a few.
K-Cloud provides online backup of client data with unlimited storage for a monthly recurring fee. The service requires a software agent to be installed at the client’s location with an initial full backup and subsequent incremental backups. It also allows for unlimited revisions of files to be stored. All backup jobs are monitored and serviced by Kobargo’s technical team, allowing a hands off approach for clients that do not have the technical resources on staff. The Kobargo team will also perform all restores as requested by the client, and notify of any cloud backup related issues.
Cloud backup, sometimes referred to as online or offsite backup, is an integral part of any disaster recovery strategy that enables clients to store a copy of their data offsite, ensuring that data can be recovered in the event of a disaster, data loss, data corruption, or virus activity. Cloud backup is meant as a supplement to local backups that should be performed nightly but may have storage limitations. It is not meant to replace local backups or local archiving solutions for partially active files, however the software can be used to back up data to local storage as well as offsite.
Simple Installation With K-Cloud, setting up your cloud backup involves the simple process of signing up for the service, identifying the data that you want to backup followed up by the software installation on the network. Within minutes, we are backing up files automatically on a schedule designed for minimal production impact. After the initial backup, subsequent backups take minutes to complete because only new or modified files are uploaded. For clients with an initial heavy data load, we provide seeding options using USB devices to speed up the first full back up if necessary.
Automatic Backup With K-Cloud, data backups are completely automated but can also be manually initiated at any time. Once the software is installed, we create a backup set that includes the data you want backed up along with the schedule of when the backups are to run. K-Cloud BDR allows you to select multiple folders, while excluding certain folders, and/or choosing individual files to backup. Once we complete the folder and file selection, our software will calculate how much data is to be backed up. Clients can save as much data as they like, for as long as they like.
Scheduling Backups Kobargo’s K-Cloud Unlimited Backup and Recovery Service is completely customizable and gives you the option of setting a different start time for each day of the week. You also can choose not to run backups on certain days, or, simply keep the default nightly backup schedule. In addition to being able to edit or change a backup set, we can also set up multiple backup sets. Multiple backup sets are useful, for example, if you want to back up the same files more than once a day or back up certain files daily and other files weekly.
Backup Status Dashboard Kobargo K-Cloud BDR provides a web portal for creating and managing client backups, as well as providing real-time visibility into the status of backup jobs and restores. From the backup status dashboard, we can view all job status and any backup failures or warnings as they occur, and click through to resolve errors or review additional details. An icon on the dashboard also notifies us if the backup agent on the server or computer is disconnected, immediately providing visibility into a common root of a failed backup. Clients are provided access to the dashboard, and as an added confirmation have the option of receiving automatic email notifications following every successful backup.
Where is My Data? All data is securely transmitted to off-site data centers via the Internet using redundant 10GB circuits. Your data is replicated to two SSAE 16 Type 2 Certified Tier III data centers (SSAE 16 compliance indicates that an organization is fairly representing the controls and security measures that it has in place for safeguarding customer information) located in Boston, Massachusetts and Los Angeles, California, for added redundancy and recovery. Each data center has 24/7 monitoring and advanced security measures such as biometric controlled access as well as backup generators and redundant connections to the Internet.
File Restoration 24/7 K-Cloud BDR can start restoring your files in seconds with just a few clicks of the mouse. Although this is a fully managed service, clients have the ability to retrieve individual files, file revisions, entire folders and backup sets, or recover all data files in the event of a complete system failure or data loss. To restore individual items, you can log in to the K-Cloud BDR portal using a web browser, navigate to the backup date you want to restore from and choose the data you would like to retrieve by clicking on the file name. The data will then be downloaded directly to your computer, decrypted, and then restored to the original location or another specified location on the system. In the event of a complete system failure, a full data recovery can be initiated in just minutes. The recovery procedure can be performed on any Windows-based computer — not just the computer where the data was originally backed up. Simply log in to the K-Cloud BDR portal and access the file catalog (the list of all of the files backed up) to restore your data.
Security K-Cloud Unlimited Backup and Recovery Service offers several features that provide maximum security when backing up and archiving data. Files are first packaged to ensure that bandwidth is minimized during transmission. The data is then encrypted (transformed from plain text into nonsensical cipher text) using a unique 256-bit encryption key to ensure that files cannot be accessed by others. For added security, each encrypted file is sent over the Internet via a secure channel, and then stored in SSAE-16 certified secure data centers located in the U.S. The K-Cloud BDR service includes multiple safeguards to prevent denial of service attacks or portal hacking, and our cloud architecture is built to protect against outside threats. Data in our cloud is stored as generic objects that can only be decrypted and reassembled by the client’s software agent, making the data unusable in its stored state.
More Security…Encryption K-Cloud encrypts each file using 256-bit AES encryption technology. A unique 48-character string created during the initial setup is converted into a 256-bit encryption key. The encryption key is client specific. It is never transmitted over the Internet and it is never stored on our servers. This means that only you can access your files. Each file that you back up is encrypted using this key and remains encrypted until you restore it and it returns to your network. In addition, the software communicates with the data center servers using SSL (Secure Socket Layers) technology. This is the same encryption technology used by Internet browsers when a user enters a secured site such as an online bank. As a result, the data is encrypted twice. It is encrypted at all times using the 256-bit AES encryption, and it is encrypted again while it’s being sent over the Internet.
More Information We hope we have answered most, if not all, of your questions about how our cloud backup works. Should you have any additional questions, please email us at unlimitedbackup@kobargo.com and we will gladly respond as quickly as possible.