Opinion: Secure online backup offers compliance peace of mind

Corporate voice and data service supplier Vox Orion says South Africa’s corporates are increasingly turning to hosted online backup services to store and protect sensitive information.

“Companies are being squeezed from two sides,” says Vox Orion MD Jacques du Toit. “On the one hand, they have to maintain accurate records of just about every customer interaction, including recordings of telephone calls, for up to five years. On the other hand, they have to ensure that customer’s personal information is not stored longer than absolutely necessary, and that it is kept safe.”

Securing customer data will only become more important, says du Toit. “There’s a new report of customer data being stolen every other week,” he says. “Sony and Nintendo have been the biggest news this year, but there may be hundreds of other less-reported cases. More and more, regulators are going to come down hard on companies who don’t take the right steps to protect their customer information.”

Du Toit says Vox Orion’s secure online backup service is built for compliance – as well as for cost effectiveness. “Your information is almost certainly safer in an off-site data centre than in your own basement,” he says, “especially if you have been storing taped backups of call records. That’s no longer good enough.”

“We designed our online backup to use bandwidth capacity that’s otherwise idle at night,” he says. “Our customers are already paying for the pipe to their offices – this is making sure that capacity is put to productive use around the clock.”

Offsite archives are securely encrypted and a full audit trail is maintained of every time the archive is accessed or changed.

Vox Orion’s solution is also designed to optimise storage space, says Du Toit. “When you’re backing up email, you don’t want to save 100 copies of the same presentation that’s been emailed around the company,” he says. “We have a de-duplication facility that will ensure only one copy is stored, and linked to each mail message it was attached to.”