White Paper: simpro Software Data Centre

White Paper: simpro Software Data Centre

White Paper: simpro Software Data Centre Where is the simpro Data Centre?... 1 Hong Kong (Primary Data Centre)... 1 Chicago (Secondary Data Centre)... 1 What About Data Redundancy?... 2 Layer 1... 2 Layer 2... 2 Layer 3... 2 Can You Explain More About Your Network?... 3 How Secure (Physically and Digitally) is the Data Centre?... 4

Where is the simpro Data Centre? Good question, we actually have several locations for our data centres: Hong Kong (Primary Data Centre) Our primary data centre provider is a U.S. based company called Rackspace. They are the data centre of choice for some big names such as ANZ Bank, Virgin, Australia Post, Telstra, Rio Tinto, Village Roadshow and Xero to name a few. Rackspace offers hosting services to more than 60 000 customers across nine data centres worldwide. They have 2600 employees (termed Rackers) and over 13 years of experience in the data centre hosting game. Make no mistake; this is a premium hosting solution. We have selected Hong Kong as a result of extensive testing. The country s location and carrier availability make it one of the safest places to host our cloud environment. Along with Australia, New Zealand, the U.S. and Canada, Hong Kong is also a signatory to an APEC Agreement on cross border privacy enforcement. Please see the following link for more detail: http://www.apec.org/about-us/about-apec/fact-sheets/apec-cross-border-privacy-enforcement- Arrangement.aspx In terms of physical infrastructure, let s say all of the physical cables (of which there are many) in Australia were cut off - we would still have redundant satellite connections to the outside world. Hong Kong and Hawaii are the two main hubs of the world s Internet traffic. Taking into account its closer proximity and better stability, we opted for Hong Kong. Chicago (Secondary Data Centre) In the Chicago data centre we have created an additional backup environment in case of a catastrophic physical failure in our primary data centre. Every night at 1am, the entire data centre is replicated to this secondary data centre. This means that in a worse case scenario we are able to fall back to the secondary backup and your data is safe as of 1am the previous night. 1.

What About Data Redundancy? Layer 1 Our private network in Hong Kong has multiple layers of redundancy. The front-end server that is used to host the primary system is replicated with a secondary or slave server in the background. This means that every time a transaction occurs on the database, the exact same transaction occurs on the secondary server. In the unlikely event of a problem occurring on the primary server, we can switch users to the secondary server without any loss of data. Layer 2 At 1am every night, all data in our primary data centre (including customisations, databases and attachments) is automatically uploaded and restored to the secondary data centre in Chicago. This ensures that in the event of a catastrophic failure in our primary data centre, we can fall back to the previous night s backup from the secondary data centre in the time it takes for DNS to update. Layer 3 Each night, databases and attachments are backed up on the Amazon S3 file storage solution. The Amazon S3 solution gives us an enterprise grade data backup solution that is replicated throughout the global Amazon network. Known as eventually persistent storage, once a backup is sent to the server, it s distributed throughout the network and available for use within seconds. 2.

Can You Explain More About Your Network? Essentially our primary data centre arrangement consists of three main hubs: Hong Kong, Chicago and Amazon. Behind the firewall in Hong Kong we have an array of front-end servers and slave servers. The slave servers then communicate with the Chicago and Amazon servers for mirroring and backups. The servers in the Australian data centre are essentially standalone servers without the redundancy and fault tolerance of the primary data centre. However, they do still backup amongst the other servers in the cluster. 3.

How Secure (Physically and Digitally) is the Data Centre? Our data centres are world-class facilities and SAS 70 accredited. SAS 70 accreditation stipulates no public access to the data centre floor at any time. Conversely, 90% of the data centres here in Australia are typical colocation arrangements, meaning that every customer has access to the server hall with only an individual cabinet separating devices. On a like-for-like basis, there are very few facilities in the world that can contend with our stringent security policies. The front-end of the private networks in our data centres are controlled with firewalls requiring multiple levels of authentication. Once initial access is gained, the servers then require additional authentication making the task of logging onto a server a three-stage authentication process. All databases are further protected with their own usernames and passwords. Using only Linux servers also makes us less prone to security exploits compared to other operating systems and ensures we have a stable, secure and reliable platform on which to deliver your software. 4.