Company pushes industry toward greater operational and technical transparency
2009-11-16
Intermedia, the world's largest Microsoft Exchange hosting provider, today announced that its hosted Exchange 2010 service includes a 100 percent Data Protection Guarantee. The public guarantee is a first among top software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers and is designed to give customers and partners full confidence that their business-critical data is safe with Intermedia.
"Whenever organizations entrust their data to a third-party, whether via a cloud computing service or a traditional outsourcing arrangement, it's important to evaluate the vendor's technical and operational capabilities to fully protect the data," says Jeffrey M. Kaplan, managing director of analyst firm THINKstrategies and founder of the SaaS Showplace. "We recommend businesses carefully evaluate the vendors' ability to verify they have the proper back-up and recovery systems as well as the policies in place to safeguard their records, such as Intermedia's Data Protection Guarantee."
Intermedia guarantees that customers' email and other business-critical data stored in Exchange are fully protected in any eventuality. Intermedia is able to credibly offer this guarantee, which is enforced by stiff financial penalties, because of the proprietary DataEcho™ architecture the company developed to work with hosted Exchange 2010.
Through DataEcho, customer data is replicated in real-time twice in one data center and at speed-of-wire a third time to another of Intermedia's geographically dispersed data centers. For added protection and rapid point-in-time restores, regular database "snapshots" are taken in each data center. This architecture protects customer data in the event of hardware failure, database corruption or even a catastrophic data center loss. Because data is replicated across "live" working data centers, customer access to the full functionality of their Exchange environment in the event of a disaster can be restored in a timely manner.
Other hosting providers use only tape backup or do not replicate customer data across live data centers. This approach is still superior to most on-premise deployments, but means that in the event of a disaster it could take several days to restore full Exchange service and data.
"The cost of data loss to a business is too great not to be protected 100 percent," says Jonathan McCormick, chief operating officer, Intermedia. "Intermedia guarantees not only the reliability of our service, but the complete safety of our customers' data. Our customers can have peace of mind knowing that their data and communications are protected from any eventuality."
Relied on by 225,000 premium hosted Exchange users, Intermedia maintains four data centers with connections to multiple Tier-1 Internet providers and premium hardware from Cisco, Dell and EMC. Hosted Exchange 2010 customers are able to select the data center of their choice to assure the fastest roundtrip for their email. Intermedia's 100 percent Data Protection Guarantee is offered in addition to the company's 99.999 percent uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA), both of which are subject to the terms of the SLA.