Everyday work over various data communication channels generates information and data that accumulate in huge quantities. The organization is obliged to preserve and maintain the information, which constitutes the organization’s overall data store. The huge and constantly growing quantity of data obliges the organization to find efficient storage services as well as a suitable and satisfactory infrastructure solution.
Because the data store is so important to the organization’s everyday work processes, much concern and worry revolve around its day-to-day handling, its preservation, and its quality.
We’re down to how many bytes left on the server
Data preservation is one prominent focus of concern, and it requires the following storage solutions:
- Volume of storage— The data store is enormous and requires appropriate storage volume — with thought for the future as well, because the volume will presumably be expanded periodically. The purchase, day-to-day operation, and expansion of storage servers in accordance with changing needs is no small matter. It requires tremendous financial investments, broad technological knowledge at the professional level, and a solution to the matter of physical location.
- Data security[1] — From every electronic work environment used by the organization, information is added into the data store. Some is confidential information and sensitive material that requires an especially high level of security. Any intrusion into the data store may cause serious damage to the organization, including irreversible damage.
- The level, and the adaptation, of the infrastructure — Another topic, no less important for the organization’s decision-making, is the infrastructure for the accumulated backups from the various work environments. The infrastructure should be up to date and technologically compliant with the currently prevailing standards and regulations. Regarding the type of infrastructure and how to administer it, the decision requires deep, up-to-date technological understanding and a professional IT team who need not necessarily belong integrally to any existing organization.
What is a work environment?
The various work environments that the organization or business uses in its everyday activity constitute its data store. A work environment may be an online shop, which is a business-to-customer (B2C) environment through which purchases are made, or the business portal, or the organization’s in-house intranet that serves for communications among the organization’s employees, or the website that serves to present and promote the organization’s image among its clients and potential business partners.
Each of the various work environments has its own requirements for administration, operation, and updating, and accordingly each of them requires different resources in connection with storage volume, type of data security, and necessary level of infrastructure.
There’s an old toaster in the kitchenette. The diskettes could go there for now
Joking aside, in the past there were no technological solutions outside the organization, so organizations did need to find creative ways to back up and store their ever-increasing accumulation of data.
Businesses needed to invest in acquiring warehouses, information was stored in enormous old-fashioned archives (and, for those who remember, metal cabinets full of heavy half-broken ring binders). The information was unlikely to remain perfect and complete over time, and consulting the archive for the answer to specific queries was difficult.
The internet and our modern digital media created a revolution that on the one hand brought much relief and even saved a great deal of physical space in business offices; but on the other hand, it did not solve the problem of how to keep the information safe from physical danger, where to store it, how to protect it from unauthorized access, and how to control its day-to-day use. Organizations found the problem of how to handle the data store within the in-house physical environment further complicated by the continual changes and advances in technology.
How to choose a storage service provider?
As implied above, a good backup and storage solution depends not only on the provider’s ability to absorb the volume of information that the client needs to store, but also on the provider’s technological ability to preserve the information.
An efficient storage service is one that can host entire work environments from the client organization on an up-to-date infrastructure that meets the most advanced quality standards of the international marketplace, that can keep them safe by means of high-quality physical and electronic data-security solutions, and that practices day-to-day administration including management and maintenance of the infrastructure itself. The management and maintenance factor also extends to the infrastructure provider’s degree of flexibility for physically extending the storage area allotted to the data store in keeping with the growing quantity of information.
By using an external infrastructure provider that strictly adheres to a high level of storage service, the organization frees itself from many worries, makes day-to-day work easier, and saves itself a great deal of money and resources.
Storage Services revolution
Recent years have seen a further revolution introducing third-party providers who supply electronic technological services (for example data security, website administration, infrastructures and file hosting, electronic work environment design, and so on) and those providers have taken over more and more responsibilities relating to the IT business infrastructure. Storage services for the work environment have naturally developed as part of the trend, and they have become an integral portion of the services offered by infrastructure providers.
Storage services at the MedOne facilities
MedOne’s subterranean storage sites provide clients with the best location for backing up and housing their data store. With servers distributed over more than 16,000 square meters (180,000 square feet), clients enjoy a great advantage when planning for future upsizing of the storage volume.
The physical location and geographical distribution of the storage servers make possible a level of survivability and security among the highest in the world, so that the facilities’ users enjoy peace of mind. The server farms, located at MedOne’s two data center sites, are built with the ability to operate autonomously at time of emergency, with no dependency on external support. Thus the storage solutions employing MedOne’s data center sites are robust and suited not only for backup but also for particularly rapid disaster recovery.
The technology behind the infrastructure is among the world’s most advanced, and together with the Med Nautilus system (an integrated optical fiber system that connects Israel as a whole to the global internet) it gives MedOne the standing of primary junction for Israeli communications. For that reason and others, each of the data center sites has been certified an essential enterprise for emergencies.
The implication for our many clients is the peace of mind that comes with confidence in the quality of MedOne’s service. Each of our client organizations knows with certainty that its data store is backed up in the best possible way by means of the most advanced technology. The integrity of the enormous data stores kept at our storage sites is no less important to us than it is to our clients, and the infrastructure we rely on at our storage sites is set up and operated to uncompromising standards of quality.
For MedOne, data security is a supreme priority
as naturally follows from the type of service we provide and from MedOne’s position as an essential enterprise for time of emergency.
We attach the utmost importance to keeping our sites secure physically — no less than to keeping the data secure inside them — and we provide the world’s highest level of security from three distinct standpoints:
- Physical security — which includes protecting the buildings against damage from nature and from threats that can overcome human control (fire, flooding, etc.).[2] Among the systems equipped to survive disaster are the air conditioning, the electrical system, and sophisticated devices for monitoring the buildings.
- Data security — which includes protecting the integrity of the data store from all possible attempts at penetration, from all hacking attempts, and from all network threats. Advanced systems of intruder identification, data encryption, and security layers form a protective wall that cannot be breached.
- Professional guards — with the support of physical security systems, alarms, and equipment from among the most advanced in the global security marketplace, to secure the installations against all attempts at physical penetration, theft, or terror attack