Cloud Protection

Routers are the first line of defense with networks. On the outside is the internet. On the inside is the IIX Cloud – and your Plant. If the bad guys can’t get past the router they can’t get into the network.

iiExperts has top-of-the-line routers with all the bells and whistles including remote monitoring and continuous updating as new bad guys and malicious threats are discovered.

The Anti-virus, Anti-spam, Anti-everything else sentry is the second line of defense. Because the bad guys are so innovative the Endpoint Protection team is constantly revising their defense profiles.

iiExperts is updated as soon as a new problem is detected. We make sure that we’re protected – and so are you, if we host your Plant.

The third level of defense in protecting your valuable Plant are the hard disks themselves. We have build in redundancy. What this means is the hard disks where all your Plant data is stored is actually an array of disks called RAID arrays. In some cases there are 24 hard disks that make up an array.

And the array is built in such a way that as many as 3 of the 24 drives could fail at the same time and you would not notice a thing. Of course we, iiExperts, would know immediately and dispatch our team to replace any drives that failed.

Level 4 in the defense is Replication. This one is easier to understand, though the software that implements it is very sophisticated. The important thing to understand is that every 5 minutes an exact copy of every server on one side (called the Active side) is synchronized to the other side (called the Passive side). You wouldn’t believe how smart, fast and efficiently it does this.

Bottom line for you is, if the Active side had a meltdown (which has never happened to date!) we would switch you over to the Passive side and fix the problem. There would be approximately 10-15 minutes of interrupted service while we throw all the switches, then you would be up and running again with nothing lost.

Level 5, just like Level 4, is all about changes in your Plant Data. By this we mean, when you post an instrument, or create a runsheet or edit an image. Every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, these changes are recorded in a reserved location on the network.

This is extremely efficient and you will never notice it as you work on your Title Plant. It’s all done behind the scenes. But it’s very important and is preparation for Level 6 below.

Level 6 consolidates all the snapshots in Level 5, three times each day, every day of the year. What this means is that should we ever need to restore any part of your Plant we can do that by selecting a backup from 8am, noon or 6pm any day in the last 16 days.

We have never needed to do this in our production network and only rarely in our development network – and it’s very fast: just a few seconds, at most a few minutes.

Level 7 moves us to what is called local offline storage. We have all heard of USB/Flash drives. Well, think USB drive on steroids. Each of our three DAS-USB drives holds 60 Terabytes (TB) and can be expanded to twice that capacity if needed. Why do we need this?

We need it because we’re extremely serious about backups. Having more than you reasonably need is a very good thing – for you! Every evening any changes in your Plant are synchronized with these DAS-USBs and retained for about 12 months. Level 8 adds something more…

The Local DAS drives in Level 7 are also connected to a remote cloud storage server. So the changes that are rolled out to the DAS drives are now uploaded to an off site cloud service.

The cloud service is a virtual mirror of the DAS, where your Plant is concerned. Some might say this is extreme, but nothing is too much for us when it comes to protecting your Plant. It’s worth taking extreme measures.

We are working toward expanding protection with an additional Remote Cloud backup. From your perspective it provides security over and above all the previous levels of protection. From our technical perspective it just does it a different way. As they say, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.