University of Illinois System

Backup Management

Service Description

The Backup Management service is a professional service that provides backups for the vast majority of servers serviced by AITS both in Chicago and Urbana. This service ensures that if data becomes corrupted or unavailable due to a disaster within the data center, the data can be restored in a timely fashion. The following is a sampling of the types of services that can be provided to customers of this service:

  • Request for backups to new servers are approved and added quickly.
  • Client can decide what data to back up and what not
    to.
  • Backups are run during the evening in order to avoid potential bottlenecks that could occur during normal business day processing.
  • Off-site critical data for disaster recovery purposes.
  • 24/7 monitoring and surveillance of backup services to verify backups are running efficiently.
  • 24/7 service desk to monitor and restart any failed backups.
  • All backup equipment is securely maintained and patched in regular cycles to provide a high degree of security to protect sensitive data and keep the application functioning properly and smoothly.
  • Restores of backup data can be requested at anytime unless routine maintenance is being done.
  • Backups are retained at least 28 days for a restore.
  • Backups are constantly reviewed in order to verify they are running in an efficient manner and can streamline them in order to improve performance.
  • Semi-annual audits of backups are taken to ensure that data is still accessible and not lost.
  • Installing most recent version of backup clients on the hosts without disrupting any other services.

Benefits of using the Backup Management service include:

  • Backup services can be provided to University customers for nearly every type of server that has been manufactured.
  • Cost avoidance for customers who do not have to maintain and provide their own in-house resources and skills for performing this type of technical support work on a full time basis when a full-time resource is not required.
  • No need for customers to have to acquire, maintain or support their own in-house, costly backup hardware and software.
  • Solutions that comply with industry standard deployment best practices, security standards/policies and accessibility policies and statutes.
  • 24/7 support and availability for backups.
  • All backup data is securely maintained and critical data is duplicated in case of a disastrous event or disaster testing.

Customer Responsibilities

  • Identify a primary point of contact to work with AITS in coordinating the activities being performed by the service.
  • All new work should be initiated through the ITPC process.
  • Support requests relating to the use of the service will be initiated by opening an incident or request ticket with the AITS Service Desk.

How Do We Charge?

This service is offered as part of the Workstation Support set of services and the Server Support set of services. Pricing and the base Service Level Agreement for these two sets of services are available.