Data security – it’s important

Posted on 21 Dec 2012 by Matt Russell

Any business that provides a service that involves storing data should understand the importance of data security. And to be honest, all too often we’ve witnessed the undesirable results when data security is breached. It can be human error (or judgement – Wikileaks?), system error (hacking/compromised systems) or a combination of both. From wikileaks secrets being made public, to governments losing important documents, to bank/credit card details being exposed – any breach of data security can have catastrophic results.

As a hosting provider, you are entrusting us with important and perhaps confidential website files, databases and emails. We’ve spoken before about the great lengths we go to to secure, protect and manage data in an appropriate manner on our live production servers. And the methods we employ, most of which we keep private for security through obscurity, constantly evolve.

But what we can share is what we do when a server, or in this case a hard drive, is retired. Our web servers are generally on a 4-5 year upgrade cycle to keep hardware fresh, powerful and reliable. But hard drives, with all of their moving parts, are more prone to failure. Hard drive manufacturers (Hitachi, Western Digital, Seagate) now offer some of the best warranties that they ever have. The Enteprise drives we use now come with a 5 year warranty. But previous drives came with a 3 year warranty and can fail when out of warranty. We take a very pro-active approach to hard drive maintenance and at the first sign of something being untoward with a particular disk, it is removed from the server (all of our servers use RAID so we can do this on the fly), tested, warranty checked and if in warranty, securely returned to the vendor for replacement.

Drives that fail out of warranty are dealt with in a secure way. They meed an untimely end at the hands of our datacenter staff. And a picture is worth 1000 words here…