Security
Roar Data provides robust security and system availability to ensure that your operations are never compromised.
Hosting
Our primary systems are hosted by our long time partners Rackspace. Located in a blast-proof building with 24 hour on-site security and monitoring, the facility is at the heart of the UK’s Internet connectivity with direct connections to major UK, transatlantic and European ‘backbones’. Power to the site is maintained by multiple feeds backed up by long-range on-site emergency generators.
Resilience
We aim to achieve a target availability of 99.999%. To achieve this, we deploy highly available redundant systems at our primary site. We utilise a hybrid-cloud model, enabling the rapid addition of additional capacity for best in industry performance, whilst maintaining our client’s data on dedicated private infrastructure. Our applications are designed to run on single servers or distributed across standard ‘n-tier’ architectures, thus providing maximum flexibility in disaster recovery situations. Standard best practice resilience measures are adopted such as: load balancing, clustering, mirrored SCSI disk arrays with hardware RAID, hot-swap drives, power supplies, and cooling fans. Bandwidth demand is also monitored to ensure that systems capacity always comfortably exceeds demand.
Backups are taken daily, weekly and monthly and stored off site with redundant overlap. In the event of transportation difficulties or more serious emergencies, our support staff can manage our systems from home.
System security
We constantly assesse our security against current best practice and current threats. We apply a multi-layered design philosophy to our network security, always assuming that other measures in front of any particular location may have been breached. Individual components of the system are hardened to withstand direct attack, ensuring we never rely on just firewalls for protection.
In a typical n-tier topology, load-balanced web servers and clustered database servers operate on separate networks, again protected by industry leading security appliances.
Application Security
Unlike typical SaaS companies, Roar Data adopts separate databases and data stores for each client, ensuring maximum security and integrity of data. Security is applied both at the operating system and database levels, and all user logon and authentication interactions are encrypted.
By providing a fully-managed service, Roar Data helps minimise security threats caused by poor administration practices. By relieving its clients of the added burden of systems administration, we not only reduce the cost of operation, but also ensure that administrative problems such as changes in personnel, do not unwittingly give rise to security threats. In so doing, we allow our clients to concentrate on their core business rather than systems administration.
Performance
Good performance generally goes hand in hand with distributed and resilient systems. But application design is also vitally important, and Roar Data is well known for the snappy performance and availability of its systems.
