Business Continuity

How we ensure continued Keyfax Cloud service in the event of the worst

Recovery Time Objective / RTO

The recovery time objective provided by Omfax Systems varies depending on the nature of the failure. The below RTO only covers hardware failures within our local Azure infrastructure and cannot cover scenarios beyond our control such as a regional or global Microsoft Azure outage.

For local hardware failures or regular Windows updates fail-over to a fully operational load balanced back-up system is fully automated and typically transparent to end users. This fail-over takes on average 1 to 2 minutes.

In the unlikely event of an outage that effects the entire data centre (for example a local natural disaster) Omfax Systems will leverage real-time geo-replication to fail-over all customers to a sister data centre located in a different region of the UK to maintain service. This manual fail-over process can take several hours depending on the availability of Omfax technical staff.

Omfax technical staff are available to assist with outages during normal business hours via email and phone. Out of hours support is also available via phone.

Web Application

If hardware failures are detected the Keyfax web application will fail over to a secondary web server within 1-2 minutes of the primary web server failing to serve requests. If all web servers within the Omfax Systems Azure availability set fail this will require a manual restore of our base web server image which can typically take up to 2 business days.

Database

If data corruption is detected Omfax Systems can restore your Keyfax database to any point in time from the last 7 days. If required Omfax Systems can also restore your daily differential back-up or weekly full back-up upon request. A database restore can typically be completed within 1-3 hours during normal business hours.

SQL Azure Database

For business continuity / disaster recovery specifically related to Azure SQL databases we use both geo-replication & long-term / short-term retention policies to maintain multiple copies of each customers Azure SQL database in real-time and at various points in time.

We can offer a considerably quicker recovery time objective should the worst happen using Azure SQL retention policies and one click restoration than we could restoring a full Azure virtual machine.

Where availability and BCDR are critical within Azure we felt an Azure SQL Database offered more reliability at a lower cost. Of course, SQL Server is still a great choice and has its place. We use SQL Server for development and on various production sites.

For reference we use Azure SQL Databases and don’t use Azure SQL Managed instances. We may consider managed instances in the future.

Back Ups

Omfax Systems will typically host both a Live and Test installation of Keyfax for customers. The below applies to both your Live and Test installations of Keyfax.

Web Application

Your Keyfax web application is replicated in real-time to a sister data centre in a different Azure region within the UK. Regular manual back-ups are also taken from the primary web server and copied to the secondary fail over web server.

Omfax Systems do not take regular daily or weekly back-ups of the Keyfax web application files as all critical customer data is designed to be stored within the Keyfax database.

To facilitate a quick recovery time objective Omfax Systems do maintain a back-up of your Keyfax configuration files and client specific settings within source control.

Database

Your Keyfax database is replicated in real-time to a sister data centre in a different Azure region within the UK. Alongside real-time geo-replication Omfax Systems also take automated point in time back-ups of your Keyfax database. In the event of data lost Omfax Systems can restore your Keyfax database to any point in time from the last 7 days. We also retain daily database back-ups for a period of 8 weeks.

For long term retention a differential backup of all customer SQL Server databases is taken every 24 hours, and a full database back-up is taken once per week. Transaction logs are backed up every 10 to 20 minutes depending on available compute resources. The daily and weekly back-ups are retained within secure, geographically redundant storage within Microsoft Azure for up to 8 weeks.

Database back-ups are managed automatically within Microsoft Azure through long term and point in time database level retention policies.

Offsite Back Ups

To ensure your data remains secure Omfax Systems do not maintain any form of offsite back-up of your Keyfax web application files or Keyfax database. This includes copying your back-ups to other storage providers such as Dropbox or OneDrive. All Keyfax Cloud customer data always remains within compliant Microsoft Azure data centres. Omfax Systems may retain specific configuration settings related to your installation within source control however all Keyfax Cloud customer specific data would remain hosted within a Microsoft Azure UK data centre.