Red Chilli Structured Finance has outsourced its disaster recovery and backup requirements to Thinking SAFE following an extensive competitive tender.

As an independent property finance advisory firm specialising in arranging funding for property projects in the UK and all over Europe, Red Chilli deals on a daily basis with important, sensitive and confidential client fee agreements which must be backed up and encrypted.  

Unlike traditional, tape-based backup methods, the Thinking SAFE solution has been designed to meet the recovery time demands of a 21st century business like Red Chilli, as well as providing continuous data protection and delivering higher availability of business systems.

The solution is now used across Red Chilli’s two main branches in London and Berlin, as Simon Page, Head of Development and IT at Red Chilli Structured Finance explains: “We’re a small, two man IT team, supporting 21 staff across two sites.  Opting for Thinking SAFE’s managed service has given us the complete peace of mind that our data is safe and readily accessible in the event of a disaster.”

Previously, the company’s data was first backed up to disks in servers, then streamed to tape. This required multiple tape devices and the ongoing headache of tape rotation management.

Simon Page continues: “Poor service availability was simply not an option as we have to protect our bottom line.  We therefore trialled solutions from three other companies but their features were really lacking. Thinking SAFE gave us everything we needed within our assigned budget.  Most importantly, they go out of their way to provide the support we need, which for an outsourced service is essential.”

Ed Jones, Managing Director at Thinking SAFE explains: “Companies like Red Chilli now have to grapple with increasing amounts of data which requires more storage. This impacts staff productivity and places more pressure on ensuring business data availability, particularly in cases like this where sensitive customer data is involved and needs protection.”

The Thinking SAFE solution delivers backup, recovery and archive solutions to solve today's challenges such as securing mobile data, backing up the ever increasing quantities of data, reduced backup windows, rising tape costs, fast recovery of critical data, and long term archiving.

The software brings together backup and recovery, de-duplication and the replication of backup data into a single platform.  The policy-based processes are set so businesses can meet their IT service delivery requirements at a lower cost than ever before and the data is encrypted to ensure maximum security.

Thinking SAFE works with a host of blue chip customers, including Virgin Management, GB Airways and National Express.