Disaster Recovery - How We Secure and Protect Your Data
How We Secure and Protect Your Disaster Recovery Images
Secure Storage Architecture
Your Disaster Recovery archive is safely housed within our enterprise-grade infrastructure, where the archive resides on its own dedicated virtual drive connected to an isolated virtual machine (VM). We've implemented strict firewall rules to completely separate these VMs from all other systems within our data center, creating a secure enclave for your critical recovery data. Access to the archive is strictly controlled through customer-specific hardware gateways, with each gateway authenticated using hardened SSL/TLS certificates.
Enterprise-Grade Encryption
We protect your data with multiple layers of industry-leading encryption. All Disaster Recovery archives are secured using AES-256 encryption, the same standard trusted by government agencies for protecting classified information. Data transmission occurs through secure VPN tunnels with AES encryption, further reinforced by SSL/TLS certificates and robust 2048-bit PKI (Public Key Infrastructure). This comprehensive approach ensures your data remains completely isolated from both local networks and VPN access, establishing an impenetrable security barrier.
Gateway Security Features
The Gateway hardware that safeguards your data incorporates advanced security measures at every level. Each Gateway's NAS drive is protected by full-disk encryption, with the decryption key stored in a secure hardware zone that remains inaccessible even to the most sophisticated attacks. Our engineering team has designed the system to be tamper-resistant – even if someone were to physically remove the drive, the contents would remain completely inaccessible.
Advanced Ransomware Protection
Our defense against ransomware attacks leverages the advanced BTRFS filesystem's Copy on Write (CoW) technology built into your Gateway. This sophisticated system automatically creates read-only snapshots of your critical data, which are stored locally on your Gateway's encrypted drive. Because these snapshots are immutable – meaning they cannot be modified once created – they remain safe and unchanged even during an active ransomware attack.
Think of these snapshots as pristine copies of your data frozen in time. When ransomware attempts to encrypt files on your network, it cannot reach back through time to alter these protected snapshots. This means that after your network has been cleaned of the ransomware threat, you can safely restore your data from these untouched snapshots, allowing your business to recover quickly while maintaining complete data integrity.
The BTRFS filesystem's CoW technology creates these snapshots with remarkable efficiency by only storing the differences between versions of files, rather than making complete copies each time. This approach provides robust protection without consuming excessive storage space. When combined with the Gateway's encrypted storage and secure architecture, these local snapshots form an essential component of your defense against ransomware attacks, enabling swift recovery without compromise.
Post Disaster Recovery
When disaster strikes and you activate Uplevel's Disaster Recovery service, our rapid recovery protocol immediately springs into action to minimize your downtime. We begin by downloading your latest Disaster Recovery image¹ to a new Gateway device, which we prepare for overnight delivery to your location by 8am the next business morning. The recovery process is streamlined to require minimal intervention from your team – simply contact our emergency response team and connect the new Gateway's Ethernet cables when it arrives.
If your temporary recovery location has a different network configuration, you may need to remap network drives within your operating system. However, if you're installing the Gateway in your original environment with unchanged network settings, it will function immediately in a plug-and-play manner. Throughout the entire recovery process, your data remains fully protected by our comprehensive anti-theft measures, including mandatory cloud authentication for decryption. This ensures your data stays secure even if the Gateway hardware is compromised during shipping.
In the event of a disaster, contact Uplevel Support immediately:
- Email: support@uplevelsystems.com
- Phone: 917-317-3001
¹ Next-morning delivery of a complete Disaster Recovery image depends on several factors: when we receive your disaster notification, overnight shipping carrier cutoff times, and the total size of your Disaster Recovery image. If the complete image transfer cannot be completed before shipping cutoff time, we will deliver the Gateway with your core business-critical data and continue synchronizing the remaining data after the hardware is installed at your location. This approach enables you to resume essential operations quickly while remaining data transfers complete securely in the background.
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