Business Backup
- Tourism: Travel Agents

Every business today depends on network functionality and data availability to function correctly. Travel agents are no different with regard to general computer requirements. There are however some specific differences pertaining to travel agencies which need to be addressed when configuring or upgrading a travel agency data backup system. These may be detailed as follows.

Data protection legislation.
All companies are subject to ever increasing data protection legislation. Travel agents are at risk here because of the volume and contention level of personal data they process. For each sale and many quotations there is information gained about family members, address, age, credit card details, illnesses, marital status, nationality etc. Few businesses require or gather such a volume of personal client information and with this privilege comes risk and risk management. Our online backup system allows total online backup management. This enables control of data retention with regard to type and age of data on an individual data backup set level. It is important to understand that a data backup system in itself can only offer compliance assistance with data backup. The backupanytime online backup system offers data backup compliance facilitation functionality to a level the competition rarely even approach.

Outside firewall.
If you are part of a travel agency professional umbrella group, your network may be connected to that groups network and therefore any installation of online backup may require their involvement. An example of this is the Galileo network. If you are a part of the Galileo network, GALILOE can safely (and do as our experience in dealing with them as been very positive) open a firewall port thus allowing online backup services for your computers.

Immediate data requirements.
In a data outage scenario, most business users are concerned initially with eventual general data availability and subsequently with the restoration time line In a travel agency, immediate availability is paramount as significant current data will pertain to current and upcoming bookings and while ongoing records may need to be kept, the essential period from a customer service and business continuity viewpoint is just before to just after the live period of a booking. Availability of booking for a client due to travel today is not much held after that clients return data. Here we have an immediate data availability requirement.

The above details some general differences in backup requirements pertaining to travel agents. For additional online backup requirements relevant to all business users including travel agents please see our white papers area on this web site.

What separates backupanytime from most online backup providers?

The following are a list off features applicable to our online backup system which most competitors do not offer. We have not yet identified (Dec 07) one provider worldwide who provides them all.

Configurable encryption.
Encryption exists to prevent unauthorised access to data. It is broadly based on a code which would take too long for a hacker to break. The general idea is that the coding system is not breakable with today's technology in a an effective time spam. As technology advances, codes reach “near breaking point” and this issue needs to be addressed. Our online backup software uses bank level encryption. In addition, we support all leading industry encryption types and an individual may amend the encryption type and level they use at any time. This in only possible due to significant software investment and is not commonly available in the industry.

Client side encryption generation and amendment.
Many online backup companies need to generate the encryption code for clients and be involved in any amendments. Our system allows client side generation and amendment. This means that even we can not possibly read your data. Again this is not offered industry wide and is a very important feature. You may be entitled to trust an outside party with your data but there are serious data protection and general ethics issues surrounding any decision by you to trust an outside party with client data.

Local data store.
Our system allows and supports local backup to disk alongside remote backup. This allows fast restore and restore without broadband. The local data store is not required for remote restore should your system be stolen or completely destroyed. Again, this is not industry wide and many users with other providers have suffered serious downtime waiting for bulk online restore or for broadband to become available after an outage.

Longest default retention period in the industry.
Our default data retention period is 365 days. This compares with industry norm of 30 days. We do not believe 30 days is enough as a virus issue may not become obvious till after 30 days leaving a short retention period configuration unusable. In addition, our default retention period is amendable at client side upwards or downwards to client requirements.

Our contract is a rolling monthly contract. This allows client release at any time. We allow this because of very high client satisfaction rates and a lack of requirement to tie clients to a long term contract. Also, payments are monthly with our system. Avoid annual in advance payments with any critical service which may require extensive fast response support.

If you have read this document to this point, it is likely that you represent a travel agency and have an interest in online data backup. Contact us today and we will implement a no commitment 14 day free trial of our award winning data backup system. You can then see for yourself the benefits our system provides.

Backupanytime.com, for responsible people and their important data.