Brothers' new enterprise to provide a back-up plan
Nov 25 2010 by John Hill, The Journal
FORMER Canary Wharf analyst Giles Wright has returned north to set up a disaster recovery and back-up company in Newcastle.
Wright worked as a systems analyst at JP Morgan from 2003 to 2008, and then spent a year and a half as a senior analyst with the New York Stock Exchange before taking a leap with his own business. While Brownsman IT was set up in 2008, Giles and his brother Mark began the process of forging it in its current form four months ago.
The company is now ready to offer its services to companies requiring the offsite storage of data, and Wright said North East digital companies are high up on its list.
He said: “Digital companies have a lot of data and graphics, and deal with terabytes of data. Some companies still back up using tape, which is an older and less efficient method. We haven’t used tape for music for years, so why should we still use it for business data?
“Until recently it’s not been efficient to do online back-up. One of the problems in the past has been the speed of people’s broadband connections, but that has increased quite significantly over the last few years, and there are a new raft of exchange upgrades going through that’s going to increase the type of service that businesses in the North East are going to be able to use.”
Brownsman IT initially manually backs up the client’s system and transfers it to its Newcastle data centre, encrypting it to military encryption standard at source. It also installs its CloudBank software on the system, allowing it to continue backing up changes to data in future months.
Wright said: “Every day the company will make changes to their data, so every night the system will work out what’s changed and back up the changes.”
Brownsman has just moved into Hoults Yard in Newcastle, and Wright believes businesses are becoming more aware of the perils of data loss.
He said: “There are various ways to lose data. There’s fire, theft, flooding and accidental loss. You can get a virus that will corrupt your data.
“There are stats out there about what would happen to a company when it loses all its customer data. 90% of all businesses that experience a massive data loss don’t survive the next two years.
“People might be slightly more wary about using these services at first but as broadband services speed up they’re going to be using it more and more for document storage and transferring files.
“It was supposed to be just a North East business at first, but we’re seeing interest from clients in the Leeds and Manchester area so we can take on clients from outside the region.”
