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Secure hosting, backups and monitoring
A hardened server, nightly off-site backups with a tested restore, and monitoring from outside
Private hosting for a document-editing service behind the data room: locked down from the first hour, updating itself, backing up the data room every night, restored once to prove it, and watched from outside so any outage is known within minutes.
The problem
The data room needed real Office editing in the browser, which needs a service of its own on a server of its own. It had to be secure from the first hour, cost little, need no attention from week to week, and never put the data room at risk.
What was delivered
A locked-down serverA firewall open on only what is needed, administrative access by key alone with passwords refused, automatic banning of anyone who hammers the door, security updates that install themselves, and a rescue console for the day something goes wrong.
The editing serviceRunning in its own container, locked to the data room with a shared secret, behind a web front door with an encrypted connection that renews itself, updating itself every week at a quiet hour.
The backupEvery night the server pulls every uploaded file and a fresh copy of the database from the data room’s hosting, keeps thirty days of history, and reports to a watchdog that emails the owner if a night is missed.
The restore, testedThe backup was loaded into a fresh database and every file was checked against the fingerprint recorded when it was uploaded, before anyone had to rely on it. Then written up as a one-page procedure.
Monitoring from outsideThe data room, the editing service and the server itself checked every five minutes from the internet, with the owner told within minutes if one stops answering.
Room to growEach new site or tool on the server gets its own name, folder, settings and certificate, so nothing can interfere with anything else.
Infrastructure is where this practice started: networks, servers, virtualisation, the cloud platforms, and the security work of finding the weakness before someone else does. This server is the small, complete version of that whole discipline, and the same approach scales to cloud environments and multi-site networks.
Let's build something that lasts
Whatever you are building, let us engineer it properly.
A system to build, a network to secure, data to make sense of, or a brand to sharpen: describe the problem, and the engineering, design and reliability follow.