Long-term cloud storage with 99.999999999% durability for SARS and SAGE compliance documents.
30–40 year archival durability for sensitive documents, automated lifecycle policies, robust disaster recovery.
Challenge
Complete Financial and Business Solutions (CFBS) is a group of financial advisors and business analysts who are passionate about business, finance and providing peace of mind through their in-depth knowledge and analysis of financial and business circumstances for clients.
CFBS required a backup and recovery solution for sensitive data that would meet the long-term retention requirements of the financial sector — documents spanning 30–40 years — while ensuring the security and sovereignty of client data. Existing Google Drive storage lacked the durability guarantees and automated lifecycle management required for compliance.
Solution
The CloudZA Solutions Team deduced that the main AWS services required for the solution would be Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Glacier, Deep Archive and AWS Lambda to import updated files directly from the Google Drive API.
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) was the ideal service to build the solution around as it enables the best Disaster Recovery (DR) strategies. Considering the nature of organisations in the financial sector, security and sovereignty of data were major requirements for the solution. S3 storage classes offer 99.999999999% (11 9's) of durability, making Amazon S3 arguably the most secure backup storage solution and one of the most reliable storage services for DR.
CloudZA provided a solution to migrate CFBS's backup data to S3 and implement S3 lifecycle policies for moving the data to Glacier. CFBS backup data will be kept for a term of 30–40 years, and cancelled clients' data will be deleted after 5 years.
Result
CFBS now holds sensitive documents with 11-nines (99.999999999%) durability and automated lifecycle policies that reduce storage costs as documents age. Disaster recovery capability is built in, and the solution meets long-term document retention requirements for the financial services sector.
The automated Lambda-driven ingestion from Google Drive eliminates manual backup processes entirely, ensuring documents are captured reliably without staff intervention.