A HIGHER STANDARD IN MULTILAYERED DATA PROTECTION

Excuse us for repeating ourselves, but redundancy is good. When it comes to protecting your information, the specialists at KWI leave no room for error. We continuously improve our Disaster Recovery system, identifying ways to improve data resiliency, redundancy and recoverability. We set the industry standard with procedures and capabilities like these:

1. Daily Tape Backups

The "normal" procedure is to make a Full backup of each system just once per week with Incremental backups on other days. But Incremental backups only capture the data that has changed since the last backup, which means restoring a full system or large environment involves multiple tapes. It's confusing, tedious and time-consuming. KWI has a better way.

• We perform a Full backup of every system, every day. It's more expensive than Incremental backups, but it greatly lowers the risk, complexity and time involved with data restores.
• Tapes are stored on-site briefly in a fireproof, fingerprint-security safe.
• Tapes are archived weekly to an off-site bank vault.

2. Off-Site Disaster Recovery

If an "event" compromises our ability to operate normally from the primary KWI site, we maintain an alternate Disaster Recovery (DR) site. From here, we can continue to operate core functions.

Support recovery:

• KWI personnel from Help Desk, Application Support and other key areas can relocate to our DR site for operational support.
• KWI's 800# forwards to the DR site to be handled by support staff.
• Full access to Internet and FootPrints ticketing system is sustained for normal processing of customer problems and requests.

Infrastructure recovery:

• KWI maintains a separate data circuit for Internet access, both inbound and outbound, as well as servers.
• If unable to connect with KWI's Production site,  all stores are automatically configured to failover polling dropoff and price file pickup via redundant DR infrastructure.

3. Securing POS Transaction Data

We constantly incorporate system improvements to maintain the highest levels of client data privacy. Steps we've taken to secure your sensitive store and credit card information include:

• KWI's cardholder data environment (CDE) segregates store/credit card data into an internally-firewalled network immediately upon delivery to our Internet-facing network.
• Our CDE has no direct inbound/outbound Internet access, and internal access is highly restricted.
• All communication with CDE occurs over encrypted transmission protocols.
• Encryption keys between KWI and stores are rotated on regular basis.

4. Database Redundancy

One of the key strengths of KWI SaaS is that we provide best-of-breed updates at no additional cost to our clients' monthly fees. The MySQL upgrade is a case in point.

Upgrading the database technology that drives our Back Office system to MySQL was our biggest upgrade project to-date. We undertook it, with no fee increase, to deliver valuable new benefits to our Back Office customers along with a performance boost. Improved data resiliency and restorability will be new "big wins" for our clients.

MySQL supports many short-term and long term gains.

• Better performance (depending on program, up to 10x faster)
• Better reliability (improved program interface, data integrity, transaction logging)
• Integration with commercial reporting tools (users will be able to customize their own reports)
• Real-time data replication, active-active operation between data centers
• Load-balanced, high-availability infrastructure

KWI's real-time data replication is provided by a backup server with up-to-the-moment data. It is able to assume Production functionality within minutes following a fatal database server failure.

Data restoration, both time and currency, are significantly improved by referencing a much more recent point in time than traditional once-per-day database backups.

With military precision, redundancy and commitment to advancing technology, KWI has your data security on constant watch.