Amrita Chandra's blog

Forrester Research has recently published its 2010 Market Overview on Enterprise-Class Backup and Recovery, in which it outlines key functionality that customers should look for when selecting a solution.  In the report’s preamble, the authors say “With dozens of providers, a laundry list of technical features, and the constantly changing landscape, it’s no wonder that many infrastructure and operations professionals would rather take a trip to the dentist than replace their aging backup infrastructure.”

One would assume those professionals will also not be eager to do it again in a couple of years. Although the report does give some attention to traditional tape backup, the underlying theme appears to be “look ahead” – so you won’t have to visit the dentist again soon.”

Of fourteen leading vendors profiled, Asigra stands out as the only product that performs backups without using an agent inside each machine – an important feature that improves hardware performance and minimizes maintenance time and service interruptions.

Only six providers, including Asigra, made Forrester’s recommended list for enterprise data center deployment, where the emphasis is on scalability and performance.

While Asigra covers the bases on established features required by enterprise customers, it positively shines in Forrester’s scorecards for emerging features:

• Source and target-based deduplication for PC, remote offices, and virtual servers
• Virtual machine backups with low overhead
• Operational and disaster recovery (Continuous Data Protection and Replication)
• Restore options (Block/image level, file/generation level, and email message level)
• Disk to disk to cloud
• Archiving and data management

The following quotes from the “Future” section of the Forrester report represent a number of trends, all of which bode well for Asigra’s trajectory in the BURR market:

• “… enterprises are finally making decisive moves about backup, away from tape and toward disk and eventually the cloud.”
• “… when enterprises were asked what storage workloads they planned to move to the cloud, the most common response was the archive.”
• “… what was once considered a backup solution is now more akin to a unified continuity and recovery management suite.”

Asigra is offering complimentary copies of this report, a value of $499.  Get your copy here.

If a normal business has a data loss incident, it’s an emergency. Right? Well then, what would you call this? Imagine you’re a rescue agency fighting to save lives in a major storm or earthquake. And, in the middle of that all that, your data goes AWOL. And you can’t recover your data quickly.

That scenario haunted the British Red Cross until Backup Technology Ltd. came to the rescue with a solution powered by Asigra. In addition, another issue challenged the rescue agency: money.

‘Because the Asigra price is based on the amount of compressed disk storage capacity required by the backup system, this space-efficient approach helped minimise the cost of the software, a factor of great importance for a non-profit organisation,’ said Ritchie Fiddes, Sales Director at Backup Technology.

Non-profits have little money, and few staff or volunteers to handle the day-to-day operations regular businesses take for granted. In particular, the Red Cross doesn’t have IT professionals in all of its branch offices around the country. So an automated system for remote backup to its central office was definitely required. 

Hear firsthand from the British Red Cross how their service provider Backup Technology, using Asigra technology, helped them reduce backup windows and protect data across 200 locations.

Asigra is pleased to be sponsoring the following events: 

We look forward to having you attend our speaking sessions and visit our booth.  For more information please email marketing[at]asigra[dot]com

We have a saying at Asigra – you don’t treat your grandmother like you treat your daughter even though you love them both. You send your daughter to a kindergarten and your grandmother to a seniors’ center. We use this reference to get people thinking about how they should treat their data when it comes to backup and recovery. Stay with me here, it will make sense if you read a little further…

I should tell you first that I work in a business role and not a technical role, and to be truthful, this is not something I had given a lot of thought to in the past. As far as I was concerned, as long as all my data was backed up, I had nothing to worry about. Until one day 3 years ago when I was working for another employer and our Exchange Server crashed. Guess how long it took us to restore our email inbox and folders? Three weeks.  THREE WEEKS!

Now, imagine for a minute what sort of information is in your emails and inbox – mostly items that are current and need to be accessed regularly, right? Then imagine what files are in your desktop for recordkeeping – presentations you may have done 1-2 years ago, perhaps financial records that are even older and are being held for auditing reasons. Do you need those to get your job done today? If you were able to choose which files got recovered first after a data loss event, what would your decision be? Would you like to have that choice?

All data is not created equal. So why should your data backup and more importantly, your recovery?  

Image:jenny818 on Flickr

Asigra MSP Kishmish has written a first hand account of their experience with a customer who is still using tape.  While many of us assume that the benefits of cloud backup are obvious, there are enough businesses today still using tape to show us that we have more work to do.

Michael Varre from Kishmish says in his recent blog post:

How could a self-proclaimed cloud backup evangelist still support customers using that dirty 4-letter word? The simple answer is: it’s my fault. I blame myself for not doing a better job of properly explaining the drawbacks of doing it the old way.

Read the full post to find out how Michael Varre and Kishmish demonstrate the value of cloud backup vs tape to their customers.  This post starts what I will hope be a longer conversation on their blog around the challenges of getting customers to move out of the status quo and consider making the leap to the cloud.

How many of you are dealing with customers hesitant to move from tape?  Or are you a business using tape yourself?  Tell us your stories.

The degree to which businesses rely on their data for their day-to-day operations can vary - law firms are a prime example of a business type whose data is mission critical.  Asigra service provider CoreVault provides cloud backup services to many law firms across the U.S.  They recently spoke with Jim Calloway, Director of the Management Assistance Program with the Oklahoma Bar Association.  Jim talks about how business continuity is critical for lawyers, saying "if you lose your forms, all of your digital calendar, all of your work in progress, it could quite literally put you out of business".

Jim says it's typical to hear law firms talk about having backup strategies in place, yet frequently, something comes up that prevents the backup from happening.  Does this sound familiar to you or your customers?  If you are a law firm or deliver data protection services to law firms, you may want to share this video with your peers.

As a marketer, one thing I love about social media is how it's made it easier to connect with our customers and partners. Many of Asigra's ecosystem of service providers maintain their own blogs, Twitter accounts or Facebook pages and it's a great lens for us to see firsthand what our partners and their customers think about on a day to day basis. One of my regular blog reads is that of InfoManage, one of Asigra's service providers in the northeast US.

InfoManage Corporation is a boutique technology services company providing enterprise-class services to the SMB marketplace. Vice President Alan Berkson recently wrote a blog post on Trickle-Down Technology where he talks about the impact of enterprise standards in the SMB marketplace. Alan hits the nail on the head when he describes how the web era has leveled the playing field for SMBs in terms of their access to technology. Companies like InfoManage demonstrate how service providers can offer its SMB customers services such as managed cloud backup, using an enterprise-grade platform (Asigra).

Read the full post here or follow Alan on Twitter for more insights.

While the “cloud” term has been used and abused by everyone under the sun, there are in fact true cloud applications that deliver value to customers looking for data mobility and shared hardware/software costs, particular for data or content-heavy applications.

IDC recently released a report* outlining the top 5 cloud applications organizations are looking to pursue in 2010.  They are as follows:

1. Collaboration applications
2. Web applications/web serving
3. Cloud backup
4. Business applications
5. Personal productivity applications

How many of the five are you (or your customers) using?  Do you agree or disagree with this forecast?

*Source: IDC, Cloud Computing 2010, an IDC Update, Doc # IDC_P20476, , September 29, 2009