April 2010
Apr 2010
30
Offsite backup is a minimum requirement. Proper DR planning requires much more.
Many companies today do not have any sort of comprehensive disaster recovery plan in place. Especially among small businesses, there is not only no defined DR policy, but also no defined plan or policy for providing offsite data protection of mission critical company data. This is despite the extensive evidence to support the fact that most companies do not recover from a catastrophic data loss. Here are just two examples -
- According to research by the University of Texas, only 6 percent of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss survive, while 43 percent never reopen and 51 percent close within two years.
- 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately. (Source: National Archives & Records Administration in Washington)
This data loss may or may not be combined with the loss of the physical office location. If this is the case, the survival rate of the company diminishes even more. The ability to quickly recover mission critical data at a DR location so that a company can continue its day to day operations is critical to the continued success of any business that experiences data loss.
Current practice for many businesses is the same as it has been for the last 20 years or more. Writing backup data to tape and then sending tapes offsite to be stored at a remote location. There are companies that specialize in the secure transport and storage of data (both printed and electronic). However, there are significant costs associated with the transport and storage of data that is kept on backup tapes. There is also the possibility that the data can be stolen, lost, or damaged both during transport and in storage. In fact, more than 75% of companies that have tested their tape backups have found failures on their backup tapes. As well, a quick Google search on “lost backup tapes” reveals a lengthy list of banks, hotels, and even companies in the business of protecting data that have suffered lost tapes and the resulting security breaches.
Any company that is interested in ensuring that they can remain in business following a catastrophic loss of data whether due to natural disaster, equipment failure, or malicious activity, needs to implement proper disaster recovery planning. Make sure to consider the following -
- For proper DR planning, you can’t afford to use tapes due to the various limitations mentioned above.
- In order to truly protect your data and business, partner with a managed service provider for your offsite data protection needs and send your data to their secure data center.
- Additionally, you need to have the option of further replicating the mission critical data while moving older, less valuable data into cheaper storage.
By using a Managed Service Provider to provide secure, encrypted offsite disk based data storage at a remote SAS-70 certified data center, your business can protect itself from both data loss and exposure of sensitive company and client data. Automated remote offsite backups provide a fast, simple, secure method of protecting your data without the management headaches associated with traditional tape based solutions. The MSP becomes your partner to assist you with all aspects of protecting your company and its business critical data.
So make sure your business is protected!
References:
Image Source: Flickr User: Rusty Boxcars
Apr 2010
29
Trickle-down technology
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.
Apr 2010
15
Asigra.com - A new beginning.
Posted by Ujwal Arkalgud
1 Comment
Our new website went live over the past weekend with a goal to significantly improve your interaction with us, online.
If you’re visiting our website to learn about us and our product, we want to ensure that you find relevant information easily and that you’re directed to content that better suits your needs. We also want to assist you in easily locating an Asigra Powered Reseller or Service Provider.
If you’re already an Asigra Partner, we want you to have easy and quick access to news, content and collateral that not only assists you in staying in touch with developments at Asigra but also benefits you in your sales cycle.
We hope your experience in interacting with us online is a lot more efficient. For the next month, we will continue to have a feedback button (as seen on the left hand side of the webpage) that will allow you to instantly send us your comments. We thank you in advance for taking the time to give us your feedback.
Finally, we would like to thank Peapod Studios for doing an outstanding job on this project right from conception to design and execution.
- On behalf of the Asigra Marketing Team.
Apr 2010
15
Advice from an MSP, for an MSP.
One the goals of the Channel Management Team here at Asigra is to help customers (our partners) successfully and profitably deliver their Asigra Powered Cloud Backup service. And there’s no better way to help customers then to share insight from those who’ve done an exceptional job at delivering and growing their backup offering.
This morning I interviewed Chris Day, President and CEO of Fully Managed Inc. based out of Vancouver, Canada. Chris had some great insight and I’d like to share that with you. I look forward to your comments and suggestions.
Q. How much growth do you see on an annual basis for your backup services?
Chris: We are forecasting approximately 50% growth in our cloud-based backup services for fiscal 2010 within Vancouver, BC and the rest of Western Canada. We see that growth number as being stable and sustainable for fiscal 2011. We started out in January 2010 with 2TB of compressed/de-duplicated data and doubled our capacity to 4TB of compressed/de-duplicated data in the first three months. This equates to approximately 13TB of actual data protected data. We anticipate being close to 10TB compressed/de-duplicated by the end of calendar 2010 which should equate to 32.5TB of protected data, using our current ratio of 3.25:1. Our revenue has doubled in a four month period, partly due to the ease of implementing the software and partly due to our ability to accurately and simply report on the usage.
Q. How did you manage to grow your business to what it is today? What’s your secret sauce?
Chris: The reason for our success is that we understand our core purpose – our reason for being – Creating Peace of Mind. The Fully Managed approach means that we focus on what we do instead of how we do it, resulting in a natural affinity for clients to want to do business with us. Asigra has created Peace of Mind for us as an organization because we are finally able to focus on delivering solutions instead of babysitting the product as we ended up doing with many of the other solutions out there (including Kaseya BUDR and Zenith’s BDR solution).
Q. What advice would you give to other MSPs out there who are looking to grow their managed backup business?
Chris: If you’re considering a backup solution to augment your offering to your clients, do your homework. We learned the expensive way that making the wrong choice early on requires a lot of effort to undo. You end up with terabytes of data “stuck” in another cloud or on your own infrastructure, and it’s very difficult to make a move without a significant investment. When selecting a platform, focus on stability and reliability of the platform – make sure you understand the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) and build your solutions around that. Asigra has delivered for us and our biggest challenge now is trying to keep up with the demand.
Apr 2010
12
Why are SMBs outsourcing IT to Managed Service Providers?
Why are many small and medium businesses outsourcing some or all of their IT needs to Managed Service providers? There are many reasons and they are dependent on the needs of the SMB as well as the offerings of the MSP.
What does an SMB look for in a Managed Service Provider?
- IT Planning and Strategy
- Comprehensive IT delivery
- Service Delivery Levels
- Reduced Risk and increased continuity
- Cost reductions
- DR planning and readiness
- The latest in certifications and training
What are the benefits realized by the SMB who outsources to an MSP?
- Better use of IT department, focusing on emerging technology and planning.
- Reduce Expenses- system Administration, costly downtime for upgrades and patching takes resources and money, which could be saved and applied to future plans.
- Increased reliability and performance.
- Competitive Edge- focusing on business needs and not wasting resources allows for a better position to the competitor that is still saddled in the upgrade, help desk, patch nightmare.
- Immediate access to the best technology and resources. MSP data centers have the newest and most efficient technologies, allowing customers to scale and grow easily into new and emerging technologies without having to purchase additional and costly products.
- Ability to use the MSP for Disaster Recovery as well as traditional outsource IT.
- Reduce costly training and certifications. The MSP has already invested heavily in these certifications. The savings to the SMB could be significant.
When considering outsourcing IT to a Managed Service provider, the SMB client needs to first do some internal evaluation. Measuring true costs of system administration, upgrades, patching, installation, asset management, system downtime, salaries and training are some areas that allow for a cost comparison. Can they save money, increase reliability and better allocate those freed up resources toward the future? If yes, than the SMB owes it to themselves, their customers and their bottom-line to explore the option of an outsourced IT model with a qualified, reputable and highly skilled Managed Service Provider.
References:
Image source: Flickr User: Hoyasmeg / James Emery
Mar 2010
25
Backing up virtual environments (Part 2)
A week ago, I published a post on protecting data in a virtualized environment. Today, I would like to follow it up with a quick post on how our solution addresses the performance, management and cost shortcomings of alternative solutions (in the content of virtualization). Asigra provides:
- A unified enterprise-wide solution with unlimited protection of physical/virtual servers, workstations, desktops and laptops without agent-based cost penalties.
- A pro-virtualization capacity-based pricing model.
- A simple, centralized management interface to ensure compliant backup and recovery across all physical and virtual environments throughout the enterprise.
- Backup and recovery optimized to greatly reduce management, CPU and memory resource impact on servers.
- Live VM backup.
- Compliant VM backup.
- File-level recovery at the VM and guest OS level.
- Any-to-any restore capability (P2P, P2V, V2V, V2P).
- Automated mass deployment and single interface management across distributed environments.
- Comprehensive enterprise application support.
- Extensive mixed physical/virtual OS interoperability.
- Next generation features including global data de-duplication, Continuous Data Protection (CDP), grid-based scalability, intelligent data retention and data center replication.
- Automatic upgrade to newer versions when they are available at the data center;
Of course, this is just the icing on the cake. If you’d like a more detailed understanding of what our solution can do for you, do not hesitate to contact us. You can also read our white paper on virtualization support.
