“Should you outsource backup or manage it internally?”
Here’s a few considerations depending on the size of your business.
Eran Farajun, Asigra

Are you a small to medium sized business?
Usually smaller businesses with one site have little if any dedicated IT staff and outsource backup (and other managed services) through IT service providers that have licensed Asigra's software to deliver a managed backup services typically sold on a $ per GB per month utility basis. It is a simple way to offload the burden of doing backups properly, securely, and removing the data offsite while being able to restore it from disk very quickly. When an SMB does a cost comparison of apples-to-apples, a backup service is more cost effective than doing it alone to achieve the same consistent results.

Note - There are also larger businesses that use our community of Service Providers as a clever way of protecting their remote site data, and also to mitigate business risk if they face legal exposure due to compliance matters. Basically, if a director has the unfortunate circumstance to stand before a judge and defend himself and their company from being fined for data loss or privacy infringement, they can point to an Asigra Service Provider as an expert they are using to mitigate data loss. By demonstrating risk mitigation through an expert Service Provider, directors with personal liability are less likely to be exposed to negligence fines and additional punitive damages. A court will say "...At least they got expert advice and tried to do something about it." This can be likened to using a surgeon, an accountant, a lawyer, an engineer, or any other type of professional. People *can* do their own taxes, but probably won't do it as well as a trained accountant. Same thing with backup.

Are you a mid-market or enterprise business?
Businesses with more than 5 sites begin to question if continued growth is best managed with difficult to manage incumbent tape-based solutions. For those organizations that do not wish to benefit from a Service Provider due to corporate policies or legislation, Asigra enables these companies to be their own "internal" SPs. There are many features and special functionality in the Asigra software which makes it uniquely suited to protect remote-office/branch-office (ROBO) data. And do it in the manner of utility service provisioning (billing system, SLA monitoring & management, budget allocation, quotas, encryption, self-healing, web self service, etc.). Asigra also enables chargeback capabilities so the datacenter can function as a profitable cost center These companies run the "DS-System" storage vaults in their own data centers.