Press Release (U.K.)

Backup Service Providers Witness Substantial Growth Fueled by Agentless Asigra Software
Data protection firms see a 140 percent increase in capacity growth over 2004 full year figures – in just the first ten months of 2005

LONDON – December 14, 2005 – Asigra, the technology leader in agentless distributed backup and recovery software for network computing, today announced that backup service providers have reported substantial increases in data under protection for the first ten months of 2005. Reviewing physical compressed capacities that are under management by Asigra Televaulting in the period from January 1st, 2005 to October 31st, 2005, backup service providers are showing dramatic increases of 140 percent in the first ten months of 2005 as compared with figures for the entire 12 months of 2004.

Asigra’s Televaulting, an agentless WAN platform solution that delivers backup/restore service as a utility, brings an easy-to-deploy multi-site data protection solution for enterprise use. Providing a highly scalable and secure method for business continuity needs, Televaulting delivers a simplified management platform for fast backup and retrieval of corporate data for businesses, as well as bringing the ability for service providers to expand beyond regional boundaries to open up new markets.

"The ability to offer a secure and cost effective method for outsourced, off-site data backup and recovery services, is a data protection strategy that businesses of all sizes really need to address as a matter of urgency," said Patric Kinstrey, Business Development Manager, oncoreIT. "As an outsourced IT business to the UK's SMEs, our own rapid growth in this area reflects the current heavy demand for secure, off-site data protection. We believe this demand is not just for reasons of compliance and security, but also to ensure overall business continuity in a commercial world that is increasingly relying on digitalised data for survival."

"As awareness of online, off-site data protection solutions expands, backup service providers should expect to see the market blossom,” said Adam Couture, principal analyst at Gartner. "Two years ago 40% of the companies we surveyed were dead set against managed backup services. This year that number dropped down to 6%. Some of the reasons are that providers have made huge improvements in online backup technology, services divisions of global corporations are integrating these technologies to become backup service providers, and storage levels are increasing considerably in size, bringing visibility and momentum to this market."

“From recent experiences, companies are increasingly seeking a level of off-site and sometimes off-shore protection of data that will ensure their business-critical information is not lost and can be quickly recovered in the case of a disaster,” said Alexander Eiríksson, CEO of SecurStore. “I believe the reason they are turning to backup service providers is to gain the necessary protection in a cost-effective manner and the opportunity very clearly exists today for these providers to listen to the demands of businesses and adapt their services accordingly.”

Asigra Televaulting for Service Providers incorporates everything needed to deploy, provision and sell storage services, including business features not available from off-the-shelf backup software packages. Televaulting’s agentless architecture ensures that installation and maintenance is fast and easy, and its built-in multi-tiered storage billing system saves the time and expense of developing or modifying an existing billing system to accurately track expenses by operating unit, division or department.

Deployed easily by installing Asigra’s agentless client software on just one node of each remote or branch office throughout the enterprise, Televaulting’s advanced security features, including authentication, strong encryption and non-escrowed keys, protect data with encryption ‘in-flight’ and ‘at-rest’ to provide the peace of mind corporate executives expect.

According to Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra, “The substantial growth of storage under management is a strong sign that businesses are learning more about Asigra Televaulting and choosing our agentless approach to solve their data management and data protection needs. Televaulting, and the real-world expertise of our service providers, enables companies of all sizes to protect their enterprise data with a robust and highly efficient solution, and we look forward to seeing continued growth as companies move to address their data protection requirements with the quick, automated and secure solution that Televaulting brings.”

About Asigra
Founded in 1986, Asigra is the award-winning leader in agentless distributed data backup and recovery solutions for network computing. With Asigra's Televaulting software, enterprises and service providers can reliably protect mission-critical information across all their geographically dispersed "data islands," whether those islands reside on servers, desktops or laptops. Leading all other distributed backup and restore disk-to-disk software vendors, more than 3 petabytes of data is protected with Asigra Televaulting. The privately held company is based in Toronto, Canada. For more information, visit the company's website at www.asigra.com.