Press Release (U.K.)

Asigra Protects Critical Financial Data for Accounting Consultants Frank Hirth
hSo:VAULT Deploys Asigra Remote Online Solution to Manage Sensitive Data

London, 21 Feb 2007, Asigra, the technology specialist in agentless distributed backup and recovery software for network computing, today announced that Frank Hirth, the international tax and accounting specialist, is using Asigra Televaulting online remote backup software. Delivered by hSo, a managed IT solutions provider, through its hSo:VAULT solution, Frank Hirth is using hSo:VAULT to back up email and critical data generated from 13 servers and 110 desktops.

Frank Hirth is an accounting consultant based in London specialising in expatriate tax compliance for individuals and organisations, with a large core client base of US expatriates, generating sensitive financial data that needs to be securely stored and easily retrieved. The organisation previously used tape-based backup, which was cumbersome, time consuming and unreliable. Due to the nature of its critical data, Frank Hirth wanted a backup and recovery system that could be relied upon. The company initially changed to the hSo:VAULT because of its agentless online backup and recovery offering in order to backup its critical client data. Frank Hirth then extended the service to include backup of its highly sensitive UK and USA tax return data because of the strong level of security provided by Asigra Televaulting.

Asigra Televaulting encrypts data in-flight and at-rest with up to 256 AES bit protection, allowing the secure movement of data to a centralised off-site location, as well as utilising advanced authentication and notification functionality that prevents un-authorised access to all backed up data.

Mike Jackson, IT manager at Frank Hirth, said, “The ability to protect our internal and client data is of the utmost importance for us, as we consistently handle very sensitive financial data. Once we trialled Asigra’s strong encryption and data protection, we knew that the hSo:VAULT service would ensure our data is secure at all times, as well as restorable at all times. The ability to stream data across the internet is far more efficient for us given our breadth of international clients. The added benefit of the reliability of the hSo service and the Asigra software, has made our entire backup and recovery procedure more effective and far easier to manage than tape.”

The Frank Hirth IT department has found that an added benefit of the Asigra software is the generational backup. The IT department can now retrieve past versions and even deleted documents easily and quickly upon request using the explorer-like interface. Because of incremental backups, data compression and file de-duplication from Asigra, backing up as many generational copies as required can be accomplished efficiently without incurring large expenditures for storage growth. hSo:VAULT can deliver an advanced level of service to Frank Hirth employees without spiralling the company’s storage costs.

Chris Evans, managing director of hSo, commented; “Frank Hirth came to hSo with specific backup and recovery requirements and the flexibility and quality of Asigra Televaulting has enabled us to achieve these. In addition, Asigra’s technology has agentless architecture, which enabled us to integrate hSo:VAULT into Frank Hirth’s existing system with minimal fuss as well as minimising management costs. Frank Hirth outsources the backup monitoring to hSo, significantly increasing the time-efficiency of its IT department compared to the previous tape-based backup solution.”

“Frank Hirth generates and backs up extremely critical data and the ability to guarantee each client the highest level of security puts the organisation a step ahead.” commented Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra. “Asigra Televaulting gives Frank Hirth the confidence that all email and critical data is secure, immediately restorable and instantly accessible. By using hSo:VAULT Frank Hirth benefits from an automatic, online, secure, remote backup service that is managed externally. In addition, hSo can provide Frank Hirth with a constantly flexible and scalable service that can adapt to the company’s evolving backup and recovery requirements.”

Requiring no further client hardware investment, hSo:VAULT offers true value for money in terms of reducing IT management time and delivering a scaleable solution to cope with increasing data generation. Systems failure and the threat of downtime are much reduced in comparison to the alternative 'on site' storage of data via tape download. In the event of a business systems failure there is no need to physically transfer data tapes from one location to another, saving time and ensuring business performance and data security are not compromised.

At the Frank Hirth London headquarters, a single Asigra Televaulting DS-Client discovers all servers, desktops and laptops connected to the local network, and automates the backup of all local data assets. Agents are not installed on machines being backed up. Before the backup data set is transmitted to hSo’s data centre, Asigra Televaulting software analyses the data, finds new and changed file blocks, eliminates duplicate files and further compresses the residue bytes to ensure the backup set is as compact as possible. The software then encrypts the data before sending it over an IP- WAN connection to a centralised Asigra Televaulting DS-System server, located in hSo’s data centre, which consolidates the backup data. Data is encrypted in-flight and at-rest. That DS-System server is then protected just like any other server within the data centre as part of the organisation’s ongoing data protection policies. As an additional level of data protection, hSo has configured the DS-System server to replicate the vault to a second secure back up site.

Asigra Televaulting for Service Providers supports a broad range of platforms, including Windows, Linux, Unix, Novell, AS/400 and Macintosh, and protects Oracle, SQL Server, VMware and Exchange Server data. Back-end DS-System software runs on Solaris, Linux and Windows.

About Frank Hirth
Founded in 1975 as a firm of Chartered Accountants, Frank Hirth has grown to become one of the largest and most respected in its field. Frank Hirth is an accounting consultancy specialising in expatriate tax compliance, providing consulting and compliance services to individuals and organisations. A large part of Frank Hirth’s core client base is US expatriates. Frank Hirth’s Accounting services include statutory audit, via its associated entity, Frank Hirth & Co LLP, which frequently complements the taxation services it provides to organisations. In 2000, the Frank Hirth partnership was incorporated to a PLC. Please visit www.frankhirth.com

About hSo
Founded in 2000, city-based hSo has witnessed annual growth in excess of 100% and this achievement transforms the company from one of a plethora of technology companies with good ideas into one with a proven business model and a sound financial position. hSo's portfolio includes: hSo:VOICE+ (a resilient voice service which eases the transition to VoIP enabled services); hSo:VAULT (a high availability offsite data back-up solution); and hSo:iSTORAGE (an iSCSI based storage resource which links hSo's own data centre to each customer via a secure IP-SAN). The company's client list includes British Land, Churston Heard, Endemol, The English National Opera and The Salvation Army.

hSo has been named by the Sunday Times as one of its ‘Tech-Track 100’ companies for 2006, which are ranked as Britain’s fastest growing private tech companies.

For more information visit www.hso.uk.com

About Asigra
Asigra is the award-winning leader in remote office/branch office online backup/recovery with more than three petabytes of data under protection. Since 1986, the company’s agentless Televaulting solution has centralised data management and eliminated the pricing and performance problems created by agent-based tape backup software in multi-site enterprises. Televaulting addresses government and international regulatory compliance demands by backing up remote/branch office data to the data centre. Data is encrypted in-flight over the WAN and at rest. Privately held Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada with partner offices located worldwide. For more information, visitwww.asigra.com.