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Asigra White Paper reveals negative impact on business continuity when using tape-based backup and recovery across remote offices London – September 12, 2005 – Asigra, the technology leader in agentless distributed backup and recovery software for network computing, today announced the release of its White Paper that reveals there is an inherent business risk for companies using tape-based backup and recovery across their remote office sites. The explosion of data growth creates more technical difficulties and management challenges in backing up data across many sites with tape. With reports that 90 percent of businesses that lose operation data go bust within two years (British Chamber of Commerce), it is increasingly necessary for companies to be aware of how inefficient and cumbersome tape-based backup can be across remote sites, and consequently, how potentially damaging it can be to a business continuity plan. Asigra’s White Paper assesses the issues companies will face when considering the expansion or implementation of a tape-based backup and recovery system across multiple remote sites, as well as the solutions to this issue. The inherent problems in using a tape-based backup and recovery system to support remote offices are: security, bandwidth, and economic drawbacks. Security is compromised as tape, typically unencrypted, is cumbersome to use and to transport across remote offices. Bandwidth is key to efficient disaster recovery (DR), and a tape-based backup does not enable a rapid recovery. DR is further affected, as a tape-based backup can not guarantee quick restore times. The economic drawbacks of a slow/unreliable tape-based system can lead to business risk in terms of productivity and revenue loss, increased business-continuity fees, burdensome regulatory fines, SLA fines, and the financial burden of hard and soft agents. In all aspects, using a tape-based backup and recovery system can negatively impact data recovery, information security, worker productivity, regulatory compliance, and business continuation. An enterprise with just five offices can easily spend $50,000 (£27,666) to purchase and maintain the file/print server, email server, database, and workstation agents required for tape-based backup processes. Companies increasingly need to implement backup and recovery systems across multiple sites, yet with a tape-based backup and recovery system they will face a huge financial and management headache. Each of these remote sites produces vast amounts of critical data that needs backing up and secure storage. The costs of upgrading backup and recovery systems across multiple sites can be expensive, adding up to thousands of agents and millions of pounds in licensing and support costs. In addition, few backup products work with all device types – again leading to new agent costs, overheads and heightened security risk. As data grows more tapes are needed, creating more management costs and time-consuming work for employees. An added business risk with excessive tape use is the shrinking of the backup window as it is increasingly difficult and risky to complete a full overnight backup, especially from remote sites. Most tape-based backup is not designed to handle the growing accountability required with the protection of additional data from multiple locations. Tape-based backup is often a costly add-on and ineffective in preventative measures. In the White Paper, Asigra puts forth a viable alternative in disk-to-disk (D2D) backup and recovery. D2D eliminates tape transport issues and makes data immediately more accessible across all remote sites, offering companies a significant improvement over a tape-based system. However, even with the obvious and immediate benefits of traditional D2D offerings, there can be side-effects of implementing D2D at a remote office. If the D2D product is used to back up to a centralised data site costs can be incurred as this generally requires the implementation of a costly, high-bandwidth pipe to the main data centre. In addition, D2D typically does not provide encryption of data as it passes through the network, which can endanger data-privacy and does not ensure the customer a guaranteed high level of data security. Traditional D2D products also come with the same high costs of agent-based technology, with the exception of Asigra Televaulting technology which is the industry’s only agentless, disk-to-disk, multi-site backup and recovery software solution. “Companies operating across remote sites need to be aware of the phenomenally negative impact on business-continuity, and business risk, when using tape-based backup”, says Eran Farajun, executive vice-president of Asigra, “D2D is the way forward. The basic D2D products on the market do offer key advantages over tape despite the potential financial overheads, and there being no guarantee that copies of critical data are being safely moved offsite from the remote offices. With Asigra D2D solution, companies have a highly reliable, high-speed alternative to tape-based systems. The economic benefit of Asigra’s D2D over tape, and traditional D2D, is that the agentless technology allows a pay-as-you-grow scalability.” About Asigra CONTACT ASIGRA: |
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