Press Release (U.K.)

Survey Indicates Remote Site Legacy Tape Backup Failing Enterprise Customers

London, September 20, 2005 – Seventy-five percent of respondents in a recently concluded survey of IT executives indicated that their companies suffered unrecoverable loss of corporate data they thought was successfully backed up to tape due to unreadable, lost or stolen media. The online survey, conducted over a 45-day period and commissioned by Asigra, the technology specialists in agentless multi-site backup and recovery software for network computing, sought to better understand how IT staffs safeguard mission-critical information throughout the enterprise, including remote offices, and how the backup and recovery process ROBOs (remote office/branch office) could be improved.

Among the survey findings:

• 63 percent said they encountered unreadable tapes when they tried to retrieve data with 76 percent of those cases reporting a direct impact to their business; from loss of productivity, to punishments for regulatory compliance infractions.


• 61 percent said that they back up remote offices to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster, while 17 percent indicated that there are no formal backup procedures in place at their remote offices.


• 20 percent of respondents said their business has experienced data loss due to lost or stolen tape media.


• Data recovery-focused features that respondents found valuable in ensuring a secure and smoother backup/recovery process included keeping the latest backup version locally on disk (93 percent) and encryption for data while ‘in-flight’ and ‘at-rest’ (85 percent).

“The results of this survey seem to indicate that there is still a severe problem with lost corporate data at remote sites resulting from issues regarding the reliability and security of traditional tape-based backup systems at remote sites,” said W. Curtis Preston, vice president of Data Protection at GlassHouse Technologies Inc. “Remote sites are much better served with a disk-based data protection system that can provide local fast recovery while automatically replicating backups to a central site for disaster recovery.”

Asigra’s Televaulting software eliminates many backup pain points through technology that is designed for enterprise-wide centralisation, built from the ground up to perform on a global level. It is tested and certified compatible by leading infrastructure providers not to take the place of data centre backup software, but complement it for multi-site backup and recovery. Business benefits that differentiate Asigra's offering from other backup solutions include true regulatory compliance, reduction in worldwide IT management expenditures, and compounded reduction of both hardware/software capital and enterprise-wide license costs. Asigra also offers a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ compressed-capacity-based licensing model, allowing users to pay only for storage under management. The initial implementation capacity is based on the amount of compressed data to protect. After that, customers are charged per compressed terabyte of additional storage.

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.