Press Release (U.S.)

Data Protection Projections for 2007 Show Growth in Demand, Capacity
Rise in distributed environments, compliance issues to challenge IT staffs

TORONTO – December 26, 2006 – With estimates of increasing demand for storage capacity at organizations of all sizes projected throughout the remainder of the decade, what challenges and trends might the storage industry see in the upcoming year? Issues of budgetary concerns, regulation compliance and managing information across distributed environments top the list.

With IT managers continuing to look for ways to better handle a growing data deluge within their organizations with equal or reduced financial resources available to them, many are adopting storage technologies that provide cost-effective protection of their company’s mission-critical information regardless of where it resides. The Enterprise Strategy Group estimates 75 percent of corporate data is located outside of the data center, with only 30 to 40 percent of this offsite data successfully backed up.

Off-site data is subject to the same regulatory compliance and corporate governance requirements as that which resides within corporate headquarters, necessitating solutions that will enable companies to meet regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Gartner, Inc. predicts that organizations that choose one-off solutions to handle each regulatory challenge through 2007 will wind up spending 10 times more on compliance than those who take a more sustainable programmatic approach. Gartner estimated that compliance management spending made up between 10 and 15 percent of IT budgets in 2006.

To help combat runaway IT budgets, many companies are seeking more affordable software solutions and utility-computing services to store their data. System management software revenue is forecast to grow by 6.9 percent annually through 2010, with software accounting for the largest portion of spending within the compliance infrastructure market. Overall managed services segment is expected to exceed the $31.4 billion in estimated revenue from 2006.

Industry analyst firm TheInfoPro has found that capacity at Fortune 1000 companies is doubling every 10 months, with the average installed capacity jumping from 198TB in early 2005 to 680TB in October 2006. But data growth isn’t restricted to enterprises. Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) have the same backup and restoration requirements as larger firms, with total storage spending growth estimated at 14 percent – increasing spending to more than $13.5 billion among U.S. SMB and mid-market organization, according to a 2006 Yankee Group survey.

“IT managers face several challenges in data storage for 2007 with increased regulatory compliance issues, continuing increases in data growth and limitations on spending budgets and manpower,” said Eran Farajun, Executive Vice President of Asigra™, the technology specialists in agentless remote backup and recovery software for remote office and branch office protection. “While there are a myriad of solutions available to choose from, companies may wish to consider one that allows them to manage data across a geographically dispersed environment while only paying for the amount of storage under protection. Our agentless Televaulting™ solution delivers highly secure data protection while addressing regulatory compliance demands by backing up encrypted remote/branch office data to the data center.”

The upcoming year will also see the expansion of data reducing technologies, such as de-duplication, Backup Lifecycle Management™ (BLM™) and Continuous Data Protection (CDP), which will seek to limit the volume of information needing to be saved, thereby reducing expenditures even more.

As companies continue to implement technologies that help them meet the intrinsic demands of data storage, 2007 looks to be another year of growth in both capacity and revenue for those in the storage and managed services industries. Purchases will be fueled by actual need for additional storage space to keep pace with record levels of information being produced; satisfy regulatory compliance issues; protect mission-critical information from disaster, theft or loss; and as a cost-reduction substitution for more expensive hardware solutions that continue to eat up IT resources.

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 centralized data management and eliminated the pricing and performance problems created by agent-based tape backup software in multi-site enterprises. Televaulting addresses state, Federal and international regulatory compliance demands by backing up remote/branch office data to the data center. Data is encrypted both in-flight over the WAN and at rest. Televaulting is offered by leading resellers and service providers worldwide to deliver highly secure data protection. Privately held Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada with partner offices located globally. For more information, visit www.asigra.com.