Press Release (U.S.)

Leading Industry Analyst Firm Provides Remote Office Data Protection Best Practices
White Paper by the StorageIO Group Reveals Remote Office Backup Pain Points and Best Practices for Managing Data Growth Across the Distributed Enterprise

TORONTO – June 4, 2007 – Asigra Inc., the technology leader in agentless backup and recovery software for service providers targeting the growing managed storage services market, today announced the availability of a new white paper addressing trends in remote backup and recovery. Titled Three Ways to Ensure Trouble-free Remote Backup: Tips for Better Data Protection at Remote and Branch Offices, the paper provides recommended data protection strategies for distributed environments.

The amount of data being generated and stored at remote sites continues to grow. While this data needs to be protected and stored in a separate location, it must also be quickly accessible when needed. Making sure all data is backed up to a separate location in a timely and efficient manner can be challenging; the most common remote site backup pain points include:

• Maintaining a regular backup schedule at all remote sites
• Leveraging traditional backup software designed for backup to tape
• Managing the cost and complexity of automated technologies or a lack of network bandwidth
• Having a limited window in which to complete a comprehensive backup
• Contending with the disruptive nature of backups and their impact on productivity
• Lacking trained IT personnel to ensure backups function as planned
• Having limited scalability in terms of performance and flexibility
• Experiencing incomplete or corrupted backups, making complete restoration and recovery impossible

Produced by Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst for the StorageIO Group, the white paper points out that many different techniques and technologies support data protection, including backup, replication, mirroring and snapshots. Tape backup (available via tape autoloaders) is a common starting place for remote site protection. Tape-based systems, however, have limitations that are being addressed by next-generation solutions. Organizations with more stringent recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) can now use disk-based disaster recovery solutions that keep a copy of backup data locally and transmit the encrypted backup data offsite to either a central data center or a managed backup service provider to ensure data availability and fast recovery.

The white paper reviews technology options for remote site protection that work for different environments, including tape- or disk-based remote backup, network attached storage (NAS) replication, wide area file services (WAFS), and managed backup via a service provider. Each method addresses varying customer demands. For example, disk-based remote backup over a wide area network (WAN) involves backing up data at each remote site and then moving a copy of the backup to a central vault; this method addresses specific challenges such as disaster recovery, fast RTO/RPO, and centralized management.

The paper highlights best practices for backing up data in remote and branch office environments. The top three are:

• Seek out solutions designed specifically for distributed environments; these will provide the simplest and most efficient operation.
• Leverage LAN- and WAN-friendly optimized solutions for safe and secure data movement.
• Implement multiple tiers of protection to address various RTO and RPO needs.

Asigra Televaulting, a featured remote backup solution in the paper, is the industry’s only high-performance 64-bit backup/recovery service platform for remote and branch offices. By combining a nonintrusive agentless architecture with a WAN-optimized feature set, Televaulting overcomes the limitations of traditional distributed-backup software, to enable high-performance data protection.

“Asigra Televaulting occupies a unique position in the world of remote backup solution providers,” says Schulz. “With all the headaches associated with remote data protection, software like this makes a huge difference in terms of time and money for IT managers in search of workable options.”

Organizations interested in obtaining a free copy of the StorageIO Group’s white paper about remote site data protection can download it at www.asigra.com/form/signup_download.php?form=storageIO

About StorageIO
The StorageIO Group is a technology analyst and consulting firm providing services to technology vendors, end users and the media. Founded by storage veteran, author and industry analyst Greg Schulz, StorageIO focuses on IT storage, storage management, networking, and related technologies and topics.

About Asigra
Asigra is the award-winning leader in remote office/branch office (ROBO) online backup and recovery software for enterprises and managed backup service providers. The company’s flagship product, Televaulting, is used by global enterprises in the financial, insurance, legal, government, healthcare, and retail industries with more than four petabytes of data protected. Asigra technology is used by hundreds of service providers worldwide that offer managed backup services to companies ranging from small and medium businesses (SMBs) to Global 2000 enterprises. The agentless remote site backup and recovery solution provides simple, centralized management of the data protection process while eliminating the capital and operational expenses associated with agent-based solutions. Founded in 1986, Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with partner offices around the world. For more information, visit www.asigra.com.