Press Release (U.S.)

Asigra Multi-Site Backup and Recovery Chosen by PRO-TAX to Protect 25 Remote Sites
Asigra’s agentless disk-based solution replaces unreliable tape backup

Toronto – May 24, 2005 – Asigra™, the technology specialist in agentless distributed backup and recovery software for network computing, today announced that PRO-TAX has selected the company’s Televaulting™ multi-site backup and recovery software to provide reliable, centralized backup for the 25 PRO-TAX offices located in three states.

Charlottesville, VA -based PRO-TAX chose Asigra’s Televaulting solution to provide 100 percent guaranteed backup and recovery of client tax data, and to satisfy the company’s regulatory compliance record keeping requirements.

PRO-TAX made the switch to Asigra after enduring the expense and unreliability of a legacy tape backup system that routinely failed to perform backup processes as expected. With each location producing a daily backup load of critical data, PRO-TAX adopted the Asigra Televaulting backup to eliminate the vulnerabilities of tape-based backup, according to Milo Farineau, Director of Information Technology at PRO-TAX. The Asigra solution exceeded the company’s expectations right from the start, said Farineau, including the bare metal restore of a server.

“Asigra Televaulting performed flawlessly and delivered phenomenal results. We restored the complete set of office files and data in minutes to bare metal,” said Farineau. “Another feature that was key for quick start-up and implementation was that the agentless software did not require a license fee for each machine at each location that I wanted to protect. This just wasn’t an option with any of the other companies I investigated.”

“When it comes to backup and quick restore of irreplaceable data, there is no middle ground; the backup system is either 100 percent reliable or it has no customer value,” said Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra. “PRO-TAX was unwilling to accept the business risk of unreliable backup technology and now has peace of mind with Asigra.”

About Asigra Televaulting

Asigra’s Televaulting is a comprehensive software solution that allows businesses to implement distributed data protection. Televaulting features grid-based performance and capacity scaling, utility service provisioning, and the ability for advanced WAN optimization techniques including common file elimination and compression that conserves bandwidth and storage by transmitting multiple copies of files only once. Security is hard-coded into the solution to provide AES encryption for data both in-flight and at-rest.

Televaulting eliminates many backup pain points through technology that is designed for enterprise-wide centralization, 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 center backup software, but to complement it for multi-site backup and recovery. Business benefits that differentiate Asigra's offering from other backup solutions include true regulatory-compliant data protection, 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 PRO-TAX

PRO-TAX offers high quality, but low cost, tax preparation services for their clients. The Charlottesville-based PRO-TAX was accepted by the IRS into the electronic filing program in 1990 for the filing of 1989 tax returns. After PRO-TAX began offering electronic filing, the company expanded quickly. Today, PRO-TAX employs over 350 tax professionals throughout the region and has 25 tax offices. The corporate office is located in Charlottesville, Virginia.

About Asigra
Founded in 1986, Asigra is the specialist in distributed data backup and recovery solutions for network computing. With Asigra's Televaulting software, enterprises can reliably protect mission-critical information across all their geographically dispersed "data islands," whether they reside on servers, desktops or laptops. The privately held company is based in Toronto, Canada.