Press Release (U.S.)

Asigra Delivers Multi-Site Backup to International Seafood Company
Iceland Seafood International signs deal with SecurStore for Asigra Televaulting, a centrally managed, reliable and fast backup and recovery service

TORONTO – October 10, 2005 – Asigra™, the technology leader in agentless distributed backup and recovery software for network computing for more than 19 years, today announced that SecurStore, the Icelandic storage services provider, has signed a service agreement with Iceland Seafood International (ISI), one of the largest food export and marketing organizations, in a country that is one of the world’s largest fish exporters. SecurStore will provide ISI with SecurStore IP Backup, its managed backup and recovery services, which deploys Asigra’s Televaulting™ software.

ISI has offices in ten countries all over the world and sells seafood products to UK retailers. In order for the headquarters in Iceland to manage the business on a global scale, it is important that data generated in all of its satellite offices is protected. ISI was previously using a tape-based backup service, which was not efficient or effective in its subsidiary office locations in the UK and Germany. The tape-based backup was somewhat manageable in the Iceland offices, but it was proving difficult to manage the tape backups on an international scale: tapes weren’t being changed at the stipulated times; it was difficult to recover data from tapes located all over the world; and there was the additional concern of tapes potentially being lost.

ISI turned to SecurStore to eliminate these problems with its Asigra agentless distributed backup software service, which does not require tapes and allows a company with geographically dispersed offices to back up and recover data from a single location. Data protection is assured as the data is backed up via disk over the WAN and therefore stored off-site, and strong ‘at-rest’ and ‘in-flight’ encryption ensures that third parties can never access and read the vaulted data.

“We chose SecurStore because their service eliminates the possibility of human error and allows us to protect our entire company’s data from every global office location, which now can all be managed from our headquarters in Iceland,” said Runar Bjarnthorsson, IT Manager of Iceland Seafood International. “We saw very quickly from initial tests how much we could save with agentless software by paying for the amount of data stored and not for each machine that is backed up.”

Through SecurStore’s IP Backup service, Asigra Televaulting provides ISI with an agentless backup/recovery environment for the entire organization, including information residing on desktops, laptops and servers. This allows ISI to protect every system on the network without the hassle of agent-based license fees, agent installation, agent-induced performance loss and annual agent upgrades.

Alexander Eiríksson, President of SecurStore, said, “The centralized backup architecture of Asigra software enabled us to fulfil the primary requirement ISI had, which was to have central control of the backup on an International scale. Moreover, because the backup is now an automated process, this gives ISI peace of mind that there is little room for human error and that the data is stored off-site, ensuring ISI that the data is protected in the event of a disaster.”

In the near future, SecurStore plans to implement a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan for ISI that will incorporate Asigra’s automated Bare Metal Restore (BMR), reducing business downtime with the capability to restore data to new machines at any location. SecurStore also plans to provide ISI with the option of assigning which data is ‘critical’ and which data is ‘important’ by using Backup Lifecycle Management (BLM), a feature that manages data during all backup and archiving processes during the life of the information.

According to Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra, “ISI’s multi-office corporate structure demands a backup/restore service that respects remote data and ensures that it is protected to the same level as corporate data. Asigra Televaulting is based on a utility service provisioning model to deliver distributed backup/restore with centralized management and a unique agentless pricing model. This means that whenever a new PC is added to the ISI network, there is no need for a backup agent to be installed, which would be a complex and costly burden on ISI. ISI only pays for the total amount of compressed data stored. Together with SecurStore’s high-calibre services, ISI is guaranteed successful and fast retrieval of any data they require from any office location around the globe.”

At each customer site, a single Asigra Televaulting DS-Client discovers all servers, desktops and laptops connected to the local network, and automates the backup of all local data assets. Before the backup data set is transmitted to SecurStore’s data center, Asigra Televaulting software analyzes the data, finds new and changed file blocks, eliminates duplicate files and further compresses the residue bytes to ensure the backup set is as compact as possible. The software then encrypts the data before sending it over an IP-WAN connection to a centralized data vault, located in SecurStore’s data center, which consolidates the backup data from all distributed sites. Moreover, data backed up with Asigra integrates directly with third-party ILM solutions from the major storage vendors. As an additional level of data protection, SecurStore replicates the data vault to a second secure backup site.

Asigra Televaulting for Service Providers supports a broad range of platforms, including Windows, Linux, Unix, Novell, AS/400 and Macintosh (to be released Q4 2005), and protects Oracle, SQL Server and Exchange Server data. Back-end DS-System software runs on Solaris, Linux, MACINTOSH and Windows.

About Iceland Seafood International
Iceland Seafood International (ISI) is a traditional marketing and sales company, offering good quality, speed and reliability. ISI represents producers of fresh, frozen and salted seafood on international markets, with branches in Iceland, Britain, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Greece, Canada, Italy and Spain. The products are sold for value-added processing, to wholesalers, distributors, retail chains, restaurants and to parties who sell the products under their own brand names, such as Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Sainsbury’s in the UK. For more information, please visit http://www.icelandseafood.is/icelandseafood/en/

About SecurStore
SecurStore was established in 1991 and is located 30 miles outside of Reykjavik. SecurStore is Iceland’s foremost storage services provider, offering extensive knowledge and expertise of IT software development and computer and IT solutions. SecurStore currently retails its services using a per gigabyte stored licensing model. It is suitable for small, mid-size and enterprise-wide, multiple-platform LAN computing environments that want to safeguard their critical business data in a secure, off-site and offshore location. The company is also a Microsoft Certified Partner. More information about the company and SecurStore backup/restore solution can be found at http://www.securstore.com.

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.