Small and Medium-Sized Businesses Turn to Managed Service Providers for Business-Critical Data Protection

February 14, 2007; 02:27 AM

Companies of all sizes need dependable data protection but the methods of safeguarding business information vary wildly. Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) particularly face a litany of questions in planning for backup and disaster recovery implementations at their organizations. How much storage will we need?  How much can I afford? How do I protect my data without a dedicated IT person?  How do I recover lost, stolen or damaged data? Can my business survive after data loss? Can my business survive a disaster that shuts down one of my offices?

Whereas enterprises may have the physical, personnel and monetary resources to proactively confront data backup and recovery dilemmas, many SMBs feel they cannot – and perhaps do not have to – properly prepare for such events.  Thoughts of “I can’t afford to protect my data like larger companies,” and “It won’t ever happen to me,” are not only common but also foolish.  The Small Business Administration estimates that 90 percent of companies that fail to recover lost data after a major data loss are out of business within the next two years.

Data loss can result for any number of reasons, such as hardware failure, file corruption, configuration problems, accidental deletion, theft, viruses and even natural disasters.  To combat these issues while also overcoming the obstacles of technical expertise and excessive expenses, more and more SMBs are turning to storage service providers.  A 2006 Gartner survey found that 43 percent of smaller companies plan to use a service provider to back up their business-critical information. According to Gartner, The SMB IT market, defined as businesses having between 20 and 999 employees, continues to grow at an estimated $400 billion per year making the global opportunity significant.

"A large percentage of small and medium size businesses struggle with managing their backup infrastructure and typically rely on older technologies to protect informational assets," said Paul Meyerson, senior analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group. "Companies like Asigra™ are allowing this segment of the market to take advantage of the latest advancements in data protection through managed backup service providers, practically eliminating the expenses, time and risk associated with in-house backup and recovery."

Secure, managed online backup services that replace problematic onsite backups to tape or hard disk have become more readily accessible and affordable to SMBs thanks to the partnership of technology vendors and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) that create new solutions with innovative pricing models, making enterprise-class data protection available and easy to use for their customers.  Documents, databases and emails from multiple small businesses combined create a storage pool, which is then administered by an MSP.

“By utilizing hosted backup and recovery services from MSPs, small- and medium-sized businesses can experience the same level of data protection as enterprises,” 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.  “A managed service provides the IT expertise often not available to smaller businesses. Managed services also provide SMBs with high-end data security features including data encryption to protect against unauthorized access. In the same way that a small or medium size business owner hires a lawyer or accountant to get professional support or uses a modern print shop to access the best equipment, the SMB entrepreneur can hire a local backup service provider to take care of their offsite data protection requirements.”

A single event resulting in data loss can cost a company significant revenue, fines and even their business.  With the offsite protection of an SMB’s irreplaceable data an absolute necessity, it behooves companies to create and put into action a storage protection plan that enables secure, remote, automatic back up and recovery of this information.  By partnering with an expert who is focused on distributed backup for SMBs, companies can ensure the safekeeping and restorability of business-critical data quickly, easily and affordably. 

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 government and international regulatory compliance demands by backing up remote/branch office data to the data centre. Data is encrypted in-flight over the WAN and at rest. Privately held Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada with partner offices located worldwide. For more information, visit www.asigra.com.

Asigra, Asigra Televaulting, Backup Lifecycle Management, BLM, and the Asigra logo are trademarks of Asigra Inc. All other brand and product names are, or may be trademarks of their respective owners.