Service Providers Manage Backups with Asigra to Provide Cost-Effective Long-Term Data Archiving and Data Compliance

January 22, 2007; 12:17 AM

Asigra^TM today reveals how Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can reduce their customers’ data storage costs and help them to comply with data retention laws with the deployment of Asigra’s Backup Lifecycle Management^TM (BLM^TM) storage solution. A case study of an SP’s provision of Asigra Televaulting^TM with BLM to a customer is included further below.

Asigra BLM manages data during all backup archiving processes, separating the data into varying levels of protected data: current critical data, which is permanently stored online for fast recovery; and archivable important data that may be needed at a later time but is not likely to be accessed in the near future. Backup data stored in an archive means it is not immediately retrievable like backup data stored online, but it is significantly more economical than storing it online.

According to Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra, “As every company’s digital data is growing at an increasing rate, companies are experiencing mounting storage costs, so they are looking for cheaper storage options for their less critical backup data. Asigra BLM allows our service providers to offer customers a lower cost service for archiving long-term backups, which can be quickly retrieved from the BLM archive back to the customer. BLM also allows service providers to help customers with their data compliance requirements, as BLM manages the movement of the different types of data as well as assigning dates for the final destruction of specific data, along with issuing destruction certificates.”

In order to save on storage costs, companies often and mistakenly choose to store the less critical backup data offline in their own vault, while their critical backups remain online in the vault of their service provider. Alternatively, they opt to delete the non-critical data altogether. However, there are many problems associated with both of these options:

-          The customer can never retrieve the data that has been deleted.
-          The customer may be in breach of data compliance laws if the data is deleted.
-          It is cumbersome to manually separate the critical backup data from the long-term backup data.
-          If the customer wishes to retrieve archived backup data from their own vault, the data cannot be transported back to the online storage medium from where it is easy to restore the data.

MSPs can negate these problems for end users with Asigra Televaulting BLM. The tool meta-tags the less critical or older backup data before it is archived offline, so that archived backup data can easily be restored to the online medium. BLM also intelligently manages the movement of data from the online storage to the BLM archive, whereby backup data which is no longer critical (i.e. not required day-to-day, older and perceived as less valuable) is automatically moved to the archive, but is still accessible. The end user benefits from a cheaper storage solution that manages the data for them and allows easy access to the archived data. The MSP also benefits from providing BLM because the data that the customer would have moved to its own vault, or deleted altogether, remains with the MSP for a longer period of time, albeit at a much lower cost to the customer.  The objective of the technology is to have the MSP Backup Service cost reflect the value of the data as perceived by the customer.

Case Study: SecurStore provides Asigra BLM to National Land Survey of Iceland

SecurStore provides the National Land Survey of Iceland (NLSI) with a backup and recovery service based on Asigra’s software. SecurStore is finding the Asigra BLM solution of particular benefit to its customers that have a lot of backup data to store and are worried about the mounting storage costs.

“By storing the huge amounts of our long-term backup data offline in cheaper storage, we can realize massively reduced data storage costs while at the same time reap the benefits online data backup has over tape-based backup,” said Brandur Sigurjonsson, IT Manager for NLSI. “SecurStore’s BLM service also helps us to comply with the data retention laws, as we can ensure that data is archived for a specific amount of time and also assigned an end date to data, so that we also don’t hold onto data for longer than is stipulated by the retention rules.”

Companies in the E.U. and the U.S. are today required to comply with more strict rules and regulations regarding the safeguarding and use of personal data, such as The UK Company Act, Basel II and HIPPA. They are required to respond quickly and with ease to e-discovery requests of archived data such as financial data and e-mails.

Alexander Eiriksson, CEO of SecurStore, noted, “Asigra BLM is now forming an integral part of our customers’ risk and compliance management systems. BLM also gives us the flexibility to attract a wider range of customers to our data back up and recovery services, such as educational institutions, which have a lot of long-term data to store but have a relatively low budget.”

About National Land Survey of Iceland (NLSI)
The National Land Survey of Iceland creates the official maps of Iceland and also produces statistical information, such as geographical information (e.g. vegetation, lakes, rivers, glaciers, fishing area limits and distances to nearest countries), road distances, population calculations and sizes of municipalities. The history of the National Land Survey of Iceland can be traced back to the turn of the 20th century, when the surveying branch of the Danish General Staff began mapping the country. The National Land Survey of Iceland became an independent institute under the Ministry for Communications in 1956, and from 1990 it has been under the auspices of the Ministry for the Environment. The National Land Survey of Iceland began working with digital maps in 1992. One year later a new Datum, Ísnet 93, was measured using GPS technology. More information can be found at http://www.lmi.is/landsurvey.nsf/pages/index.html.

About SecurStore
SecurStore was established in 1991, and for over a decade offered extensive knowledge and expertise of IT solutions and services. In 2004, SecurStore decided to focus solely on its professional online backup service, which meets the requirements of small and medium businesses in terms of cost, security, automation and fast and reliable recovery.

SecurStore protects data for companies of all types and sizes, from only a few gigabytes for the smaller customers, to several terabytes for the larger customers. These customers have operations in many different countries within Europe.
SecurStore has operations in The United Kingdom and Iceland enabling customers to also receive offshore data protection options. For more information about the company and SecurStore backup/restore solution visit www.securstore.com.

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 centralised 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 centre. 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.