The ease and speed of recovery are one benefit of CenterBeam’s services, but compliance is equally important.
The company is particularly strong in the real estate, construction, engineering, professional services, healthcare,
and nonprofit and social services markets. Many of these
industries are heavily regulated, which not only demands
constant access and continuity but also backup and the
ability to recover systems for compliance purposes. In
these environments, losing a disk, losing a system or losing any data can lead to disaster.
Backup Solutions Achieved
CenterBeam needed a flexible and efficient solution that
provides a range of backup and restore services, can be
delivered remotely and is flexible enough to be tailored into
its service offerings. The answer was Iron Mountain Digital’s Connected® for PC and LiveVault® services. Connected
covers the desktop systems and laptops, while LiveVault
provides a similar level of granular backup service for the
server side. The flexibility and efficiency of both services
fit into CenterBeam’s model of disaster prevention, and
help give its customers the data protection they need.
“They’re tightly woven into our core set of infrastructure services,” says Hayward. “There’s no customer
or prospect [to whom] we don’t present both Connected
and LiveVault.”
Connected for Desktops and Laptops
Connected covers desktops and laptops with secure,
automated backup and component-level recovery using
its Delta Block® technology, which ensures only changes
made to files are backed up, not the entire file. SendOnce®
technology ensures that identical files residing on different
machines are only backed up once. Both of those features
increase speed and efficiency.
CenterBeam also uses Connected to centrally manage
its distributed data backups. Connected helps reduce the
amount of storage space needed by as much as 85 percent,
and provides for automated backups, system roll-back following data loss and flexible backup scheduling. Through
Connected, CenterBeam’s customers can retrieve damaged
or lost files without help-desk intervention.
“We’ve been using Connected since 1999,” Hayward
says. “It’s an integral part of our service. It’s an incredibly
efficient desktop backup solution. Connected lets users
perform backups from anywhere, and gives them flexible
and efficient options to do so.”
With automatic backup, Connected doesn’t rely on user
intervention, so desktop backup can be a corporate priority
that happens seamlessly. Backups can also be done via the
Internet; the data is encrypted for added security. Using
Connected as part of its recovery services, CenterBeam
can roll back a customer’s system to the last known good
state.
“There’s no customer
or prospect [to whom]
we don’t present
both Connected and
LiveVault,” says Karen
Hayward.
LiveVault for Servers
LiveVault provides similarly granular services at the server
level, including fully automated backups, continuous backups to ensure against data loss and built-in protection for
open files. The open file protection ensures that any file
being used during an outage or other disaster can still be
recovered. Like Connected, CenterBeam can manage its
LiveVault storage services through a Web-based portal.
“The market for LiveVault is huge,” Hayward says.
While the size of the market is one factor, the state of
the market is equally important; many companies rely on
outdated backup technology.
“Most of the companies in this space—about 80,000
in the U.S.—are still using tape,” she says. “The problem
with tape is that many CFOs who have responsibility for
IT don’t even know where it’s being stored. Tape often
becomes corrupted, so much of the data is at serious risk.
It’s all very manual.”
Hayward recalls a review for a potential client, a publicly traded company based in New Jersey, that was using
a tape backup system. “The director of IT was keeping
the tapes in the trunk of his car,” she says. “And in New
Jersey, it gets chilly in the winter and hot in the summer.
The CFO was mortified when we told him that.”
Blue Screen Tales of Terror
Not even Hayward could escape a case of the dreaded blue
screen of death. While preparing a presentation in Washington, D.C., she fired up her laptop only to be greeted by
that unsettling field of blue. A quick call to CenterBeam’s
help desk confirmed her worst fears. “The agent said it
