was a complete and total hardware failure, and he’d have
to give me a new machine,” she says.
The enterprising service agent asked Hayward where
she would be the following day, and he arranged for a new
laptop to be sent to her hotel the very next day. Even better,
the new laptop had all her files, folders, data, presentations and settings intact: they had been preserved because
Hayward’s laptop was backed up with Connected.
“They performed a Connected restore to get all my
data and all my settings—everything was there. And all
of this was loaded on a new piece of hardware,” she says.
“As a mobile worker, I found it an amazing experience—I
didn’t skip a beat.
“The only thing you lose is what you didn’t back up
since the last time,” she says. But I had a lot of documents
on my desktop and they were all there.”
Connected also saved the day for Dan McDade, president of Atlanta-based marketing company PointClear, a
CenterBeam customer. “Last week I got the dreaded blue
screen,” McDade says. “I called CenterBeam and they took
over. CenterBeam remotely restored my laptop to full func-tionality, including all of the files on my local hard drive,
all within a day of receiving the case.”
To McDade, having backup services handled remotely
was more expedient than if he had been helped directly in
his office. “I made one phone call and CenterBeam handled
the rest. My IT staff didn’t need to get involved, and with
all they have on their plate, this certainly was completed a
lot faster and more efficiently than it could have possibly
been handled internally.”
The potential for lost and damaged data on laptops
is a particularly pressing issue, especially since storage
capacity continues to increase by orders of magnitude and
laptops have become many mobile professionals’ primary
system. “Think about what people carry around on their
laptops,” Hayward says. “You don’t have to go much further
than to say, ‘What would happen if we took your laptop
away today?’”
Serving Up Storage
The market for Storage-as-a-Service is heating up as mid-market companies look for more efficient, economical and
secure alternatives for backup and recovery. “When you
look at the SMB and midmarket range, a lot of customers
want to adopt this new technology,” says Bob LaLiberte,
an analyst with the Milford, Mass.-based storage analyst
Enterprise Strategy Group. “It’s expensive to bring it in-house. The ability to get this advanced service for a low,
monthly, predictable rate takes the burden off the IT staff.
They don’t have to worry about backups.”
He sees tape as still having a place in the world of
backup and recovery, but the manner in which tapes are
typically handled is problematic. “For smaller companies,
backup to tape was their strategy,” he says. “Those get
taken home in someone’s trunk. They don’t have control
over the media. Being able to leverage [Storage-as-a-Ser-vice] gets it to a remote site for geographic protection for
your data.”
LaLiberte cites numerous benefits for midmarket companies using Storage-as-a-Service, including improved
recovery times, the ability to back up individual files or
incremental changes, the ability to perform quick restores
via the Internet, and the ease and speed with which IT
staffers can perform large-scale full restores.
“When people need to recover [data], it is often data
less than a couple of days old that just got lost or deleted
accidentally. They need it back immediately,” LaLiberte explains. “In those situations, online backup works
extremely well.”
Using flexible backup and recovery through Storage-as-a-Service can also fit well with a company’s regulatory requirements. While statutes like Sarbanes-Oxley and
HIPAA typically have a greater impact on larger companies,
LaLiberte is starting to see online backup companies offer
archiving solutions suitable for the midmarket. “We’re
seeing companies come out with different options,” he
says.
The areas for growth within the Storage-as-a-Service
market include eDiscovery, especially the ability to archive
data, discover it and restore it quickly for eDiscovery purposes. “For the midmarket, it’s really about archiving and
eDiscovery, rapid restores and quick starts. They’re trying
to improve recovery time objectives,” says LaLiberte. “Those
are the biggest opportunities we see for expansion.”
Value and Differentiation
As CenterBeam expands its market to more midsize companies, and with an increasing global presence, the services
it provides with Connected and LiveVault will continue
to be a core differentiator. CFOs in this sector continue
to cope with constant technological change and increasing threats to security and business continuity. “They’re
overwhelmed with the increasing complexity of managing
all aspects of their [infrastructure]. With more pressure
around data and infrastructure security, email and user
expectations of 24/7 service and support, they have it com-ing at them from all angles,” says Hayward.
CenterBeam also places a premium on process documentation. That way, what it has done for clients and the
manner in which it was done is easily repeatable. “The
whole notion of variable support in a repeatable, highly
documented fashion is pretty compelling for the CFO,”
Hayward says. “We go in and optimize the existing environment. We give them a lot more visibility into their
environment than they would otherwise have.” ▲
LAFE LOW IS A FREELANCE TECHNOLOGY JOURNALIST
BASED IN FRAMINGHAM, MASS.
