with the explosion of remote workers in distributed enterprises,
It decision-makers have faced a host of challenges. among the
toughest: backing up a company’s most precious resource — its data —
that sits on desktops, laptops and other distributed devices.
Despite the decades-long push for IT to shift from
operations toward a strategic role in enterprises, customers tell Dell they spend only 30 percent of their IT budgets on new initiatives; the remaining 70 percent goes to
maintenance and licensing. That’s 70 cents on the dollar
just to keep working, rather than doing anything new or
revenue generating.
Dell realized its mission was to help its customers
reclaim that money, says Paul Young, Dell’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product manager. Their strategy was
aimed at IT challenges like remote management, online
backup and restore, and assisting in regulatory compliance, Young adds.
Thanks to a partnership between Dell and Iron Mountain, CIOs now can leverage Software-as-a-Service to
assure that their organization’s far-flung data is secure,
protected and backed up. Under the umbrella of Dell SaaS
applications — which include a comprehensive portfolio
of proven systems management and business continuity
solutions aimed at simplifying IT — Iron Mountain provides the technology and know-how to bring some order
to remote backup for Dell customers.
Depending on where you look, notebooks comprise
between 40 and 50 percent of a typical enterprise’s PC
fleet, with some companies (like Intel) deploying more
than 80 percent of their fleet in laptops. Mobile computing
introduces risks that desktop workstations do not have.
a partnership between Dell and Iron Mountain offers CIos a
Software-as-a-Service strategy to assure that far-flung data
is secure, protected and backed up.
Relying on laptops introduces such risks as stolen equipment, malware attacks resulting from personal use, and
loss by leaving a computer on an airport baggage carousel,
or in a coffee shop. A Dell-sponsored study, conducted
by the Ponemon Institute, shows that up to 12,000 laptops are lost in U.S. airports alone each week. And the
research indicates that approximately 53 percent of surveyed mobile professionals carry confidential company
information — and 65 percent of those who do don’t take
steps to protect it.
Another challenge is that the “brains” of many organizations have moved: “We estimate that about 60 percent of
enterprise data sits on workstations, not on a server — and
often in email,” says Young. So your company generates
enormous amounts of proprietary intelligence; but much
of it, even inside a four-walls operation, is “off the grid”
or unrecoverable.
Remote workers especially are off the grid. Unless they
connect via the Internet to their company’s virtual private network (VPN) when a backup is run (or run manual
backups), all their one-of-a-kind information sits on their
