laptops. That takes millions of dollars of intellectual property out of a company’s control. The laptop itself is not
especially valuable; a fairly new one will get you about
$100 at a pawn shop (we checked), and Dell has driven the
price of some of its models (like Vostro) under $500. “The
total lifecycle of a device may be a few grand for the initial
purchase, but it is dwarfed by the value of the data created
by a knowledge worker,” says Young.
Any company that uses laptops is considered a distributed enterprise. A distributed enterprise may employ
“digital nomads” who take their mobile workstations to
meetings, then take work home. It may employ “road warriors,” like traveling salespeople or field service engineers.
Or it may be a franchise operation, or retail giant with
hundreds of stores in scattered locations.
This reality has rendered onsite backup ineffective.
Don’t even bother — it’s an obsolete practice, and here’s
why: imagine putting a dedicated server at every one of
hundreds of franchise locations. You would have to purchase thousands of servers, and thousands of copies of a
backup application; ask all the local managers (who are not
IT experts) to install it; then require them all to diligently
conduct backups. It just isn’t going to happen.
Neither can you expect all the laptop users in your company to conduct a daily backup to a thumb drive. It is one
of those routine tasks that people do sporadically, poorly
— and, eventually, never. After a few weeks without incident, no one is going to trouble himself to put in a thumb
drive and run some backup application that disables the
computer for use while it works.
Finally — a last pain — “shelfware:” software-based
solutions like backup and recovery or data encryption that
have a way of being forgotten. “Go into any IT department,
and you’ll see boxes of shelfware that was never installed,
was partially installed, or was never updated and is now
obsolete,” says Young. “So your company may own backup
capability, but may not have backup capability.”
When you put it all together, you have backups which
don’t address client systems; can miss up to 60 percent of
your enterprise data; cannot reach remote corners of your
organization; and the software is likely improperly installed
and out of date. Of course none of these challenges reflect
upon a CIO’s competence; the old tools and old models
simply don’t do the job any longer.
The Solution: “Simplify IT”
“One thing became clear to Dell,” says Young. “Our customers wanted simplified ownership. They wanted to add capabilities without adding servers, wanted to manage remote
workstations as if they were onsite, and wanted to capture
and secure enterprise data from them. They wanted results
without agony, and Software-as-a-Service was the only way
to deliver those results.” In an initiative that Dell called
“Simplify IT,” it acquired five SaaS providers that filled the
bill. Among them was Everdream, which along with its partner Iron Mountain provides online backup and recovery.
SaaS delivered over the Internet has many charms.
Automated online backup delivered and administered
over the Internet is the only way to make sure that all of
the covered PCs are being backed up on a regular basis,
“and the chance of a successful deployment is far higher
because the provider takes responsibility for success,” says
