Young. “The pressure is on us, not the customer’s CIO
or IT department. A Dell implementation team walks a
customer through the installation to be certain it works,
so you get no partial installation — instead, you leave the
implementation with a fully operational solution, and can
be confident of the results.”
With SaaS delivered over the Internet, a company can
reach every workstation in its purview, even the remote
ones, and even ones not plugged into the VPN. Every one
of those workstations has the same up-to-date software,
including the CEO’s PC in her corner office, and the field
engineer’s laptop connected to the Internet through Wi-Fi
at an airport. The CIO has equal, consistent control — and
that is the value proposition.
Finally, a multi-tenant SaaS application achieves an
economy of scale. “No single company pays for Dell and
Iron Mountain infrastructures,” says Young. “Instead, thousands of companies share the cost of a common infrastructure, and own the compelling features and benefits. Few of
them would have the cash flow to develop those capabilities
on their own, particularly the smaller enterprises.”
Everdream and Iron Mountain
“Everdream fit our modular management strategy perfectly,”
says Young. “They are masters of hosted asset management,
including online backup and restore.” By the time Dell
acquired Everdream in 2007, the company had a strong client base, and 19 industry awards to its credit, including two
Best Mid-Market Solutions Services Innovation™ Awards
from Gartner Group; A CIO 100 award from CIO magazine;
and an editor’s choice award from PC Magazine. Everdream
was clearly a company that knew its business.
Most importantly, with Everdream came its online
backup and restore partner: Iron Mountain.
“We knew of Iron Mountain, but we weren’t a customer,” says Young. “So we did the same diligence that new
Iron Mountain customers do: looking into its capabilities,
its competitive analysis, its history of security breaches
and data loss — there were none — and its history of
success — there were plenty [of successes].” Dell had to
answer a question that every new Iron Mountain customer
asks: if we’re backing up our data over the Internet and to
a remote vault, how private is that data? How secure?
“What we discovered,” says Young, “is that because
Iron Mountain has been in online backup for a decade,
they know what they’re doing when it comes to backing
up enterprise-level data. The vaults are literally in the
side of a mountain and are military grade, and that data is
encrypted ‘in flight,’ with 128-bit SSL encryption, between
the customer locations and the vault.”
“So we’re able to say to Dell customers, ‘If you conduct
an online backup with Iron Mountain, you have no prov-
able risk of data loss. But if you don’t back it up, you risk
losing the data entirely.’”
Dell SaaS: Comprehensive, Flexible
and Easy to Use
Along with online backup and recovery, Dell customers may
opt for other Dell SaaS offerings such as laptop encryption;
email management; crisis management and alerting; distributed device management (hardware and software management and security for client PCs); and remote infrastructure
monitoring (monitoring and patching of servers, storage and
other network devices).
“Our customers want to buy á la carte,” says Young.
“To buy only what they need, versus making some huge
IT investment. I’ve queried a few CIOs among our cus-
tomers, who tell us they use only about 40 percent of the
functionality of an ERP or CRM system — what have you.
With Dell SaaS applications, they buy what they need,
like online backup and restore, asset management, patch
management or some subset.”
The Dell online backup and restore solution integrates
Iron Mountain’s Connected® Backup service to help cus-
tomers centrally manage data from computers, and elimi-
nate the cost and labor of capturing and recovering highly
distributed data, like from franchises, or from road war-
riors’ laptops. One of its key features is that the end users
need not connect to a company’s VPN; the backup runs
over the Internet. And it runs in the background, allowing
the user to keep working.
Finally, end users only have to conduct one full backup
(which can take up to two hours or more, depending on the
Internet connection). After that, backups cover incremental data changes only, minimizing time and network traffic.
The service typically saves the last 10 backups individually,
for the ability to restore an earlier computer image.
The CIO as Customer
“We aim our tools toward the CIO, so there is as little end-user interaction as possible,” says Young. “The end users
get backed up in the background, without even knowing
it. And if something happens, they can reconfigure their
machines very quickly” — typically in under an hour, and
over the Internet.
“I can speak to this personally,” says Young. “My lap-
top had a hard-drive failure, and we had the Dell and Iron
Mountain backup software on my computer and were able
to successfully recover my data quickly. We look at backup
in terms of the value of the lost data, plus the lost time
and productivity and opportunities.”
You can add peace of mind to that values list, says
Young. “As a CIO, what are you going to do when your CEO
says, ‘My system is not working and I have a presenta-
tion in two hours, how can you help?’ Without a backup,
you can’t. That’s where Dell’s Iron Mountain-powered
solution comes into play. You have the opportunity to
regain efficiency and uptime at very minimal cost and
disruption.” ▲
