Midsized firms look to backup service providers for help

As data and legal regulations proliferate, often in seemingly equal amounts, across every industry, some companies, particularly smaller firms, are finding that the best way to manage the sprawl is to hand the reins to someone else.

Monday 10 Dec 2007

As data and legal regulations proliferate, often in seemingly equal amounts, across every industry, some companies, particularly smaller firms, are finding that the best way to manage the sprawl is to hand the reins to someone else. And though industry experts say it remains unclear just where the backup outsourcing market is headed in general, many users who have chosen it say they swear by it.

Matt Row, business services manager with Brisbane based property developer Heritage Pacific and Meridian, began exploring online backup services shortly after he joined the company earlier this year. The firm has long backed up around 500GB of data to tape nightly - most of it from complex design applications - and runs most of its corporate desktops, which span around 40 locations, using Citrix Systems thin-client technology.

However, Row needed a more effective way to manage backups of the mission-critical data on the thick-client design desktop PCs. Although he quickly implemented a policy of keeping backup tapes offsite, Row also happened upon the services of Queensland company Spheritec, whose client-side backup tools regularly run incremental backups that move new data from client desktops to secure Spheritec storage.

Heritage Pacific and Meridian is currently backing up more than 10GB of data nightly, and Row says the whole process has been both easy and effective. "It has given us a lot more security around the design files," he says. "It's not going to replace tape backup yet - it's a lot of data we're talking about - but it is providing an extra layer of redundancy on that critical data."

Because the Spheritec solution works on a decentralised structure, it may well prove even more useful in the long term as a way of adding that layer of redundancy to backups from other sites. "We're going through a process now of identifying key critical data that we would want that extra assurance in place," says Row. "For businesses starting out or small businesses who haven't really got a sufficient backup program in place, this is an easy way of doing that."

Model appears to scale well, as US experience shows