New Backup and Recovery Options

By Stacey McDaniel

Small to mid-sized organizations can always benefit from any IT enhancement that will save both time and money. Unfortunately, many of these mid-sized enterprises are not able to get the benefits from IT that they need, chiefly due to lack of resources and expertise. For that reason, many small to mid-sized organizations are exploring the Software as a Service options that are now available -- these options cost less and are run by experts.

Capabilities that are delivered via the Software as a Service (SaaS) model (sometimes called "online services") are provided to end users over the Web, rather than software that is installed and maintained in-house by the customer. With SaaS, a vendor (or other service provider) owns, hosts, manages and updates the software so that customers need not implement or manage software applications themselves, but can rely on experts to do it for them. Customers pay for SaaS on a subscription or per-use basis, which simplifies budget planning, reduces upfront costs, makes payments more predictable and lowers total cost of ownership. This allows organizations to eliminate many of the overhead IT expenses and operational concerns commonly associated with traditional software products. Also, organizations using SaaS will never have to deal with an IT infrastructure that has become obsolete over time.

Despite all of its benefits, some IT managers are hesitant to make the move to SaaS applications. Why? Many are resistant to change what is working for them; it's the "if it ain't broke, why fix it?" kind of thinking. Other organizations worry that their unique business needs can't be met by a new SaaS solution -- that the solution will be feature-poor or unreliable. Still others are afraid the transition to SaaS would not be smooth and that the vendor won't be available to help (or worse -- that the vendor won't be around in a year or two!). Finally, another common obstacle is that businesses worry about the security of their data when it's hosted and/or stored offsite by a vendor.

Storage as a service
Many small to mid-sized organizations are finding that data storage and data availability are evolving into major IT headaches -- security is a concern, maintenance costs are high, infrastructure grows quickly obsolete and, most important, there is the need to maintain compliance with an ever-growing list of regulations and rules. According to Graham Penn, Storage Associate Vice President for analyst IDC, "You can't ignore the increasing requirement for compliance. Storage as a service really needs to be on the list that people consider."

Setting up a solid backup and recovery infrastructure tends to be not only expensive, but also a daunting and time-consuming task for organizations. All too often IT teams don't realize there's a problem with their data protection solution until they try to restore data from tape backups or archives, only to learn that the data is corrupt, unavailable or unusable. That is why SaaS backup and disaster recovery offerings can be an ideal solution.

Backup services coming
For these reasons, new online service platforms for IT protection are coming to market to deliver comprehensive protection to small and mid-sized organizations by boosting their IT infrastructure via a wide range of web-delivered services. The first of many planned online data availability and security offerings to be delivered is online backup.

Online backup service is an on-demand data backup and restoration service that can be utilized from anywhere through a web browser. Data is always encrypted using a sophisticated 256 AES encryption mechanism via a secure customer-specified private password and securely transmitted to and stored in data centers.

It's simple to set up online backup, and there's no need to buy new hardware; only an Internet connection is needed to walk through online configuration options. After that, users can browse their data files, select data to be protected, and specify other backup settings such as backup windows, or whether you use incremental or continuous backup. When data needs to be restored, administrators or users can use the online browser-based interface to securely browse and select files for restoration. Users doing restores only have access to those files in which they have permissions based on Active Directory settings. These files are then securely transmitted back to the organization's servers.

Conclusion
Small to mid-sized organizations require the same high levels of service reliability and data security as their enterprise counterparts -- but that isn't easily achievable due to the costs and time associated with managing assorted IT elements. Software as a Service offerings enable these businesses to focus on their core business rather than IT and security-related concerns.

Vendors will soon be able to deliver the secure, proven backup technology these organizations demand in a highly economical online business model.

Stacey McDaniel has been writing about high-tech issues for more than six years.