Protect Against Loss of Remote Office Data

Enterprise IT departments are facing a corporate imperative for the secure protection, availability and recovery of remote office operations and data. The ability to securely and centrally control, manage, and restore data that resides in many disparate, resource-limited enterprise remote offices is of paramount importance.

Virat Chadha, Pre-Sales Specialist of JSE-listed solutions and services company Faritec, says critical data which resides in enterprise remote offices, but outside of IT data centre control, must be protected.

Remote office backups are traditionally unreliable and costly. According to Gartner, data volumes are growing at more than 60% a year, and this expansion is accompanied by huge leaps in the complexity, scale and cost of data protection solutions.

"Without effective data recovery and availability, firms face operational risk which can compromise their enterprise remote office productivity, impact time to market, supply chain efficiency, and customer satisfaction; or bring about cost penalties, fines, or negative publicity," Chadha says.

Commenting on these challenges, Chadha says the newer environments such as server virtualisation have introduced further hurdles to affordable, effective backup solutions.

Capacity-optimised, disk-based enterprise remote office data protection solutions are emerging to address this increasing need for cost-effective, centralised control for enterprise remote office data availability, recovery, and administration.

Faritec meets its customers' needs in this area with Veritas NetBackup PureDisk from Symantec, which offers storage and bandwidth optimised data protection for diverse IT environments. This solution combines data de-duplication technology with a highly-scalable, software-based storage system to provide customers with a flexible and advanced data protection solution.

With PureDisk, redundant data is eliminated at the source, which allows data to be backed up over a wide area network (WAN) and administration to be centralised. A further advantage is that tape-based operations at remote sites are no longer necessary, and storage requirements are dramatically reduced.

Native backup functionality is provided within virtual environments by deploying a PureDisk client within each virtual machine. The de-duplication option enables the customer to substantially reduce the volume of data contained in a backup image, thereby ensuring the efficient use of WAN resources to replace backup data to a disaster recovery site.

The benefits provided by this solution include secure, disk-based data protection for servers in remote offices, virtual environments, and the data centre. In addition, the solution enables distributed backup data and policies in the data centre to be centralised and managed.

"Furthermore, storage required for disk backups is reduced by a factor of 10 to 15 compared to tape," Chadha says. "It also enables low bandwidth backup and data synchronisation over a wide area network."

"By protecting all the organisation's information, these solutions reduce cost and risk while simultaneously protecting against data loss and exposure, thereby enabling a high-quality IT service to be delivered to the business," he says.