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INFOSTOR
Online
backup and recovery-specifically, outsourcing storage operations to
third-party services providers-may make more sense than ever. Whether
for consumers, small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), or larger
enterprises, outsourcing a critical business function such as backup
and recovery, which requires high reliability and technical expertise,
entails a certain amount of risk. But as more and more tapes are lost
and hackers find new ways to break encryption codes, the
risk-to-benefit ratio is in some cases tipping in favor of trusting
outside experts to back up-and recover-your data.
For smaller companies that do not have dedicated IT staffs, adequately
securing data is nearly impossible without outside intervention. Even
companies that have multiple sites must have the know-how to ensure
data is adequately encrypted and physically secure. For companies on
either end of the spectrum, the amount of labor required to
conscientiously manage the backup process is draining-both on the
personnel involved and the budget.
As
data was growing at its offices in Toronto and Montreal, plus from a
sales force across Canada, adidas-Salomon Canada, based in Concord, ON,
wanted an automated backup solution that would not require intervention
from the IT staff.
Paul Leone, adidas’ CIO, had read about
StoragePipe’s online backup-and-recovery service in trade publications
and had also used StoragePipe for procurement of servers and PCs in the
past.
About 200GB of adidas’ data is being
backed up 25km away at StoragePipe’s primary data center in Toronto.
Leone says StoragePipe’s automated messaging system notifies three
adidas employees if a backup failure occurs.
“We’ve been able to answer auditors’
requests for invoice registers,” says Leone, “and our ability to pull
raw data through the services that StoragePipe provides has been very
smooth.”
In the future, adidas plans to add its
financial information and a variety of databases to StoragePipe’s
online backup-and-recovery service. StoragePipe runs an IBM Tivoli
infrastructure at its data center in Toronto, which has backup
generators to provide weeks of power, fire suppression, cooling
systems, and surveillance cameras. Access to the data center is
restricted to only those individuals who have passed rigorous
background checks. The Toronto site is backed up to another data center
in Mississauga, ON.
“Online backup allows customers who have
multiple locations to centralize that service,” says Steve Rodin,
StoragePipe’s president. “Their IT staffs can recover to a central
location and they can push data out to where it’s needed without
needing IT staff in every location. The remote offices also don’t need
backup equipment, tapes, and pickup services for off-site management.”
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