Jim Masterson; LightEdge Solutions
How can I protect my critical business data?
Backup and recovery of mission-critical data has become a hot topic for many companies across all industries because of the exponential growth of data and the increasing costs to retain it all. Many companies still rely upon the time-consuming and archaic IT process of backing-up to tape; putting those tapes on a truck; and shipping their company’s critical data to some off-site vaulting facility. Or worse yet, they take tapes home and put them in their basement. And of course, with all this physical movement of data (typically in an unencrypted format), there’s not only risk of lost data but there are all sorts of legal issues if that data should happen to fall into the public domain, especially if it contains sensitive financial, legal or medical information.
Is there an alternative?
LightEdge Solutions, a hosted service provider headquartered in Des Moines, has solved the challenges associated with traditional backup technologies through its Managed Backup and Recovery service. LightEdge Solutions has partnered with EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, to provide a next generation disk-based backup and recovery solution which can fit into the budget of any small or medium-sized business.
LightEdge’s Managed Backup and Recovery service is built on the EMC Avamar platform, which is a complete disk-based solution — but with a fundamental difference. Avamar is unique in the market because it uses source-based data de-duplication, which dramatically reduces the amount of redundant data that is transferred across the network and ultimately retained in the backup process. With data de-duplication, Avamar automatically identifies and removes redundant data from the backup process before sending it over an IP network to Avamar Data Stores located in multiple LightEdge datacenters. In many instances, it can reduce the required bandwidth by up to 500 times. So depending on the size of the customer’s data set and available bandwidth, this makes WAN- and Internet-based backups a viable option.
The bottom-line is LightEdge’s Managed Backup and Recovery service is a facilities-based solution that truly alters the fundamental economics of storage by offering a completely managed, professionally engineered disk-based platform for less than storage to tape. From an operational perspective, the service increases reliability, reduces risk of data loss through offsite storage, eliminates the need for insecure vaulting and transforms the entire backup process into a scheduled electronic event with monitoring and verification.
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