Data protection is critical

Your data usage is growing

The volume of data required to manage businesses has grown rapidly over the last decade, driven by widespread use of the internet, e-mail and media-rich applications that most organisations depend on. As early as 2002, International Data Corporation (IDC) projected a dizzying annual data growth rate of 80%. Today, the accelerating pace of data creation, accumulation and distribution is becoming an increasingly common phenomenon among companies throughout the world today. Yet backing up your business data as well as searching for the files you backed up has never been more complex. And hardware upgrades to handle the massive amount of data your business uses may be costing you an excessive amount.

How much is data worth to you?

Viewed from a strategic perspective, your data is at the heart of your business. Contracts, databases, transaction records, proposals, accounting records, marketing material, business contacts, e-mails and, increasingly, photos and video are invaluable business assets that you simply can’t afford to lose. You have invested valuable TIME, MONEY and EFFORT in developing the data on which your business depends on. This value can be measured in a number of ways:

initial cost of data creation and maintenance
cost of re-creation of missing information
opportunity cost incurred through inaccessible data
legal liability with regard to contractual obligations with clients
implications of failing to observe regulatory requirements
damage to your hard-earned reputation if data is unavailable or lost

Backup is mission-critical

However you measure it, reliably backing up data is essential for every organisation. Meanwhile, increasingly complex, competitive and regulated business environments demand it.

Operational efficiencies are driving increasing automation of business processes
The reach and impact of regulatory and best-practice frameworks such as ITIL, Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA is growing relentlessly, with compliance requiring a new focus on data storage
Ever-rising customer and client service expectations require close to 100 percent systems uptime, and close to immediate data recovery
Open, interoperable corporate IT architectures require flexibility and scalability: Backup solutions need to fit into the IT infrastructure, not the other way around

The challenge for successful businesses is to achieve optimum data protection with the minimum of cost overhead.