As data and legal regulations proliferate, often in seemingly equal
amounts, across every industry, some companies, particularly
smaller firms, are finding that the best way to manage the sprawl
is to hand the reins to someone else. And though industry experts
say it remains unclear just where the backup outsourcing market is
headed in general, the users who have chosen it say they swear by
it.
According to Thomas Trillo, chief operating officer for
Ridgefield Capital, a hedge fund that registered with the
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under the Investment
Advisor's Act of 1940 after new guidelines went into effect in
February (see
Hedge funds snub SEC email archiving rule ) his firm soon found
itself overwhelmed by compliance requirements for its data.
"When we chose to become a registered investment advisor, we
found that the SEC required us to be much more diligent about
backup and disaster recovery," Trillo said, whose duties with his
firm also put him in charge of marketing, investor relations and
human resources, as well as systems and technology administration.
"Managing that to the SEC's satisfaction would be a full-time job
for someone like myself, and I'm already a jack-of-all trades
guy."
Ridgefield Capital explored several options for outsourcing firms,
finally going with Eze Castle Integration, which specialises in
off-site
backup and
disaster recovery for the financial market.
Another appeal to Eze Castle besides its expertise in
Ridgefield's particular industry, Trillo said, was the size of
the company. Eze Castle has over 260 clients, according to its
Web site and has locations in Boston, New York, London, San
Francisco and Stanford, Conn.
Ridgefield Capital stores 150
GB of data offsite with Eze Castle's data centre in Boston; the
company also outsources management of its entire IT infrastructure,
including hardware and software purchases, to Eze Castle as
well.
"Some people look at outsourcing as a risk because you're
putting all your eggs in one basket, but we felt it was prudent to
have one service provider for the sake of convenience and cost
management," Trillo said.
But, he said, "The bottom line is that as a hedge fund, our
focus is trading and investing. Eze Castle has IT expertise we
never will, and we also benefit from their economies of scale when
it comes [to] doing hardware and software purchases through
them."
Data growth and lost laptops: Two more reasons to
outsource
For organisations both large and small, sheer data growth and
the burgeoning amount of data kept on devices, such as laptops, are
the other main factors that makes outsourcing backups a more
appealing option.
For small companies like North Carolina-based Strahan Associates
Architects, outsourcing backup has become the only viable option
when the growth of critical data has come up against a lack of
internal IT resources.
"We have seven people in our office total, and I'm the de facto
IT guy," said Strahan engineer Chuck Ladd. Previously, Strahan had
been sending critical data to a removable
Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) disk that plugged into a
Windows 2000 server. That data was only up to 41 GB in incremental
backups a day, but as more and more architectural data that
previously had been kept on paper, such as
computer-aided design (CAD) drawings, are
put onto electronic storage, that amount was only growing, Ladd
said.
"And even if we don't have a lot of data, our critical data is
crucial," Ladd said. "We absolutely can't operate for a minute
without it."
It had formerly been Ladd's responsibility to shut the server
down, remove the disk and take the disk to a safe-deposit box every
week.
"Murphy's Law says that if we have a failure, it's going to
happen on a Thursday because that's the day before I usually swap
the disk out," Ladd said. "We realised we just couldn't rely on
swapping out that disk anymore."
This past January, Strahan Associates decided to outsource its
backup with Arsenal Digital Solutions Inc.'s ViaRemote service,
which pulls data offsite through the firm's cable modem and stores
it at a data centre in Raleigh, N.C.
Ladd said he estimates the outsourced backup service saves the
firm $600 per month on the labour time it saves him alone, as well
as the downtime required to shut down the company's server and swap
out the removable disk.
"That's more than it costs us per month for the service," said
Ladd. "So it took us literally no time to recover the cost."
Click here for page 2,
Midsized companies reach out for backup help.