When it comes to storage,
small and midsized businesses (SMBs) should
forget about vendors and find a partner they can trust to help
with their buying decisions, said Steve Goodman, vice president
of business continuity for SonicWall Inc., a network security
company in Sunnyvale, Calif.
Goodman founded San Francisco-based Lasso Logic Inc., the SMB
backup and recovery company that was acquired by SonicWall 10
months ago. Before its acquisition, Lasso spent a year and a half
developing
continuous data protection (CDP) and
off-site disaster recovery products specifically tailored for
SMBs.
Storage requirements are getting more complicated, Goodman said.
In a recent interview with SearchStorage.com, he described why
users need to think hard about how to secure their network and how
to protect data.
Lasso Logic started as a company aimed at providing CDP for SMB
customers. Can you tell us about some of your customers and how
they're using your product?Steve Goodman: Well, we're really covering more of the
"S" than the "M." Within that, we're very strong in financial
services, very strong in healthcare and very strong in the legal
field, although generally speaking healthcare and financial
services are the strongest.
For example, one of our customers is a mortgage company based in
Baltimore, National Fidelity Mortgage. They have several of our CDP
boxes spread over their six locations. They're running SQL and
Exchange, including at their branch office "end points." All of
these applications are backing up to SonicWall as a secondary
location -- the box backs up to itself and also to a centralised
location. So if either the box or the facility goes down, the data
is still in the cloud.
Another example is R.E. Grid Power, which bought firewalls from
one of SonicWall's VARs
[value added resellers]. At the time, the VAR
was selling competing backup products, like Veritas, and the
problem the user and the VAR were running into was that they
were dealing with multiple products from multiple vendors. An
SMB depends heavily on its VAR to keep life simple -- and
creating a more simple life often means less vendors. The VAR
was able to install CDP boxes across the power company, and they
already had lost data they've had to recover at several
locations. The thing they say they like about it is, if someone
deletes even a row in a spreadsheet, that end user can get it
back immediately without even calling an IT person. They don't
have to call their VAR either for something minor, like losing
part of a spreadsheet.
It seems like between the 'one throat to choke' concept and
the granularity they're demanding, SMBs are becoming more and more
like enterprise customers. Is that really the case? How are they
still different?
Goodman: SMBs still can't afford enterprise class
systems, of course, but the thing is, they do require 70% to 80% of
the functionality found in enterprise-class products. That's
becoming more necessary as storage and data protection requirements
grow ever higher within that segment. Threats to data are becoming
that much more apparent, and it's now top of mind for business
owners.
This is the most important thing: It needs to be simple. The SMB
doesn't have a team of IT people -- at most maybe two -- but the
large share of users of SonicWall products have zero dedicated IT
people, or they outsource to other companies. Simplicity is the No.
1 driver in this market.
At the end of the day, our appliance is a standard distribution
architecture PC. The secret sauce is in the software. We are a
software more than we are a hardware. We just wrap it up according
to a PC platform, using off-the-shelf stuff. The software side has
much better margins, so we can afford to go further down in price
and still offer SMB customers enterprise-class features, like CDP
and off-site disaster recovery.
Why is the SMB market such a hot one right now? Is it the
last frontier, or are there other forces at work that have
propelled it into the spotlight?
Goodman: Enterprise-class software is a saturated market.
There are only so many customers to go around in the Global 2000 --
and they're all pretty mature when it comes to requirements on the
software side. Meanwhile, as data has grown over the years, across
all industries, the SMB segment is now facing the same challenges
-- maybe even bigger problems -- than the enterprise. For example,
if a virus hits an enterprise network, they have a team of guys to
put out the fire. A smaller company may actually be put out of
business. So NetApp [Network Appliance Inc.], EVault, EMC [Corp.]
and all those guys are seeing that data requirements are exploding,
and SMBs coming to grips with the fact that they need to buy
storage and get into the storage marketplace with those big
companies.
What's your advice to SMB customers as more and more of the
big enterprise storage vendors try to market to them?
Goodman: I hate to hear it, but probably about 25% of the
end customers I talk to don't even have a data protection strategy
in place. There is still a big need to educate customers, that data
protection and business continuance are important.
In the enterprise market, IT people get into religious battles,
like Dell Inc. vs. HP [Hewlett-Packard Co.], SAP vs. PeopleSoft,
things like that -- people very much know who the vendor is and
care about it. Ask a 100-person company about their back-end
system, if they can name it, and most of them can't. The SMB end
user cares less about the brand of product and cares more about the
partnership of the company they're dealing with.
So my first advice to users is to forget about vendors. Go find
a partner -- a VAR, a consultant, a systems integrator-- that you
really trust, that really understands IT generally and the exact
requirements of IT within small and medium businesses. Second, I'd
say it's very clear that the requirements of storage are growing
exponentially across the board, and this makes those purchases more
crucial right now and more complicated. I would urge users to spend
a lot of time thinking about how to secure their network and how to
protect data. How can you ensure, if your building flooded tomorrow
or you lose power, that you are still running the next day? Forget
about productivity for a minute, because productivity comes in lots
of different ways. Worry about protection. After you have
protection, productivity apps are a dime a dozen.
This article originally appeared on
SearchStorage.com.