UK legal firm DFA Law has switched fromtapetoonline backupand recovery to increase
data security and reduce annual costs by 2%.
The Northampton-based law firm is using
Asigra's Televaulting software as a managed service from ICT
services company Smartways.
The law firm said the cost of installing the new system and
running it for the first year was 7% less than the previous
tape-based system.
The move is in line with a trend by small- and medium-sized
companies to move to online backup services, said Adam Couture,
principal analyst at Gartner Research.
Demand for such services has enabled some service providers to
achieve annual growth rates of up to 50%, albeit off a small base,
he said. "Companies are attracted by
service level agreements that guarantee data will be backed up
automatically."
Colin Mitton, IT Manager at DFA Law, said that the new backup
system had enabled the firm to move from weekly to daily backups of
business-critical digital data for a reduced and fixed monthly
cost, including support services.
Mitton said the combination of low maintenance agentless
software and disk-based backup over a
wide area network eliminated staffing requirements and other
costs associated with tape-based systems such as media and drive
maintenance.
"Changing or adding a server used to cost £760 in
software licence costs, but those costs fall away with the new
system because it is agentless, which means no software is
installed on each new server."
Non-quantifiable benefits of the system, said Mitton, included
faster backups, faster data retrieval, continual rather than daily
e-mail backup, greater reliability with no data corruption, and
easier budgeting because of a fixed monthly fee.
A dedicated backup appliance at the DFA Law office automates the
backup of all data on the all the servers connected to the local
network.
The software eliminates duplicate files, and compresses and
encrypts the data before sending it over an ADSL connection to the
Smartways datacentre.
De-duplication means that unchanged files that are still on the
system are sent to the datacentre and are stored only once,
reducing transmission costs.
Computer Weekly's guide to de-duplication discusses the
benefits of data de-duplication, how suppliers' offerings differ,
and what companies should consider if they are considering this
method of data compression.
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