InformationWeek

By Richard Adhikari

teve Drohan has a new way to back up data from the notebooks used by his company's 300 salespeople: the Internet.

Drohan, a project manager at LightScan Inc., a Milpitas, Calif., unit of Johnson & Johnson that makes medical meters, uses a backup service called ImageStor from McAfee Associates Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif. ImageStor lets clients back up data over the Internet for about $45 for 40 Mbytes of storage per user per year.

Backing up data to service providers over the Internet for a fee was a practice once limited to individual users and small-office/home-office (SOHO) clients. But it's now catching on in corporate America, too. Companies have long struggled to convince staff in the field to back up their notebook data. The Internet makes that easier, and relatively cheap. Better yet, new software offered by service providers lets users restore their files themselves instead of calling on the IS department for help.

Sensing a lucrative oppo rtunity, Internet backup service providers are expanding into the corporate market. Competition will get keener: The backup providers are teaming with Internet service providers and telephone companies.

The technology isn't perfect. Some analysts and users warn the procedure has drawbacks. For one, Internet connections are often interrupted. For another, service providers' willingness to burn stored data on a CD-ROM on user request is giving corporate IS nightmares about the potential for stolen data.

Still, using the Net for backup should help get field sales staff to back up data from their notebooks. "Sales guys don't do anything they don't want to," says Brian Hendrickson, a network systems administrator at Andataco Corp., a network-storage vendor in San Diego.

Also, IS groups have spent a lot more time and energy building backup systems for servers than they have field machines. "Data on the servers is growing at a faster rate than technology can handle," says Mark Nicolett, a research a nalyst at Gartner Group Inc., an IT advisory firm in Stamford, Conn. "Backing up data on laptops is too difficult because mobile workers don't have fixed schedules for coming into the office and IS can't fit them into its routine." He adds that the ideal backup process will be "automated and invisible."

Do-It-Yourself
That's where services like those offered by vendors such as Connected, HotWire Data Security, and SafeGuard Interactive encourage users to perform their own backups ( see table in a new window ). Corporate IS only has to do the initial backup of all files on a user's laptop, then install the service provider's client software. Subsequent backups are incremental, meaning that only changes in files or new files are backed up. The client software takes care of everything once the user clicks on the appropriate button.

At LightScan, for example, sales staff pull down the McAfee menu, point to the backup or restore button on McAfee's WebStor clien t backup software that's installed on their notebooks, and click. The software takes care of everything else. Drohan says it takes salesmen just five to 15 minutes to do an incremental backup or to restore individual files.

Curing A Headache
Backing up data to a third-party provider over the Internet also gets rid of another corporate IS headache: storage management. "For every dollar you spend on one megabyte of storage, you spend $4 to $5 worth of overhead managing it," says Anders Lofgren, an analyst at Giga Information Group, a market research firm in Cambridge, Mass.

Backing up data on corporate notebooks only adds to the storage management burden, something IS is happy to avoid. For example, Gene Gaines, a St. Lambert, Quebec, telecommunications consultant whose clients include major Wall Street firms, used to spend hours every week backing up and managing data on about 30 tapes and 500 diskettes.

Now, he's handed all that off to SafeGuard Interactive, in Pittsburgh, for a bout $10 a month and uses the time saved to generate more business. He backs his data up to SafeGuard's servers every night using SafeGuard's netTape backup and retrieval software over a cable modem link to the Internet. "I'm very pleased with the idea of selling my storage-management problem to someone else," says Gaines.

Another IS issue of concern: data reliability. There's no point paying money to store data on a server if it can't be restored easily or will be lost when the service provider goes out of business. Gaines, who has worked in corporate data centers for years and describes himself as "paranoid about backup," has restored data from SafeGuard's servers "about 10 times at least" to see if the process works. So far, he's had no problems.

SafeGuard and other companies that offer backup services over the Internet maintain mirrored servers to enhance their reliability. On request, they will cut a CD-ROM with a customer's data on it so customers can have all their data back at any time. The going price is about $25 per CD-ROM.

Quality of service, reliability, the ability to outsource storage management, and the low cost of service-anywhere from pennies to just over $1 per megabyte per year-has led companies to look at using backup services over the Internet. Many service providers, which began by tackling the individual and SOHO markets, are now eyeing corporate clients, too.

Take Connected Corp. in Framingham, Mass. When the company launched its DataSafe product in May 1996, Howard Marson, the company's VP of business development, targeted "any company that doesn't have in-house IS support," adding, "Connected wants to be their virtual IS department." Now Connected is working on corporate clients. It's released Version 2 of DataSafe, renamed it Connected Online Backup, and has added T3 (45 Mbps) and higher bandwidth lines to accommodate corporate users.

Scrambling For Market Share
Telephone companies and Internet service providers (ISPs) are also scrambling for a piece of the action. Pac-West Telecomm Inc., which serves ISPs in California, signed a deal with SafeGuard in May that will let Pac-West's clients offer SafeGuard's netTape software directly to customers. More ISPs are likely to follow suit. "The key to the Internet is the ISP," says Michael Peterson, president of Strategic Research Corp., storage industry specialists in Santa Barbara, Calif. Backup over the Internet, he adds, is a "beautiful value-add service for the ISP."

In fact, competition is so keen that while players say it's growing, they're all refusing to quote statistics. "It's so cutthroat that nobody wants to be the first to throw numbers out," says Keith Franz, VP of sales at SafeGuard.

Backing up data over the Internet can be difficult. One big problem is poor Internet connections. "It's difficult to establish an Internet connection reliably and without interruption," says Tim Sloane, director of Internet research at Aberdeen Group Inc., market consultants in Boston. "You may have to ca ncel the connection and retry."

Andataco's Hendrickson, who uses Connected Online Backup to support 75 of his company's mobile salespeople, says workers have sometimes had to wait as long as 45 minutes to send files as small as 200 Kbytes. "You know the Internet," he says, "it's wait, wait, wait until the route's free."

Another worry springs from the service providers' willingness to create CD-ROMs containing their stored data. Hendrickson, for one, is uncomfortable with the idea. "What's to stop a sales guy who's leaving from calling up and getting a CD burned and taking that data with him?" he asks.

To prevent that from happening, Hendrickson has arranged with Connected to wait for clearance from him or two other Andataco IS staff before burning CD-ROMs on request for his users.

These problems don't matter much to LightScan's Drohan. "It's been great," he says. "We've had the data backed up, I don't have to worry about hiring more staff or running out of disk space. It's secure on McAfee' s site, they're responsible for it, and it's up seven days a week, 24 hours a day."

With that kind of reaction, it looks like backing up over the Internet is here to stay.

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