Backup And Recovery For Remote Workers

Remote workers at most companies are out of luck if their hard drives crash--and so are the businesses they work for. That's because as much as 60% of a company's intelligence is stored on remote users' PCs, analysts say, and almost none of it is backed up.

Keith Burke, IT production response manager at financial-services firm Eaton Vance Management, missed a scheduled call this week because he had a more pressing engagement. Somebody's hard drive had crashed, and Burke had to oversee the installation of a new one. He didn't, however, have to provide solace to a moribund employee crying about lost information. Burke knew all the information would be restored within minutes because the company uses DataProtector with EmailOptimizer from ISV Connected Corp.

Connected is polishing its new EmailOptimizer 7 in an effort to beef up the E-mail capabilities of its remote backup and recovery software. EmailOptimizer is expected to debut later this month. The new version will support up to 20,000 PCs, and it's integrated with Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. In addition, as Connected moves data across the IP network, it will compress the information to 25% of its original size, down from 50% compression in past versions.

That's a big deal for Burke, who wants flat network performance reports, with no spikes in bandwidth consumption. "Any time we can shrink data in half or more, it helps our business because data space is so expensive," he says. "With the next version of EmailOptimizer, I expect such a small file that it won't affect other reports on the network at all."

Though big players such as Legato Systems Inc. are getting into remote backup and recovery, Enterprise Storage Group analyst Peter Gerr says Connected has the most experience protecting data outside the data center. It will make more efficient use of progression algorithms to compress the data in 7. "Increasing volumes, more mobile workers, and many new regulations make it more important than ever to protect E-mail," he says. "Yet most people are just becoming aware of how important remote backup and recovery is."