Iron Mountain Brings Enterprise-Proven, Budget-Friendly, Cloud-Based Backup to SMBs

fact sheet Vendor: Iron Mountain Incorporated (www.ironmountain.com) Vendor's Information: About Iron Mountain vendor resources Online Server Backup — Checklist for Your Small Business Join IDG senior editor, Jim Malone as he examines how small businesses can save time, money, and IT resources by selecting the right online backup solution. Joining Jim will be Jackie Sue, Product Marketing Director from Iron Mountain, who will be debuting LiveVault® SBP. Learn how this easy-to-use web-based interface allows you to backup your data quickly and securely.  Skip the Disk The demand for data storage is exploding, which is driving up costs, increasing the risks of data loss or exposure, and complicating plans for diaster recovery. To cope, organizations are turning to cloud-based storage for relief. This whitepaper explores the benefits of moving to the cloud and how to select the right cloud storage service provider. Achieving Security with Cloud Data Protection This white paper explains how organizations can achieve security with cloud data protection to protect their vital data and reduce the costs, risks and complexity of protecting business information. Information Management and the Cloud Explore how to break the endless cycle of data management and examine the fundamental shift to information management in the cloud to reduce costs and risks of data growth. Is Online Server Backup Appropriate for Your Business? Read this whitepaper to examine the setbacks of traditional backup, gain a better understanding of online backup, and discover why Iron Mountain's LiveVault backup and restore solution provides ideal server backup for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as enterprises with remote locations. How to Compare Server Online Backup and Recovery Service Providers IT professionals are increasingly looking to online backup and recovery services for server data protection. This is particularly true for small to medium-sized businesses and for remote offices of larger enterprises. This white paper helps companies recognize the major categories of service providers offering online backup and recovery specifically for servers. Why the Cloud: Top 10 Reasons Cloud server backup solutions reduce the burden of tape management and backup operations headaches, by automatically storing the data safely offsite to protect for disaster recovery purposes. This white paper discusses the top ten reasons why organizations are turning to cloud server backup to encourage you to examine your own data protection strategies. How to Measure ROI for Online Server Backup and Recovery This white paper helps managers demonstrate the profitability of reducing operational costs in server backup and recovery through investment in cloud server data protection, rather than traditional backup methods.

As businesses of every size begin to think about and experiment with cloud computing, use of the cloud to backup server and application data is emerging as one of the more popular applications of the technology. The use of third-party cloud storage to store off-site copies of data is expected to increase nearly 40 percent by 2012, according to Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

Cloud computing simplifies backup for small businesses, many of which now understand how important data is to the health of their business. ESG found that 53 percent of companies with less than 25 servers could tolerate one hour or less of downtime before experiencing significant revenue loss or other adverse business impact, and another 19 percent could withstand one to three hours of downtime.

Webcast: Skip the Disk, Move to the Cloud Data protection has evolved from a disk-to-tape to a disk-to-disk paradigm over the last few years. However, as cloud services have matured, a new model has emerged — one that allows organizations to "skip the disk" and leapfrog to the cloud with a disk-to-cloud or disk-to-disk-to-cloud approach. Join Lauren Whitehouse, ESG Senior Analyst, for this live webcast to explore why cloud backup is fast becoming the next-generation solution to meet your company's data protection needs and learn how you, too, can "skip the disk" and make the cloud part of your data protection strategy. td>

For small businesses in highly regulated or litigious industries like healthcare or financial services, the stakes are even higher. They need to maintain data for years in order to comply with industry or government regulations, and they need to retrieve and place legal holds on records that may be needed for litigation.

Iron Mountain's LiveVault® is a fully managed, cloud-based server backup solution developed by a company with more than a decade of experience in cloud backup, storage, and retrieval, and outfitted with the affordability and ease of use that appeals to small and medium-sized businesses.

For small businesses that want to concentrate on their core business and leave the complex, error-prone backup process to others, LiveVault's automation and easy-to-use Web user interface means they don't need to spend time upgrading or mastering new software.

Most backup software vendors provide training sessions that run up to two or three days to teach IT administrators how to use their software properly. Iron Mountain designed LiveVault to be so intuitive that it requires no training, said Jackie Su, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Data Protection and Recovery at Iron Mountain.

The LiveVault Web Management Portal lets users manage and monitor the entire data protection workflow including backup, off-site storage, archiving, and recovery from any Web browser. Users can use the portal to create customized backup policies, check status, delegate responsibilities, and initiate restore operations. It features role-based access control so users can define access levels for various user classes.

LiveVault is a fully managed solution with proactive administration and monitoring, which means it keeps users abreast of issues that need attention and frees them from maintenance and patching and the other daily tasks of server and application management.

Iron Mountain also designed LiveVault pricing to appeal to small businesses. Instead of charging by the gigabyte like other cloud-based backup providers, LiveVault uses server-based pricing (SBP). SBP lets LiveVault customers pay a fixed price, charged by the server, banded by capacity tiers.

Su compares per-gigabyte pricing plans to old cell phone plans that charged by the minute. During a busy month or a period of growth, per-gigabyte pricing plans can lead to a very unpleasant surprise to customers.

"It doesn't matter if it's an SMB or a larger company," Su said. "Their data is growing like weeds; but their bills for backup and storage are growing like weeds too. SBP is a simple, affordable, and predictable pricing plan designed to alleviate this pain. It's an enterprise-proven solution, packaged and priced for SMB."

How It Works

LiveVault performs backups automatically and continuously, protecting data as it is created. The data is transferred over the Internet or through a private network connection to a high-security, off-site, mirrored Iron Mountain data center without manual IT intervention.

All LiveVault data is encrypted at the source using 256-bit AES encryption with a unique key. For an additional layer of protection, the server backup and recovery solution uses the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol to establish a secure, resilient communication tunnel to the Iron Mountain data center.

LiveVault's continuous backup delivers point-in-time recovery, providing nearly 100 recovery points daily. When it's time to recover data, users select the data to recover from a catalog of archived file versions and LiveVault automatically restores the data. Recovery can be handled over the wire, or through the shipment of physical media if necessary.

LiveVault uses Iron Mountain's DeltaRestore™ deduplication technology that restores only the data that has changed, preserving bandwidth and making the backup and recovery process more efficient.

Initial seeding of LiveVault backups, as well as large restores like full disaster recovery, can be done with the LiveVault Data Shuttle Service. The service is available to customers on demand by phone, email, or the Web portal.

Customers who adopt Iron Mountain's LiveVault solution will be able to leverage value-added Iron Mountain solutions for archiving and eDiscovery for their businesses, allowing them to manage their information beyond data protection.

A Backup Strategy That Works for You

Many small businesses are accustomed to using cloud-based backup providers that take the data from disk to the cloud (D2C). But increasingly small businesses are looking at the disk-to-disk-to-cloud (D2D2C) backup model, where an on-site cache appliance is the first backup, and then a backup to the cloud is kept to enable disaster recovery and site failures.

LiveVault's optional TurboRestore™ appliance can be kept on-site for D2D backups, then adds the D2D2C backup when it syncs to the cloud backup in the Iron Mountain data centers.

"We're seeing more D2D2C," Su said. "It allows customers to have an on-site backup for most of the restore needs while optimizing the bandwidth utilization"

Whether your small business needs D2D or D2D2C backup, Iron Mountain's LiveVault provides an affordable, easy-to-use, and fully-managed solution that will free up IT resources so they can concentrate on the business. Thanks to a free 30-day trial, potential customers can even take LiveVault for a test drive to see how easy it is to get started with an enterprise-class, dependable system for data backup and restoration.