Cloud computing is getting a lot of attention in the media. Rightfully so: as Internet access bandwidth capacities go up, and the cost goes down, it’s tempting to consider just how many IT services can take advantage of this scalable approach to computing.

Applying the latest in cloud storage principles to the tedious task of data retention offers some tangible benefits: a reduction in capital expenditure on local storage, and of course the manpower to manage backups. And it can eliminate the ‘human error’ component of managing local data retention locally. But with a client’s critical data at risk, you need a bullet-proof strategy before you ditch those tape drives.

The strategy that we recommend for our VAR and MSP partners focuses on establishing a data lifecycle for their clients’ data. In this era of stringent regulatory compliance, many organizations must retain data well beyond the date at which it ceases to be operationally important. So we work with them to define a ‘data lifecycle’. This enables us to institute a process that identifies and migrates ‘legacy’ data from costly online storage to more cost-effective storage. And that’s where cloud-base storage offers a cost-effective solution.

The trick is understanding how to manage data through its lifecycle, as it ages from operationally critical, to legacy/stagnant, and finally to destruction. An automated tiered-storage backup approach can manage these lifecycle transitions, and satisfy the demands of healthcare, financial services and other highly regulated and data-intensive businesses.

VARs, MSPs and trusted IT advisors can create revenue opportunities with cloud-based online data protection services, including these new tiered-storage services. Adding online backup services to your line-up means you can offer your clients peace of mind with respect to their business continuity protection, while creating long-term relationships and multi-year annuity revenue streams for your business.

To learn more, sign up for our May 28 webinar with SMB Nation: LINK

Tomorrow, Dave Minns, our trusty client services manager, is presenting at the ASCII “Reseller Success Summit” in Washington DC. His mission is to help our channel partners turn stagnant data into new revenue streams. Come on down if you’re in the area! The event is free to VARs and MSPs.

WHAT: ASCII Group Reseller Success Summit
WHERE: Hilton Washington Dulles Airport
WHEN: Thursday, April 23, 2009. 8:00 AM – 5:30 PM

Attend Dave’s seminar and you will learn:
• why is there a ‘data tsunami’ on its way to most businesses
• how to identify SMB customers that need guidance with backup strategies
• the fundamentals of the data lifecycle management
• why most business information is ‘stagnant’ and how to identify it
• how to transition your clients to a ‘tiered storage’ approach to offsite data protection

Sign up here. This event is free to resellers, VARs and MSPs.

We announced our new VAR program this morning. Contact us to find out how you can turn your clients’ stagnant data into a recurring revenue stream!

Storage Guardian Enables VARs and Managed Service Providers to Transform Stagnant Data Into Revenue Streams

Resellers can create annuity revenue by adding profitable online data backup, optimized for small-to-midsized businesses, to their suite of services

VARs and managed service providers that cater to the needs of small and midsized businesses (SMBs) can now add online data backup, business continuity protection and information lifecycle management to their list of managed IT services. By offering an enterprise-grade online backup service through Storage Guardian’s VAR program, MSPs can create profitable annuity revenue streams by helping their clients avoid costly downtime. 

Many SMBs need guidance with the complex problem of data backup. Data volumes are on the rise, security and regulation requirements (such as SoX, HIPPA, FRCP) mandate more rigorous data handling, and the typical SMB internal IT resources can struggle to keep pace. To address these needs, solutions providers can partner with Storage Guardian and its profitable online backup and storage solutions that feature tiered storage. Storage Guardian provides its reseller partners with training, tools and support so that they can sell, install and monetize an ongoing revenue stream that complements their existing set of services.

Storage Guardian’s approach recognizes that the value of information stored on most computers decreases as time goes by. Working with its channel partners Storage Guardian formulates a data retention strategy based on backup lifecycle management, which categorizes data on a scale that ranges from ‘operationally critical’ to ‘stagnant’.

“We like to tell our MSP partners that they can turn stagnant data into a new revenue stream. As much as 80 percent of data that is backed up is never going to change, and yet many online backup services treat it (and charge for it) like operationally critical data,” says Dave Minns, client services manager at Storage Guardian. “We can apply our expertise and decide whether to locate it on ‘highly available’ storage or less costly offline storage. In either case, the MSP’s client is assured of bullet-proof data protection and fast recovery.”

With more than ten years of experience and hundreds of satisfied customers, Storage Guardian remote data backup service has established itself as a dependable provider of enterprise-grade online backup technology for smaller companies. What sets it apart from the many low-cost alternatives in the market are online data backup features optimized for businesses that depend on servers—nowadays, that’s most SMBs. Storage Guardian’s enterprise-grade online backup technology is designed to complement Exchange, Small Business Server, SharePoint Server, and Active Directory.

A no-cost 30-day trial is available here: http://www.storageguardian.com/free_trial.php.

Storage Guardian’s online tiered storage backup:

• Reduces cost of storage infrastructure

• Includes web search and retrieval in the restore and recovery process

• Archives data to a common source

• Offers automated or on-demand destruction of data

• Provides audit documentation that confirms destruction

Today we announced our new tiered-storage pricing, designed to make online data backup more affordable for small-to-midsized businesses. Here’s the news release we issued:

Remote data backup provider, Storage Guardian, announces new pricing model with the potential to reduce storage costs by 80 percent. SMBs can now protect and backup critical data to ensure minimal downtime after a disk crash or other data loss catastrophe 

As someone who is very familiar with the costs incurred by small and midsized businesses (SMBs) due to lack of planning or insufficient data backup strategies, Dave Minns of Storage Guardian urges business owners and IT professionals to get serious about protecting their precious corporate data in 2009. With Storage Guardian’s new remote data backup pricing model, which can reduce monthly backup costs by 80 percent, is making it even easier for SMBs to take advantage of the latest in enterprise-grade online data backup.

Until now, ‘highly available’ online backup has had a reputation for being beyond the reach of most SMBs, which led to many of them depending on risky onsite tape-based backup approaches or ‘consumer-grade’ online backup. For many SMBs, the decision to not use a robust online solution that guarantees a full data restore is often driven by the cost of ‘highly available’ online backup storage. To address this, Storage Guardian has created a hybrid model whereby ‘highly available’ storage is blended with a tiered-storage approach that features intelligent backup lifecycle management. This can reduce the cost per stored gigabyte to around 60 cents.

 “What we see is that many SMBs,” says Dave Minns, at Storage Guardian. “Our new pricing model means that SMBs can now afford to make the jump to enterprise-grade online backup, and benefit from a backup system that is specifically geared to the unique needs of companies that use Exchange, Small Business Server, SharePoint Server, and Active Directory.”

A no-cost 30-day trial is available here: http://www.storageguardian.com/free_trial.php. 

With more than ten years of experience and hundreds of satisfied customers, Storage Guardian remote data backup service has established itself as a dependable provider of enterprise-grade online backup technology for smaller companies. What sets it apart from the many low-cost alternatives in the market are online data backup features optimized for businesses that depend on servers (nowadays, that’s most SMBs):

• A tiered-storage approach that includes a) a local backup of first-generation data; b) a highly available second tier of online backup; c) a third tier of near-line backups of mature data (typically backups that have aged past 90 days.

•  Convenience and flexibility are two crucial considerations when a major data restore is needed. Storage Guardian offers the ability to perform a “bare metal restore” to a completely different computer.

•  To save time, the initial backup is performed on an external drive that is shipped to the Storage Guardian. Similarly, if a major restore is needed, Storage Guardian can overnight-courier an external drive containing crucial data.

• Storage Guardian’s ultra-secure online backup technology uses AES 256-bit encryption PLUS hardware authentication.

• Storage Guardian can restore individual mail boxes and contacts from MS Exchange and Outlook.

Hi, I’m David Chernicoff, senior contributing editor for the Windows IT Pro magazine, and author of our monthly storage update newsletter. A few words about the pros and cons of internet-based data protection, and that is backing up your local servers to a remote storage site via the internet. What we are talking about here is data protection as a service. In the traditional data protection model, a significant portion of available IT resources are dedicated to backing up the data stored in the corporate servers, plus dealing with the major user support issues that exist in restoring lost data to end users.

Additionally, many businesses need to deal with the issue of regulatory compliance as related to data backup. Add all these issues together, and other common backup and restorative issues, and it is easy to see why the costs of data protection take an ever-bigger chunk out of the IT budget. I’m not going to go into details of how traditional backup is done, rather we’ll focus on how a good data protection service can be of value to your enterprise. Subscribing to a backup service means that you can deliver the same backup and restore capabilities to all sites within your organization. The roll-out process for the service is much simpler than that normally encountered for such a major component of your infrastructure. Some services offer an appliance that needs to be installed at each site, others are even simpler with just software components that need to be installed on a server that already exists at each site.

Regardless of the technical methodology used to back up the data, the key is that the data is aggregated to a local server, then moved to a secure location via the internet. Data backup services are available to provide protection for both client and server, and they can be used to protect applications such as Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft Sequel Server. If you have the bandwidth to support a backup service, they are an excellent alternative to the traditional corporate backup methodology, and if you’re implementing a new backup solution, they are well worth your consideration.

When selecting a backup service provider, you need to find one that matches your needs. Don’t settle for a vendor who can only provide support for part of your infrastructure. If you are an exchange user, your solution provider should offer backup and restorative exchange server. Ideally, you should be able to restore individual mailboxes and individual messages, and not have to recreate entire servers just to restore a few messages. If you are a Sequel Server user, and your data set is of a practical size to be backed up remotely, then your provider should have sequel server support, and you should be able to configure your backup settings quickly and easily, without requiring input from the vendor.

If your business environment supports multiple operating systems, such as Windows and Unix, your provider should be able to handle all the operating systems you need to support. Overall, the backup components should be smart, doing file duplications so that multiple copies of the same data are backed up only once, rather than for every instance, reducing the amount of bandwidth needed for backup, as well as the space needed to store your data. Other bandwidth optimization should be also available, depending upon your specific circumstances.

And lastly, though it is still one of the major decision points in selecting a service, is the ease of restore. Your vendor should be able to provide a consult or an application that allows IT to restore any data that has been backed up without jumping through any special hoops just to get their data back. Make sure that you understand your backup requirements prior to evaluating a data protection service. You’ll be much better served if you know exactly what you need when going in to the project.

Hi, this is Ben Smith. I want to spend a few minutes talking with you today about a new way to doing something you’re pretty used to doing in IT. Now, in IT we’ve never been short on buzz. The problem is, for each innovation that’s buzzworthy, two prove to be just buzz words, and are forgotten within months. Software as a service is currently generating a lot of buzz. What I’d like to talk to you about today, is a specific application of software services, and that’s storage. Now, we’re used to thinking about storage as hardware: hard discs, CD-ROM media, tape backup devices and the like, but with a dramatic increase in the availability of high bandwidth, low latency internet connections, and the decrease in the cost of that bandwidth, it’s time to start thinking about storage as a service that’s delivered through software.

In particular, storage services are ready-made for common types of secondary storage, like backup and archive, that typically only the largest businesses can afford. Think of it this way – your users continue to use their computers the way that they’re used to, but in the background their data is being backed up to a secure database that’s online. If the data is erased, or the user’s hardware should fail, the data can be easily restored, even if the user never comes to the main office.

The three factors that really make storage services buzzworthy for small and medium businesses: the pain that comes with infrastructure, the expansion of the traditional office, and the benefits of having best of re-technology and experts to operate it. Now, infrastructure is one of those things that everyone appreciates, but few people ever really see the price tag. When thinking about storage, or backup and archive, the infrastructure costs in hardware and remote access technologies can be cost prohibitive capital expenses. Further, infrastructure scales poorly, and is rarely agile at reasonable price points. Storage services, on the other hand, can be provisioned and deprovisioned as the business needs change.

The idea of the traditional central office is becoming more or less a quaint memory. The modern office has users that are more or less nomads. Desktop computers are making way for laptops. Me, for instance – I haven’t had a desktop computer at work for over five years. Branch offices are increasingly becoming the norm in business. Online storage services uniquely integrate into a world where data is as mobile as the users who create it. It’s always on, always working seamlessly to allow the users to work in the way that they want to work, not where they have to work. As expensive as infrastructure is, most of the time getting the expertise to operate it is even more expensive, and often quite elusive.

Software as a service allows everyone to get 24 by 7 IT experts managing and monitoring state-of-the-art hardware, without having to locate and staff it themselves. So for storage as a service, your business can have people that eat, sleep and drink storage, on a virtual IT team. Storage as a service is really something that’s worth the buzz that it’s generating today. Not only do storage services enable a modern workforce to work the way they want to, storage services do it in a way that makes good fiscal sense for businesses of all size, particularly the ones that want to be agile.

Hi, I’m David Chernicoff, senior contributing editor for Windows IT Pro magazine. In this post I’ll be discussing the issue of regulatory compliance and storage policies. In industries where regulatory compliance is an issue, be it regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, or SEC rule 17-4A, maintaining control over the storage used by all users and applications is critical. Failing to meet the requirements as outlined by such regulations can result in civil penalties involving significant fines, and it’s even possible, in some situations, to face criminal litigation. In general, the regulatory requirements fall into two categories: access and retention. Access control is usual the easier of the two requirements to meet. In these cases, there are specific categories of users who are authorized to access data.

This fits in well with the traditional model of network access control. Network administrators are used to setting up user accounts with limited access privileges, and features such as group policies and active directory in Windows server, are common examples of how access control policies are implemented to assure that only authorized users have access to data that is protected by governmental regulations. In small businesses however, data retention can quickly become a problem. For example, a small financial office that does a lot of communication by email may generate a gigabyte of data that falls into the regulatory retention requirement, per user, per year, and need to retain the email communications such generated by the traffic, for an extended period of time.

Now, retaining 20 or 30 gigabytes of data for a few years may not sound like much of a challenge, I suggest actually you go and try to find an email conversation generated two years ago, if you don’t have an existing backup and retention policy in place that is designed to allow you to do just that. Consider also the plight of the small to medium sized health care provider. HIPAA requirements on the security and access controls on patient data are very strict, and need to be maintained for long periods of time. This is an area where the services of a backup service provider can really shine for small businesses, especially medical, financial services, real estate, investment trust businesses, and any other that has specific storage retention requirements.

A first-tier backup service provider isn’t just going to offer to back up your server data, they will offer a complete backup lifecycle management solution, which is something that small and medium sized businesses often overlook or ignore when looking to protect their data. It gets overlooked because smaller businesses usually don’t have the IT expertise in house that can identify their storage processes as candidate for such solutions. Or it gets ignored because the cost of implementing such solutions, especially in house, can be prohibitively expensive for a small business.

By utilizing a storage service provider, implement a full scale storage lifecycle management program, a business can get the benefits of having their recent data immediately available for restoration, and older data moved to near-line or offline storage, giving them the option of less expensive storage, while still meeting the regulatory requirements, without the need for any up-front expenditures that can make a significant dent in an IT budget.

And it’s also important to note that the service backup provider can scale what the business needs, so the next customer is never in the position of being unable to meet the regulatory responsibilities due to a lack of internal hardware or backup capability. The business itself can then focus on their business model, without worrying their backup infrastructure is a potential future problem.

Welcome to the Storage Guardian blog. We will be offering news, tips and articles about safeguarding your data. We look forward to providing you with the definitive source of information about data protection.