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.