Johannesburg, 18 Mar 2012
Security giant Symantec has expanded data protection technology for small businesses and virtual environments.
The company unveiled latest versions of its Backup Exec 2012 and NetBackup software, as well as Backup Exec Small Business Edition, and BackupExec.cloud, which provide off-site backup and disaster recovery for SMEs.
According to Herv'e Lequippe, director of regional product management at Symantec, with mounting digital assets and shrinking IT budgets, growing organisations need to find a way to keep costs down without compromising availability of their information.
He explains: “While organisations grow the size of their servers and virtual environments, they are not making the same investment when it comes to their backup infrastructure. Virtualisation is creating complexity in terms of backup and recovery.”
Lequippe says that in order to address this challenge, Symantec has rolled out a series of backup and recovery solutions to enable small and medium-sized companies to back up their data to a hosted environment.
“By 2014, 70% of applications will be virtualised. Yet more than 65% of virtual servers are not protected,” adds Lequippe.
Sheldon Hand, Symantec's CTO, explains that the rise of mobile devices, social networking, virtualisation and cloud computing has spurred the growth of data, which is rising in volume by more than 60% per annum. This comes at a time when organisations struggle to back up and recover already huge volumes of data. In addition, following the global hard disk drive shortage, the cost of storage is also going up.
Hand says organisations need to shift their attention from having a backup plan to focus on having a recovery plan. “The backup is just a consequence of the fact that the organisation needs to recover its data.”
He adds: “With the growing interest in the adoption of virtualisation, many boutique virtualised backup players have emerged, but this creates a challenge for customers because they have to now deploy multiple tools to manage these environments.
“Our vision is for customers to use existing tools they've invested in - a single backup product that can manage both physical and virtual environments. And the new technology we've released with deduplication allows this.”
According to Hand, Backup Exec indexes data as it automatically gets backed up and archived. It provides a consolidated view of all the requirements and creates a workflow process for doing recovery, which reduces complexity.
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