Search
Close this search box.

Author: Tim Anderson

Confidently Move Into Cloud-based Backup & Recovery

Most businesses small and large have many IT needs but one that they continue to focus on as they move into a completely paperless world is data protection and, more specifically, data recovery. They know their current in-house backup and recovery processes are often less than adequate so when they ask hard questions like, “How long can I afford to be without my data?” and “What does losing that data mean to the company and the company’s public reputation?”, they don’t like the answers. But what IT managers are surprised to learn as they look to move to a SaaS offering based on a cloud-based computing architecture for their backup and recovery services, they find there are many options from which to choose.

Read More

Granular Recovery for the Enterprise MS Exchange Environment

Microsoft Exchange email and backup administrators are continually faced with the problem of trying to backup and recover Exchange data in a reasonable amount of time, whether that is to meet a shortening backup window or satisfy new recovery time objectives that call for faster disaster recovery and business continuity. Currently, there are oodles of different backup and recovery applications out there that claim a more simplified approach when performing backup and recovery in a Microsoft Exchange environment. However, most of them use the same basic approach when performing Exchange level data protection.

Read More

Veritas CommandCentral Gives IT Operational And Risk Management a Big Shot in the Arm

As I travel around talking to companies of all sizes, one of the biggest concerns that they have and ask me about is how to drive costs out of their storage environment. Most of them dedicate a certain percentage of their overall IT budgets to counter the exploding growth in their storage environment but, due to the current economic crisis, that budget is now shrinking. My answer to them is always very straightforward, “You need to get a solid handle on what storage is allocated and what is used.

Read More

Dialing up the Right MSP for Online Backup Requires More than just Picking up the Phone

However as the number of MSPs proliferate, the decision about which MSP to dial up gets harder, not easier, since more and more VARs are jumping on the SaaS bandwagon to offer Managed Backup Services. Further, companies need to quantify their own needs and expectations as they select an MSP. Below are some examples of questions that they need to ask and answer internally and externally before making this important decision.

Read More

Companies Leaning on IT Vendors to Provide Them with Remedies to Current Economic Malaise

The general economic malaise of the past few months is not going unnoticed by anyone as it seems every day more companies are cutting back and tightening their belts in anticipation of a lean 2009. Just in the last months, numerous companies including 3M, Dow Chemical, and Hewlett-Packard, just to name a few, have announced cutbacks in staffing. But for those individuals that remain, the task does not get any easier. Most if not all end-users that I talk to are getting a hard push by their IT executives to cut costs as the days of simply purchasing more infrastructure is an unacceptable solution.

Read More

It’s not Impossible to get all the Enterprise Backup & Recovery Features that You Need for Free

Any storage architect or administrator that has ever dared to accept the challenge of engineering or re-designing their company’s backup and recovery environment has undoubtedly discovered that he or she has had to sacrifice functionality or features based on the practical limits of their budget. Reasons for this vary from vendor to vendor, but mostly it comes down to how many backup and recovery software options are they willing to pay for? Most vendors offer reasonably good licensing for the core software, but once you step outside of that realm, some of the most basics features are not included.

Read More

Crafting a Proper Backup & Recovery Service Level Agreement

Anyone who works as an end-user is continually confronted with crafting SLAs for various infrastructure components. Aggravating the situation, once SLAs are signed-off on, it is nearly impossible to make changes without completely rocking the boat so it is extremely important to get it right from day one.

Read More

Click Here to Signup for the DCIG Newsletter!

Categories

DCIG Newsletter Signup

Thank you for your interest in DCIG research and analysis.

Please sign up for the free DCIG Newsletter to have new analysis delivered to your inbox each week.