Verio PC Data Backup Prepares SMBs
By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
July 14, 2006 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Nearly one year ago, Hurricane Katrina devastated the north-central Gulf Coast, flooding much of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, killing 1,836 people and racking up $75 billion in damages.
Along with the hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs who watched the destruction of their businesses, many small IT companies found they were ill-prepared for the catastrophe, losing either most or all of their business data.
While natural disasters, particularly Katrina, are often used as arguments for disaster recovery services, a new market for backup services is emerging around similar services not necessarily for hosted information.
Managed services provider Verio (verio.com) recently unveiled its Verio PC Data Backup service to prepare small businesses for disasters by protecting critical data and work documents stored on personal computers connected to a hosted server.
“Eighty percent of small businesses keep their business data on a computer, not on the server,” says Craig Vosburgh, senior product manager for Verio. “It’s in a highly vulnerable situation, and I think we learned from Katrina that you can’t just have an external hard drive on premise serving as your backup because if you lose your premises, you’ve lost not just your primary data but your backup as well.”
Verio partnered with information protection and storage services provider Iron Mountain (ironmountain.com) to deliver the technology that instantly backs up and restores business files and data in mirrored offsite, secure data center facilities.
A recently conducted poll of Verio customers indicated that many small businesses are unaware of the risks of leaving data unprotected, and are more likely to back up critical data if offered flexible pricing options that reinforce their strategies for business growth.
In a separate 2005 study, Gartner reported 78 percent of all small businesses said that of all the services available, backup recovery was most likely the one they would be interested in outsourcing.
“We’re targeting small office and home office businesses,” says Vosburgh. “As the business gets larger and starts expanding beyond 20 PCs in the business, it’s very likely they have a server. This is not a server backup product. There are other products on the market for backing up servers. We’re targeting those 80 percent of small businesses that store their business data on a PC or laptop.”
The Internet-based PC Data Backup solution protects businesses from data loss due to hard disk drive failure, data corruption, virus infections or accidental deletion.
The user interface enables business owners to back up one or more PC laptops and desktops simultaneously and to watch backups as they are being processed. Users can also be confident in knowing that government-level encryption is used during transmission and storage.
Verio’s PC Data Backup provides a cost-effective data backup solution for small businesses and home-based business users with limited IT budgets and scarce resources, whether they are aware of it or not.
Vosburgh says the company hopes to build a greater awareness for the solution among its current and prospective customers.
“In our own survey of our customer base,” says Vosburgh, “most of them said they hadn’t really thought about [investing in a data backup solution] but once they thought about it, they felt like they needed it right away. The second most important criteria for them is that it would have to be from a company that they trust.”
