As connectivity speeds climb, some companies are looking to solve two backup problems at once, gaining off-site protection with predictable reliability and minimal on-premise investment.

‘Being in the middle of London, there were concerns about business continuity,’ says Anthony Billingy, national IT manager for commercial property manager King Sturge LLP.

Five years ago, King Sturge contracted with vendor InTechnology to handle its nightly backups, using a high-speed 100Mbit/s link to the provider’s data centre for nightly incremental backups.

These backup-by-wire services let customers simulate some of the always-available benefits of a continuous data protection scheme, while maintaining the performance-friendly characteristics of nightly, off-peak backup.

‘If your file is backed up at 10pm at night, at five minutes past 10 you can restore that file,’ says Stefan Haase, business manager for InTechnology. The alternative is being forced to wait for a tape-write cycle to finish before retrieving data.

‘We will not totally get rid of tape. It will always have a place, and we need the ability to keep our own yearly archives,’ says Billingy. ‘But we decided for our immediate requirements to get data offsite, and this was great.’