White paper details remote back up best practices

New whitepaper could help firms struggling with data back up challenges

Many firms are struggling to cope with the data back up challenges by the shift towards distributed workforces, remote offices and home working, according to a new whitepaper released yesterday detailing best practices on how to back up data in remote office and branch office (ROBO) environments.

Titled Three Ways to Ensure Trouble-free Remote Backup: Tips for Better Data Protection at Remote and Branch Offices, the free whitepaper from analyst firm StorageIO Group as the amount of data being generated at remote locations continues to grow firms are facing a number of pain points when trying to ensure it is backed up securely.

In particular the report claims that firms are struggling to maintain a regular back up schedule at remote sites; assign necessary bandwidth for back up purposes; train enough IT professionals to ensure back ups function as planned; and scale existing back up systems designed for tape environments to cope with remote workers.

Eran Farajun, Executive Vice President of back up software specialist Asigra, which commissioned the report, argued that many firms were relying on tape-based back up systems for remote locations that are proving ill-suited to the task.

"A lot of companies are still using tape-based solutions for remote locations and that is the crux of the problem," he said. "It means that each remote office is treating itself like a mini datacentre with its own tapes which drives up the cost of ownership. In a lot of cases firms end up not testing the back ups, not taking the tapes offsite and taking ages to back up everything."

The whitepaper recommends that firms should tackle these problems by investigating solutions specifically designed for ROBO environments and, in the case of smaller firms, consider managed services companies that specialise in backing up data from remote locations.

Farajun added that alongside deploying new technologies IT chiefs should also look aim to improve their data and back up management processes to ensure they are not storing data they no longer need. "A lot of companies are managing too much data," he said. "If you are treating three-year-old data in the same way you treat yesterday's data then something is wrong."