With the renewed focus on security and disaster recovery, information technology (IT) professionals are being challenged to find the best means to comprehensively protect their organization’s data assets. Effectively backing up and managing business-critical information, particularly the growing amount stored on distributed desktop, remote and laptop computers, represents one of the greatest components of this challenge.
Complicating the problem is the fact that while the importance of business information is increasing, so is the difficulty of protecting and keeping it available. This is due, in part, to the increasing data volume on desktop and laptop computers and the increasing complexity of the software and hardware on these machines.
The financial impact of information loss is high. It is costly to recreate lost data and there are significant related costs such as lost productivity and lost opportunity. (Consider the impact of a sales representative losing all customer and prospect contact information on a laptop computer due to a hard disk crash.) In addition, it is costly to keep desktop and laptop computers up and running. Bringing a loaded computer back up to full operation after the loss of operating system software is a complicated and time-consuming process.
Most available storage management and backup software products come up short in providing complete protection for all critical information, especially information stored on desktop and laptop computers. They also come up short in providing comprehensive recovery tools that can easily find and restore lost data, as well as quickly bring desktop and laptop computers to full operation after software or hardware failures.
