You don’t need us to tell you that the backup process gets ever more complex, just as backup windows are shrinking. Or about the commercial pressures that are driving you to find ways to reduce recovery time. You already know all of that.

But how confident are you that your backup provision is up to the job?

Limit your exposure!

If you still rely on old-fashioned tape backups your business could be vulnerable. 30 years of experience has shown us that tape is a familiar technology but it’s one that can also be inflexible, slow and unreliable. Changing tapes takes time. Waiting for backup tapes to be delivered to the recovery server delays the data restore process. What’s more, tape backups don’t always work – which means neither does the recovery.
While tape may appear to be a cheap option, when hidden costs are taken into account the true outlay is almost double. Hidden cost of tape backup

Consider that you’ll need:

• Staff administration time
• Software licences
• Tape device hardware
• Tape media
• Off-site storage
• Retrieval fees
• Hardware and software maintenance

Then there are the obvious security risks in handing over sensitive information to a third party. Think about it. How many news items have you read about tapes containing highly confidential data being lost by ‘man in a van’ outfits? And, as recent events have shown, the logistical problems of transporting tapes when a city is locked down make the system all too fallible.

SunGard’s Electronic Vaulting service eliminates the many problems generally associated with tape backups. Instead, daily back-ups are encrypted and transmitted, either over the internet or via dedicated communications links, directly to disk in a fault tolerant technology centre. This, in turn, is automatically copied to a second geographically separate technology centre, giving true resilience.

It’s the end of lost tapes, corrupted data, laborious tape changes, time-consuming admin and hours of recovery delays waiting for backup tapes to arrive.