Symantec Declares Better Backup for All Sized Organizations

Recent study conducted by Symantec in the Middle East found that majority of SMB’s do not properly backup their data

DUBAI, UAE – March 8, 2012– Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced it will deliver a new approach for modernizing backup and recovery for companies small and large in the Middle East, a process that has become unnecessarily complicated and expensive as organizations’ data stores grow exponentially. Compared to traditional backup, Symantec’s approach enables 100 times faster backup, eases management and simplifies recovery if a disaster occurs, helping customers realize significant cost savings while better protecting their business information.  Key components to Symantec’s unique approach to data protection are the new NetBackup 7.5 and Backup Exec 2012 software and cloud solutions are designed to help Symantec’s Middle Eastern customers address backup issues common to companies all over the world.

“Over the last 20 years data has exploded, virtualization has become widely adopted and service level agreements (SLA’s) have become near impossible to meet,” said Johnny Karam, Regional Director, Middle East and North Africa, Symantec. “These challenges also affect small businesses that struggle with implementing a proper approach to data protection.  The current approach to modernization introduces an ever-growing collection of point solutions resulting in added complexity, increased costs and headaches for backup administrators, network administrators and executives.”

According to Symantec’s 2011 SMB’s study done in the Middle East, SMBs are not making disaster preparedness a priority until it is too late. Symantec found that only 34 percent of SMB’s in the Middle East are backing up their data on a daily basis, and out of those 34 percent, 74 percent are incorrectly backing up their data onto CD’s, DVD’s and external hard drives. The survey data reveals that the cost of not being prepared is high, putting a SMB at risk of going out of business.

Symantec urges enterprise and SMB’s alike in the Middle East to understand the importance of backing up their data correctly.  Symantec recently surveyed more than 1,400 IT professionals worldwide on their backup practices and their ability to recover information in the event of a disaster. The findings reveal that traditional approaches to backup are broken and a new approach is vitally needed:

       49 percent of respondents can’t meet service level agreements (SLA’s) due to too much data

       72 percent of respondents would switch backup product if speed doubled

       28 percent say they have too many backup tools

       Organizations average four backup solutions to protect physical systems, and three for virtual

       42 percent of respondents believe that their virtualization backup is not adequately or perfectly working

       More than a third (36 percent) of respondents would not bet their paychecks that 100 percent of backed-up data could be recovered

“Companies in the Middle East need to see backup as a life jacket for all their vital information. They need to be prepared to put on their jacket if a disaster occurs,” said Mr. Karam. The UAE government has taken the lead by making backup mandatory to all their government and financial entities, demonstrating that they understand the importance of managing the public’s information properly.

“Today, Symantec unveils a radical new plan to modernize data protection that will drive out 80 percent of the operating costs associated with backup over the next five years,” said Mr. Karam. “Symantec is announcing a new set of solutions that address the problems in backup – from the most complex of enterprise data centers requiring a true tiered-recovery strategy to the smallest business that needs the confidence that they can easily recover their data.”

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“In the past several years we have seen an acceleration of information growth with our customers, resulting in new challenges in how they protect and recover business critical information.  The proliferation of virtual servers in our customer sites also adds to the data protection complexity,” said Andrew Calthorpe, CEO Condo Protego. “As a channel partner, we turn to Symantec for innovative solutions that allow us to adapt to the growing markets in the Middle East and to address these difficult challenges with our customers, ensuring their most vital asset, their data, is protected.”

Key components to Symantec’s unique approach to data protection are the NetBackup 7.5 and Backup Exec 2012 software and cloud solutions, designed to help Symantec’s more than two million backup customers address backup issues common to companies all over the world.  Symantec’s strategy focuses on the following areas:

        Change the Operating Model of Backup: Symantec’s strategy is to eliminate 80 percent of the operating cost of backup by delivering an integrated platform that replaces multiple solutions typically used in backup today. Symantec backup appliances can drive down costs even more than traditional appliances by combining backup software and deduplication into a single solution supported by a one vendor, that is fast to deploy and easy to manage.  The ability to combine software, appliance and cloud-based backup solutions provides customers greater choice and flexibility.

        Break the Backup Window: 100 times faster backup with NetBackup 7.5, compared to traditional approaches, means organizations can complete full backups at the speed of incremental backups without sacrificing recoverability to meet critical service levels.

        Fight Infinite Retention: Too many organizations keep backups for too long. Knowing when information can be deleted can significantly reduce costs and management burdens on IT.  New backup search capabilities in NetBackup give IT the ability to separate out what is relevant to legal or compliance investigations while keeping the rest of the backup infrastructure running on a more typical 30-60-90 day backup cycle. Infinite retention is infinite waste for IT and infinite risk for legal.

        Unify Snapshots and Backup: A snapshot without NetBackup is just a snapshot.  A snapshot with NetBackup is data protection, manageability and recoverability. Unifying snapshots and backup with NetBackup gives organizations the speed of snapshots with the recoverability of backup.

        Stop Putting Tapes on Trucks: With the help of Symantec NetBackup technology, organizations can modernize their disaster recovery strategies and stop the practice of shipping tapes by truck. Symantec NetBackup Auto Image Replication (AIR) allows customers to eliminate volumes of physical assets and prioritize files that can be sent over the network, while significantly reducing the chance for human error.

        Unite Virtual and Physical Backups: Reduce operating costs around virtualization with patent pending Symantec V-Ray technology that enables organizations to have deeper visibility into their VMware and Hyper-V machines for virtual backups with a single product. Integrated in NetBackup and Backup Exec, V-Ray delivers load balanced virtual machine backups to eliminate backup storms, improve virtual machine performance and reduce storage by deduplicating data everywhere, whether it is on VMware, Hyper-V or physical servers resulting in up to 90 percent storage reduction.

        One Product for Any Recovery:  Symantec provides one solution for all backups whether they are based on tape, disk, or in physical or virtual environments.  Customers can recover any application or system to a virtual machine whether they have the hardware or not. Physical to virtual recovery is now included for free in Backup Exec, simplifying disaster recovery by automatically creating a virtual machine when recovery is needed. New backup to virtual (B2V) technology is also available to accelerate the migration from physical to virtual servers as part of the backup process.

        Eliminate Complexity: Backup Exec has eliminated backup management complexity by simplifying the user interface, utilizing insights from millions of users, policies and licensing.  This allows IT administrators and SMB owners to have a professional data protection strategy without being backup professionals.

        Easy Backup: Symantec introduces Backup Exec Small Business Edition ensuring smaller companies can set-up proper data protection in less than 10 minutes and in three simple steps.  In addition Symantec expands Backup Exec.cloud into Europe providing those customers who prefer a simple, automated and hosted backup offering a reliable, secure solution.