Remote Office Data Protection

Remote or branch offices are increasingly at the front lines of business - they have the closest contact with customers and partners and therefore have a dramatic impact on the success of the business. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there were more than four million remote offices in the United States alone. Many, if not most, of these offices run autonomously from headquarters and are responsible for managing their own operations - including protecting and retaining the electronic information that they generate. Ignoring the protection and recovery needs of this distributed data is simply not an option.

As companies expand operations into new markets, the percentage of total corporate data in remote offices is increasing. However, many companies are not adequately protecting these assets. It's no wonder - this is a very complicated problem and can be extremely expensive to solve completely, considering all the things that can go wrong with remote office data:

• Accidentally or maliciously deleted files

• Virus, worm or hacker attack

• Corrupted database

• Disk or server crash

• Local or regional disaster

Couple these challenges with the lack of skilled and dedicated IT staff in most remote offices and you can see that there is a great deal of business risk associated with data in these offices.

IBM offers solutions for remote office data protection and recovery that are automated, easy to use and cost-effective. These solutions offer enterprise-class data protection and integrate seamlessly with core data storage management solutions in the data center, such as Tivoli Storage Manager. The IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack family of remote office solutions provide:

• Local, automated, continuous data protection for near-instant recovery of any data asset.

• Selective replication to the data center or other site for remote office disaster recovery, business resiliency, backup consolidation and integration with central data lifecycle management processes.

• Bare Machine Recovery to similar, dissimilar or Virtual systems.

• Granular recovery of individual Microsoft® Exchange e-mail objects.