Tag Archives: Asigra Cloud Backup

BTL Cloud Backup Product Features – Part I

November 1, 2016 Damien Garvey

Cloud backup software has come a long way. Today, the average software has powerful and sophisticated features. One of the best breeds of software in the cloud backup space is Backup Technology Limited (BTL) software. BTL’s software is powered by Asigra, a leading cloud backup enabling company since 1986. The most striking feature of BTL is its agentless architecture. Professional data administrators will always appreciate the advantages of BTL’s software. Security is never compromised, as it comes with encryption key that can save and recover data to and from the vault systems. The complexity and size of problems are thereby minimised; upgrades are centralised from the vault system, and data backup and recovery becomes a streamlined process. Furthermore, licensing is easy to set up, as a single license acquisition takes care of all the future needs of the organisation.

BTL manages file databases intelligently. Every single file of the database is identified and managed by proprietary algorithm, and the end-user can remain completely unaware of the intricacies that enables the backup of different kinds of data files, from multiple operating system environments, using a single interface.

How does all this happen? BTL’s cloud backup technology consists of two components: the DS-Client, and the DS-System. The DS-Client is installed on a dedicated Windows, Macintosh or Linux server and target backup machines are identified. The DS-Client also allows versioning, which means that backups can be available for a quick restore.

Using standard APIs on the target machines, the system automatically logs into the backup system and captures the data securely. The DS-Client, then processes, compresses, encrypts and transmits the data from the target machines using delta blocking and common file elimination technologies, commonly knows as de-duplication. The system is very intelligent in that it runs un-interrupted in the background, segregating corrupted files; correcting them or marking them for re-try at a later date.

The DS-System is at the core of Asigra Cloud Backup technology. It is installed in an enterprise or service provider data center, or in an IaaS cloud. The DS-System efficiently aggregates data from all remote DS-Clients and maintains, manages and validates the online backup repository.
BTL allows the use of Local Restore tool in order to speed up LAN restorations. Depending on your needs, you can use such tools, as:
• Long Term Storage Policy Making Tool — is a discovery tool to automatically ascertain characteristics of primary data, Client and System Monitoring, Email Message Level Restore, Bare Metal Restore capability, and SNMP Integration.
• File Summary Tool — provides both a synopsis and detailed scanned file information. The report is easily modified with several filters allowing a group of files to be specifically analysed.
• LAN Discovery Tool — identifies the characteristics of data, such as when the last time it was accessed, its age, and file size. This will help the user to make business decisions about how they want their data stored and recovered.
In Part II of this series, we will further discuss BTL’s main features in details.

Accessing your Data from Anywhere, Anytime

October 5, 2016 Sam Broadbent

Due to relatively recent advancements in cloud computing technologies, the age of the truly mobile desktop has finally arrived! Indeed, gone are the days when you would have to remember to store every file you were going to need for a business trip on your laptop in order to know that you were fully prepared, or had to access cumbersome, expensive virtual private networks in order to retrieve your data when you were on the go. Nowadays, your PC can sit safely protected at home or at your place of work while you travel, and be fully accessed, including the browsing of applications like Outlook and QuickBooks, from your smart phone or other mobile digital device!

So, how does one take advantage of this amazing new technology? Well, once you find a cloud storage provider that offers this type of service, all it takes is the quick installation of client application software on both your computer and mobile devices and that’s it; all the files from your desktop computer are now available for access and download to and from your portable digital device using nothing more than a simple web-based interface. In fact, once you are linked up, you will be able to use all your PC’s programs and utilities just as if you were back home sitting in front of your computer!

Mobile desktop access includes the ability to send items from your mobile device to your printer back home, or from your PC’s hard drives to a remote printer located wherever you happen to be. Of course, in addition to being able to modify and see PC’s files from your mobile device, you will also be able to cut, copy and paste items to and from your mobile device and your desktop, effectively doing away with the barrier between your desktop and your mobile digital devices! In addition to this, with any quality mobile desktop application, all potential security concerns are null and void, with all transfers to and from your computer and portable devices using bank grade encryption and remote data only becoming accessible after passing high levels of user authentication procedures.

Unfortunately, however, there are still a few snags that one must potentially overcome to get all of this going, the first of which is the requirement of having a desktop that is Windows based and supports Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol, which can be found on most Windows 7 versions. Secondly, for now at least, one’s mobile device must be either an iPhone or iPad, with plans for extending this service to other sorts of devices coming soon. Finally, not all cloud computing or online data backup companies are providing this high-tech service yet, so finding one that does can sometimes prove to be a bit of a challenge.

This is just one of the reasons that we here at Backup Technology Limited (BTL) are proud to offer our cloud backup services. BTL, powered by Asigra, specialises in being one of the few cloud backup and storage providers globally. It offers clients an easy software that installs quickly and uses application that truly carries with it powerful features for the modern day. Businesses, on the go, take advantage of such solutions as data mobilisation has become very important; keeping you connected to all of your digital assets wherever your business might take you. To find out more about BTL, visit www.backup-technology.com

Factors Affecting Backup Consolidation of Laptops, Servers and Endpoints

June 10, 2016 Callum Huddlestone

IT managers want to consolidate backups. They try to bring this project to CIO’s attention at times by writing a reminder on the IT’s whiteboard every year, especially during budget approval. The purpose of this backup consolidation is simple: protection of the data while increasing the speed of data recovery and storage process and reducing costs. However, most of the efforts related to backup consolidation have not been successful, as data continually changes in the organisation. As a result, most of the small to medium sized enterprises have given up hope of utilizing CIO a single consolidated backup solution.

There are numerous problems in data consolidation process especially the lack of a single dominated solution. The data protection system fragments when users implement applications. Nowadays, Cloud is the only remaining hope for the SMEs. Cloud has brought us bespoke services, ensuring the data protection requirements. SMEs are beginning to appreciate the value of the cloud; it has now matured and has evolved into disaster recovery and long term archival in addition to basic backups and data protection. Let us discuss additional points on how cloud backup can help the SMEs to implement useful data protection strategies.

Elements of Change:

The very first thing in the process of consolidation is the historical information about previous fragmentation. Recent technologies have brought several changes in this area.

Following things have forced the IT departments to invent new solutions for data consolidation:

Rapid data growth;
Home/remote offices;
Cloud-based applications;
Demand for faster recovery;
Increased workforce mobility;
Desktop and server vitalisation.

Specialized Applications:

Most companies have got their specialized data recovery options, but they will need to have a single solution if they want to utilize data consolidation. For instance, it would not be a good decision to recover thousands of emails when a few emails are lost. This is why the email database backup and recovery system must know how to recover the desired emails in less time. Modern and specialized backup applications are more useful to generate such results.

The Mobile Workforce:

Today, the Internet has enabled the widespread adoption of “work from home”. A vast number of people are telecommuting, and at times are referred as mobile workforce. Such initiatives save commuting time, reduce Carbon footprint, encourages green thinking, and saves money, and office real estate. Mobile workforce can access data in a network from office or any place with the help of an Internet connection. All this has completely changed the network reach assumed by traditional backup service providers.

Mobile workers usually use laptops, which are not usually protected. If protected at all, it would be done using separate backup solutions. With the proliferation of Smartphones and tablets, a typical mobile worker now has at least three devices — each of which creates data — which are prone to theft and loss. Mobile data has become important and it always needs to be protected. This can be done with the help of specialized data backup option, such as Asigra’s agent less solution.

Consolidation Requirements:

To make backup consolidation successful, it is required to match with modern IT architecture. Following steps will be required for this purpose:

Consolidation should be extensible for innovative dedicated applications. This will help the IT departments to make changes in future in order to create compatibility.
The IT applications should work in all types of environments (high or low bandwidth connectivity). This will enable the system to continue backup process from any source.
It should be efficient to utilize Internet in order to create backups. This will be good if devices or systems are being used outside the area of local network or administrator.
It should recover data quickly, allowing a variety of recovery point and recovery time objectives, with minimal data movement, block data transfer, across LAN and WAN.

Will the Cloud Consolidate Backup Easily?

It leads therefore that the cloud will be able to consolidate backup without any problem. As a matter of fact, cloud has a natural backup system enabling it to work worldwide with various applications. It has excellent tendency to work with low or high bandwidth connection, different computing gadgets, Smartphones and networks.

L.K. Bennett Selects Backup Technology to provide their Asigra Cloud Backup and Recovery Solution

August 28, 2013 Rob Mackle

Company Ends Maintenance, Performance, and Security

Concerns of Tape-Based Backup Solutions

London – August 27, 2013 – Backup Technology, the leading Enterprise Level Cloud Backup and Recovery Specialist provider since 2005, today announce the extension of their five year partnership with L.K. Bennett. The company made the changes in 2008 after it began suffering from backup cycles that exceeded available backup windows as well as failed backups and restores.

Click to Tweet: L.K. Bennett Selects Backup Technology to provide their Asigra Cloud Backup Solution #backup #cloud

Headquartered in London, UK, L.K. Bennett (http://us.lkbennett.com/) is a luxury fashion brand defined by its British heritage. After using a tape-based backup solution for years, the company realised a change was necessary when its backup environment began suffering from increasing backup windows and failed data recoveries. The company sought to modernise its backup environment by transitioning to a cloud-based data recovery solution, which included the Asigra Cloud Backup Connector provided by Backup Technology Limited (BTL). As a result, L.K. Bennett has eliminated the inefficiencies of tape backup and recovery to improve overall business uptime.

L.K. Bennett currently backs up over 14 TB of production data in a very complex environment that involves a mixture of physical and virtual systems (Dell workstations and HP servers), and multiple connections from the company’s multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) across sites in London and the United States. As such, the company’s tape-based backup system required extensive management time. In addition to tape management and data recovery headaches, storing data onsite was an additional security concern which required IT management to move data offsite and out of Greater London.

Having been a customer of cloud backup and disaster recovery provider Backup Technology Limited (BTL) for over five years, L.K. Bennett turned to BTL for an enhanced solution to its data protection challenges. With limited bandwidth, L.K. Bennett needed a WAN-optimized solution in order to meet its requirements. “We did our research to find a provider with market experience and a customer base to match,” said David Van Eck, Head of IT at L.K. Bennett. “That provider was BTL.”

L.K. Bennett modernized its backup environment with services from BTL to protect data that included SQL databases, iSeries data, application data from Microsoft Exchange, as well as a large volume of unstructured data. BTL was able to provide its Asigra-based solution to automatically and regularly back-up and protect data, according to policies set by L.K. Bennett. The solution also provided the ability to connect to local network storage to further increase the local recovery capabilities.

Van Eck from L.K. Bennett reported that the switch to the Cloud Backup Connector Appliance helped the company to achieve several business benefits. “Through a centralized online monitoring portal, we receive guaranteed backup and recovery for all of our data systems as a professional and fully managed service,” said Van Eck. “The backup forms the basis for our enterprise-wide data recovery solution, which is essential to L.K. Bennett.”

“The most common recovery is of emails or contact items,” added Van Eck. “BTL provides high-performance local recovery as well as online backup and virtual disaster recovery, which is key to our organization as downtime can be very costly. The Service has been reliable and when data needs to be restored it is always available on demand. The ability to restore emails at a granular level back to the same or a different location is invaluable.”

“Cloud-based data recovery allows L.K. Bennett to overcome the limitations of traditional backup software and legacy tape solutions,” said Rob Mackle, Direct and Channel Sales Manager EMEA at BTL. “Asigra’s Cloud Backup Connector Appliance is a tool that allows companies like L.K. Bennett to securely protect their business data and meet regulatory requirements. Should they lose one or multiple servers or sites, BTL’s Virtual Disaster Recovery also allows their systems to be restored and operational with minimal impact to the business.”

About Backup Technology

In 2005 Backup Technology was formed specialising in business and enterprise level Online Backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions. By utilising a market leading technology, BTL has quickly established itself as one of the World’s leading Backup and Disaster Recovery providers.

Backup Technology has a strong global presence, from their head office in Leeds in the UK; they have expanded to offices and data centres in the US, as well as establishing partnerships in Europe and Australia. BTL’s core business has been built around their partnership with the world’s leading software provider for Online Backup, Asigra. Backup Technology became Asigra’s first ever Global Partner of the Year in 2008 and then became Asigra’s first European 3D Hybrid Partner later that year. Other awards include Best Competitive Takeout (2010), Best Hybrid Cloud Implementation (2011) and Best Vertical Enterprise Cloud Marketing (2011). The company has also received many industry awards and had articles featured in publications such as the Financial Times, the Independent and Computing Magazine.

BTL are fully ISO 9001 (April 2010) and ISO 27001 (May 2010) certified, ensuring consistent quality management procedures are in place and all security processes are followed and documented. The ISO 22301 certification has also been achieved (January 2011), meaning BTL has an independently audited Business Continuity Management system in place to offer additional peace of mind for its customers.

BTL currently employ 35 full time staff all of which are fully trained and certified by Asigra in Toronto. This ensures that BTL offer consistently high service levels to all customers and have an unrivaled knowledge of the Asigra product. With individual customer data sizes ranging from 1TB to over 2PB, BTL currently protect and manage in excess of 14 Petabytes.

For more information visit www.backup-technology.com.

Backup Technology UK Backup Technology USA

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0800 999 3600 800-220-7013

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