ATEGO Benefits and Comparison
All companies invest in locks, security systems, and fire insurance to protect their physical assets, but, many try to cut corners when investing to protect their data. Having a sub-standard backup protocol, such as backing up to portable hard disk or tape and then transporting it off-site once a week, is somewhat akin to having fire insurance that only covers you if you have a fire on Friday night.
There are many advantages to the ATEGO Cloud Backup when compared to other backup strategies. Here are a few key ones.
Off-site Storage: A big benefit of the ATEGO Cloud Backup is that we can use your broadband Internet connection to transport your data to a secure off-site datacenter. That means your backups won’t be destroyed in an office fire, and they aren’t prone to being lost or stolen from your office. If you already transport your tape backups off-site and think that completely protects you, think again. There are numerous examples of tape backups being lost by transport companies. Even in Singapore, a large bank lost control of client data when the tape transport service they employed lost a box of their backup tapes. Encrypted electronic transfer of data to an off-site location is now the gold standard.
Highly Automated: The unfortunate thing about DIY backup to portable hard disk or backing up to a tape drive is that these processes involve human intervention either to start the backup, rotate tapes, verify the backup, catalogue the tapes, clean tape heads, transport off-site, and keep the backups secure. You can’t remove the chance of human error that results in some backups being missed, some over-written, some un-restorable, some lost, and some damaged. The ATEGO Cloud Backup automates the entire process to greatly reduce the risk of human error.
Highly Secure: We take the security of your data seriously. Firstly, your daily backups will only be the incremental blocks of data that have changed since the last backup, so even if someone could intercept your data, it would be near impossible to assemble a complete file. Second, and more importantly, all your data is encrypted using the only US Government FIPS certified AES256 encryption algorithm available in the backup market. That means your data is encrypted while on the fly during backup, and while at rest on our storage infrastructure.
Only you have the encryption key. We do not keep a copy of your key and cannot read your data. [The only exception is if the customer specifically wishes us to keep an encrypted electronic copy of the key using the Key Management feature of the software.] If you are considering some other backup service, ask them who has the encryption key to the data they store.
Easy installation: Because the ATEGO Cloud Backup uses a unique agentless architecture, you don’t need to install an agent on every target machine you want to protect. There is no need to reboot your servers or manage software agents.
Cost Savings: Cost savings come from a few areas. Not the least important source is the reduced time that IT staff have to spend managing the backup process. It also comes from the reduced hassle to restore lost data. Since there is no software agent to install you can back up an unlimited number of servers, desktops, and laptops. You only pay for the total capacity of compressed, encrypted, and de-duplicated data you subscribe for. Upfront investment in hardware, software, and tapes can also be avoided. Because we can back up servers, desktops, and laptops you don’t have to purchase and manage separate systems to back up each type of machine. We can also centralize your backup from multiple remote offices to a single storage location and management console.
Reliability: Tape backups are notoriously unreliable, while transporting and storing your tapes off-site can result in lost and damaged tapes. ATEGO Cloud Backup stores multiple copies of your data. The first optional copy can be local on the ATEGO DS-CLIENT. The second copy is stored off-site on our RAID5 disks, another copy is backed up to our backup platform, and another copy will be replicated to our redundant storage infrastructure hosted in a separate datacenter. The system also does autonomic healing to try detect and correct corrupted backup files. Customers can also receive email notification of the status of their backup completions. Numerous other reports are also available. We also guarantee 99.9% uptime of the service in the Service Level Agreement.
Scalable: You can start with subscribing to as little as 1GB of capacity and grow to multiple terabytes if you need. The architecture of the ATEGO platform allows us to easily expand as our customers require.