Asigra Addresses Achilles Heel in Compliance

34% of Medium-to-Large Enterprises Report Compliance Concerns with Remote Offices

Asigra Inc., a technology leader in agentless backup and recovery software for service providers targeting the growing managed storage services market, has announced availability of a new white paper addressing a standout challenge facing medium-to-large enterprises with regard to corporate compliance remote and branch office data protection. Entitled Compliance: Is Remote Office Data Your Achilles Heel - the paper identifies current challenges and highlights methods for addressing those issues.

The white paper points out that the current regulatory environment -- as defined by Basel II, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley -- does not differentiate between data centre and remote office data. Regulations require companies to secure ROBO (remote office/branch office) data and non-compliance can result in penalties leveled against the company and individuals within the company who are responsible for compliance. Job loss, financial damages and even jail time are possible downsides from non-compliance.

According to a January 2007 research report by the Enterprise Strategy Group, entitled Branch Office Optimisation:

• 46% of organisations with 20,000 or more employees ranked ensuring compliance with government, industry, or corporate governance mandates as urgent
• 37% of organisations with between 5,000 and 9,999 employees ranked compliance initiatives as urgent
• 26% of organisations with between 1,000 and 4,999 employees ranked compliance initiatives as urgent

Compliance was also a big driver of centralising IT services with 48% of organisations having 100 or more remote offices indicating that centralised IT environments and applications were primary initiatives. This area was also a top concern among company CEOs representing four major industries, including Financial, Government, Health Care and Information Technology.

For those who do not take this seriously enough, the white paper offers up sobering examples, including a gender discrimination suit where the company being sued was not able to locate certain emails. The excuse given by the company was that the backup tapes the emails were on had been overwritten. The judge told the jury to assume, then, that the lost emails were probably damaging to the defendants case. The defendant lost the case and faced a judgment of $20 million (~10 million).

Asigra Televaulting backup and recovery software for remote and branch offices (ROBOs) allows companies to achieve the same level of compliant data protection across remote sites as is available within the enterprise data centre.

This is accomplished by integrating compliance-focused features such as:

• Disk-based backup and recovery for near-instant data retrieval
• Encryption of data in-flight and at-rest
• ROBO data consolidated at the data centre
• Efficient one-step backup to ensure usability
• Detailed reporting
• Simplified executive sign-off
• End-of-retention certificate of data destruction
• Restoration of detail at the single email level
• Near infinite scalability
             
  Eran Farajun, Executive Vice President of Asigra, said, Fear and uncertainty are terrible for business. By becoming informed and taking action to comply with regulations, businesses can avoid becoming a headline due to non-compliance. Achieving peace-of-mind in this intense regulatory environment ensures the bottom line remains strong for the long run.

Organisations interested in obtaining a free copy of the referenced compliance white paper can download it at: www.asigra.com/form/signup_download.php?form=compliance.

About Asigra

Asigra is the award-winning leader in remote office/branch office (ROBO) online backup and recovery software for managed backup service providers and enterprises. The companys flagship product, Televaulting, is used by global enterprises in the financial, insurance, legal, government, healthcare, and retail industries with more than four petabytes of data protected. Asigra technology is used by hundreds of service providers worldwide that offer managed backup services to companies ranging from small and medium businesses (SMBs) to Global 2000 enterprises. The agentless remote site backup and recovery solution provides simple, centralised management of the data protection process while eliminating the capital and operational expenses associated with agent-based solutions. Founded in 1986, Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with partner offices around the world.