Are you backing-up all your PCs and notebooks? You should!
Companies certainly expect their employees to daily backup what is on their PC and notebook hard drives. But do they? “Perhaps for a while”, says Richard Dewing, CEO of Cibecs.
IT departments have backing up of data stored on the main servers well under control and most company’s IT personnel will manage a dedicated server, often dedicated as the H- drive on the employee’s desktops and laptops. But good habits don’t last and when something goes wrong the first to blame is the IT guy. Why did he not have something in place?! How many times don’t we tell ourselves “I am running late, I will do it tomorrow?” But tomorrow may come only next week or never!
Dewing says there are four issues at play:
- Employees often don’t back up their data.
- Confidentiality is another reason why people don’t like to back up on central servers because IT personnel always have access to it. In many cases the security requirements are such that one can not back-up to an open server.
- Infrastructure or lack there of can be a major problem. If a thousand employees did their back up all at the same time, a large amount of infrastructure would be required.
- And then access to bandwidth is for many companies a problem, it is still too expensive particularly when a large number of remotely located machines have to be backed up.
“We have developed Cibecs, to look after data specifically for larger enterprises from 500 to many thousands of machines although we also have customers with 20 or 50 users,” says Dewing. “For large enterprises one needs more than just a back-up system but have facilities like reporting, centralised control and the ability to manage which machine needs to be backed-up and what type of data need to be stored.”
Cibecs is managed centrally and offers the selection of users, the setting up of the policy; for instance what documents need to be backed-up for which user, emails and any business sensitive documents that are important for the business to keep running should a machine fail. One could exclude all multimedia or select the type of multimedia that should be safeguarded.
On the user side the system will automatically set up the policy and on a daily basis it will scan through all the data and will take out all the binary data that has changed, encrypt it, compress it and store it on the enterprise’s central server and archive it. As the data is fully encrypted it is not available to any other user or IT person.
When an user is off-site, the system can still be configured to do the back-up. When the user logs on or arrives back at the office, the backed up data is automatically transferred to the server. The key to the success of Cibecs Continuity is that it requires the minimum of user action. To set up a user machine policy takes only a few minutes, after that it all happen automatically.
Recovery is a simple process. Select the version and the place where to save it. It will recover all the data and rebuild the data. Cibecs is particularly useful when it comes to replacing hardware. The technician can simply use the recovery process and all the data can be built automatically instead of spending hours copying it from one location to the next to the new PC.
Cibecs was started in October 2004 and today has thousands of users of its Continuity software. Hasso Plattner Ventures Africa recently acquired a stake in Cibecs with the objective of assisting in growing its international markets and gaining access to Hasso Plattner Ventures’ business network and crucial expertise to tap international markets. ” We were not so much in need of capital investments but rather assistance in accessing new markets,” Richard said.
The support for Cibecs will be twofold: local management support through HP-Ventures Africa based in Technopark, Stellenbosch and help with expansion in the global arena.
The R380-million Hasso Plattner Venture Africa fund was launched last year by Prof. Hasso Plattner, the co-founder, chairman and chief software advisor for global ERP software giant, SAP.
EngineerIT
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