Symantec invests big in backup

Symantec has announced a significant upgrade to its backup and disaster recovery suite, promising increased simplicity and flexibility as well as a 100-fold improvement in speed.

The company best known for its Norton security suite has invested heavily in the sector to develop the upgrades, Pacific director of specialist solutions Sean Kopelke saying it’s ‘a very important part of Symantec’s business’.

"We’ve spent a lot of time trying to sit down and say, ‘we’ve been doing a pretty good job, how do we take that to the next level?’ Kopelke says.

"Talking to our customers we’re hearing that a lot of the challenges are around speed, simplicity and flexibility.”

Speed is particularly important in large organisations, Kopelke says, which are dealing with larger data sets as well as smaller windows in which to perform backups.

"You can’t run backups 24 hours per day. You’ve only got a small window outside of production, and that’s getting smaller as places are running longer hours and performing more tasks.”

Data is also becoming more complicated, as organisations fragment their environments to take advantage of different platforms. For example, many businesses may have virtualised some of their data, but mission-critical information tends to still be located on servers.

"They weren’t having the confidence to move to the next level, even though they desperately wanted to for the cost savings.”

To deal with this, Symantec has added the ability to backup from different platforms via its single solution; the other benefit of this is that when the data is recovered it can be returned to whichever platform is more convenient for the business.

"It’s going to give customers the confidence to move a lot more.”

Kopelke adds that Symantec has introduced a version of Backup Exec specially designed for small businesses, which make up a large proportion of the New Zealand market.

The solution breaks the installation process down into three steps, and offers a cloud backup option to help keep costs to a minimum.

"You’re never going to have that advanced flexibility, but a small or medium company doesn’t need that. They just want to make sure they’re backed up, and this gives them that very easy set-it-and-forget-it option.”

Check out the results of a recent survey by Symantec of business attitudes to backup here, or go here for more on the new solutions.