Small and medium sized businesses (SMB) increasingly are turning to storage service providers as a means to back up data, and a 2006 Gartner survey found that 43 percent of these businesses plan to use a managed service provider to back up their business-critical information, according to Asigra, a leader in remote office online backup/recovery. Meanwhile, the SMB IT market, defined as businesses having between 20 and 999 employees, continues to grow at an estimated $400 billion per year.

"A large percentage of small and medium size businesses struggle with managing their backup infrastructure and typically rely on older technologies to protect informational assets," said Paul Meyerson, senior analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group. "Companies like Asigra are allowing this segment of the market to take advantage of the latest advancements in data protection through managed backup service providers, practically eliminating the expenses, time and risk associated with in-house backup and recovery."

Secure, managed online backup services that replace problematic onsite backups have become more readily accessible and affordable to SMBs. This is thanks to the recent partnership of technology vendors and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) who have created new solutions with innovative pricing models, making enterprise-class data protection available and easy to use. Documents, databases and emails from multiple small businesses combined create a storage pool, which is then administered by an MSP.

ôBy utilizing hosted backup and recovery services from MSPs, small- and medium-sized businesses can experience the same level of data protection as enterprises,ö said Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra. ôA managed service provides the IT expertise often not available to smaller businesses. Managed services also provide SMBs with high-end data security features, including data encryption, to protect against unauthorized access. In the same way that a small or medium size business owner hires a lawyer or accountant to get professional support, or uses a modern print shop to access the best equipment, the SMB entrepreneur can hire a local backup service provider to take care of their offsite data protection requirements.ö

A single event resulting in data loss can cost a company significant revenue, fines and even their business. With the offsite protection of an SMBÆs irreplaceable data an absolute necessity, it behooves companies to create and put into action a storage protection plan that enables secure, remote, automatic backup and recovery of this information. By partnering with an expert who is focused on distributed backup for SMBs, companies can ensure the safekeeping and restorability of business-critical data quickly, easily and affordably.

About Asigra
Asigra is the award-winning leader in remote office/branch office online backup/recovery with more than three petabytes of data under protection. Since 1986, the companyÆs agentless Televaulting solution has centralized data management and eliminated the pricing and performance problems created by agent-based tape backup software in multi-site enterprises. Televaulting addresses government and international regulatory compliance demands by backing up remote/branch office data to the data center. Data is encrypted in-flight over the WAN and at rest. Privately held Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with partner offices located worldwide.