Asigra has added an important new type of customer to its client base.
Asigra’s agentless Televaulting product eliminates the need to install agents on devices that are to be backed-up. While service providers have traditionally been the company’s key customers, organizations adopting a utility computing model and providing IT resources as a service to cost centers within the organization are also beginning to use Asigra’s software.
The software has been designed to work with an organization’s existing back-up and recovery products, enabling those organizations to leverage existing investments in back-up software. The strength of Asigra’s product, and its biggest selling point at present, is that it encrypts data before it is transmitted from the remote site to the data center.
The data is also stored in its encrypted form and the keys are encrypted and stored on the server, which contains the Televaulting software on the remote site. The encryption of data in transit from remote site to data center is tremendously important. Although the lines used for the transmission should be secure, there is a risk that the data will be intercepted.
There has been a recent spate of instances where back-up tapes being physically taken from a customer’s site to a vault have been lost. In all of the cases the data was not encrypted, and in most cases it contained sensitive customer information. For organizations using third-party vaults to store back-up data, transferring this information electronically is a much safer and more secure option, particularly if, as it should be, the data is encrypted prior to transmission.
Asigra’s software is already used by many service providers, some of them large companies. As utility computing starts to gain traction, the company will have many more opportunities to build market share in the data back-up market, which will raise the company’s profile. This is likely to make it an attractive acquisition target for numerous large storage and back-up vendors, including companies Asigra already supplies its software to.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
