Verizon expands cloud backup service to global market

Verizon Communications Inc.'s business division Wednesday announced the global launch of its Verizon Remote Backup and Restore program, an expanded suite of managed services that perform automatic data backup and restore functions for servers and PCs.

The remote backup and restore service has been available in the U.S. for six years, but the company said it has now built up its infrastructure enough to offer it to the global market. "This is a completely automated, managed service delivered through the cloud, but it's a service focused on specific business tasks," said Anthony Kessel, a senior product manager at Verizon.

Kessel said the service is designed to allow enterprises to perform remote site backups or archive data from individual PCs, reducing both management and backup windows for IT administrators. Data is encrypted while it is transmitted and being stored in Verizon's data centers, Kessel said.

Verizon uses data de-duplication and snapshot technology to reduce the bandwidth needed for nightly backups, which only send changed files from servers with Verizon's agents installed on them. The backup service can also be managed by users who want to choose which files or document folders to back up off their PCs each night.

Chris Alvord, CEO of business continuity software vendor COOP Systems Inc., has been using Verizon's backup service for two years on his SQL servers in order to speed up recovery time in case of lost or corrupted files. Alvord, who had been backing up via tape, said he backs up about 20GB a month through Verizon.

"Rather than having local tape, there's a copy made to Verizon's Denver data center daily. It's encrypted and compressed. We don't have to think about it. We just have agents on our servers, and it does everything for us," Alvord said.

Alvord said going live with the service was painless; since implementing it, he has had to recover data several times due to user error. "It was just so simple to do this," he said. "This has worked flawlessly over the past two years."

Verizon is charging about $US3.80 per gigabyte of backed up data it stores.

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