10 red hot enterprise tech for SMB customers

Backup is one bugbear of SMBs that never goes away. The task is often given a low priority and the most common vehicle, tapes, place too much reliability on human involvement.

Alliances are springing up between backup software and hardware storage vendors to simplify the process. Late last month Netgear and ShadowProtect announced a partnership to improve performance and functionality.

How long will SMBs continue to rely solely on on-premise solutions? While backing up every inch of data to the cloud may be unfeasible in terms of cost or bandwidth, saving important files such as financial information should be standard practice. Backup is tipped as one of the drivers of cloud services and new vendors are popping up with original ideas.

In the US last month Ctera Networks unveiled a new local NAS appliance which can be used for bare metal recovery of downed servers. The 4-bay, rack mount C400 comes with server agents to make it easier to backup and recover data related to a specific application and can back up not just data but a bootable operating system environment.

Ctera signed in Australia late last month with security distributor Whitegold Solutions.

If SMBs move their productivity applications to the cloud then backup is generally part of the service. Recently Google described how its free disaster recovery, synchronous replication and data backup for Google Apps for all users were superior to on-premise solutions.

Google Apps senior project manager Rajen Sheth said that Google Apps' data recovery and backup options are stronger than on-premise solutions. For e-mail, he wrote, small businesses usually have a mail server and copy e-mail data to tape at daily or weekly intervals. When something goes wrong, the tapes are used to restore the data that was saved prior to the most recent backup. "But the information created after the most recent backup is lost forever," he said.

Some small business owners will no doubt be reluctant to let go of their critical information. In June a US company called Backupify launched a service to back up all data stored in a Google Apps account to a local PC or another storage service, such as Amazon S3.

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