Today's enterprises must support employees and computer resources that are distributed throughout the world to meet demands of the global marketplace. When critical data is no longer hosted at just one physical location, the challenge of backing up and securing data is magnified. Consider the following:

• 51% of organizations believe that their current backup schedules leave data at risk in the event of loss. (source: Enterprise Strategy Group)
• Remote tape backup creates large data security and compliance risks
• Traditional approaches – involving deploying tape backup equipment and processes to each location hosting data, and hiring or contracting local resources to manage the backups – are a risky and costly proposition.

Network-based backup allows for consolidation of backup data into the data center, where it can be placed onto tape or other secondary storage media. Backed-up data is then more secure, and easily accessible in the event of a restoration. In many cases, disk-to-disk backup over the WAN becomes feasible with Riverbed using existing WAN connections without any bandwidth upgrades.

With Riverbed's Steelhead appliances accelerating backup procedures, our customers have seen significant benefits:

• Reduced backup costs. Tape backup systems are no longer required in each remote office, saving between $5,000 and $20,000 for each remote office every three years.
• Simplified off-site media management and storage. By deploying Steelhead appliances, IT departments can consolidate off-site media management and storage through the centralized data center, saving money and easing compliance with security regulations.
• Reduced services costs. Steelhead appliances enable your company to easily backup remote servers to your own data center, where your own staff can reliably handle the data. Third party resources, which are a significant security risk, can be eliminated. On-site staff can be redeployed to strategic IT projects.
• Reduced hours spent on routine, manual processes. IT staff can tackle forward-looking strategic projects instead of spending so much time handling manual backup processes. For example, download the Tivoli Storage Manager Performance Brief to understand how Riverbed Technology can accelerate the backup process by 9x to 45x.
• Faster recovery of data. The cost of downtime continues to increase along with the value of information to businesses. By accelerating backup operations with WDS, customers can enable faster recovery of their data in the face of failures, adding resiliency to IT operations and increasing the availability of data.

Riverbed Technology works to provide the greatest acceleration possible to the widest range of backup mechanisms, with no changes to your software or storage architecture. Riverbed's approach:

• Eliminates data redundancy at the byte level, sending even less traffic than "smart" backup packages that perform block differencing algorithms.
• Overcomes latency within the network with TCP and application protocol optimizations
• Works with any TCP-based backup program or any storage environment.

Download the Network-Based Backup and Data Replication Solution Brief to learn more.