Basel-II News

Asigra Addresses Achilles Heel in Compliance: Remote Offices

(June 26, 2007)-- Asigra, agentless backup and recovery software for service providers targeting the growing managed storage services market, today announced availability of a new white paper addressing a standout challenge facing medium-to-large enterprises with regard to corporate compliance – remote and branch office data protection. Entitled Compliance: Is Remote Office Data Your Achilles Heel - the paper identifies current challenges and highlights methods for addressing those issues.

The white paper points out that the current regulatory environment -- as defined by Basel II, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley -- does not differentiate between data center and remote office data. Regulations require companies to secure ROBO (remote office/branch office) data and non-compliance can result in penalties leveled against the company and individuals within the company who are responsible for compliance. Job loss, financial damages and even jail time are possible downsides from non-compliance.

According to a January 2007 research report by the Enterprise Strategy Group, entitled Branch Office Optimization:

46% of organizations with 20,000 or more employees ranked ensuring compliance with government, industry, or corporate governance mandates as urgent
37% of organizations with between 5,000 and 9,999 employees ranked compliance initiatives as urgent
26% of organizations with between 1,000 and 4,999 employees ranked compliance initiatives as urgent 

Compliance was also a big driver of centralizing IT services with 48% of organizations having 100 or more remote offices indicating that centralized IT environments and applications were primary initiatives. This area was also a top concern among company CEOs representing four major industries, including Financial, Government, Health Care and Information Technology.

For those who do not take this seriously enough, the white paper offers up sobering examples, including a gender discrimination suit where the company being sued was not able to locate certain emails. The excuse given by the company was that the backup tapes the emails were on had been overwritten. The judge told the jury to assume, then, that the lost emails were probably damaging to the defendant’s case. The defendant lost the case and faced a judgment of $20 million.

Asigra Televaulting backup and recovery software for remote and branch offices (ROBOs) allows companies to achieve the same level of compliant data protection across remote sites as is available within the enterprise data center. This is accomplished by integrating compliance-focused features such as: Disk-based backup and recovery for near-instant data retrieval, Encryption of data in-flight and at-rest, ROBO data consolidated at the data center, Efficient one-step backup to ensure usability, Detailed reporting, Simplified executive sign-off, End-of-retention certificate of data destruction, Restoration of detail at the single email level, Near infinite scalability

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