Why Branch Site Backup Should be a Breeze by Aravindan Anandan, Consulting Systems Engineer, Asia Pacific, Barracuda Network 

Whilst old school backup is changing rapidly, it is still looked at by many IT mangers as a necessary evil. We don't want to do it, but it must be done.
 
Large enterprises sometimes have departments and individuals dedicated to backup but for the vast majority of companies that is a luxury they cannot afford.
 
The issue with backup is that it does not help business productivity, some may argue it hinders it and the only successful backup is the one that does it job quietly and doesn't bother anyone.
 
Backup itself is inherently technical and traditionally requires people with good IT knowledge to implement, manage and support it.
 
Given the historical complexity of backup, one of the most problematic areas of protecting data is when it comes to branch offices.
 
Typically branch offices do not contain employees that are IT savvy, and this means IT at branch offices needs to be automated, remotely manageable and as far as possible problem free. Backup has a legacy of being one of the most problematic IT functions that is rolled out across branch offices.
 
To this day I am still coming across situations such as branch staff on the phone to IT outside of office hours trying to free a jammed tape in a tape drive. This really does still happen.
 
The problem with traditional approaches to branch backup is that they have been prone to problems that cannot be solved remotely and cannot be solved by local staff. In addition to Branch offices often having low bandwidth, data intensive backup processes can also disrupt productivity.
 
Barracuda’s approach to backup is transformative, not only do we simplify the whole process, we improve backup resiliency and our technology lends itself to making branch backup very simple to implement, incredibly easy to manage and most important removes the need for branch employees to ever touch the backup process.
 
We use an appliance based approach that uses cloud for disaster recovery. The on-premises Backup hardware controls the backup process and stores the backup data in a single, self-contained device. The data is then periodically synchronized with the cloud, the transfer rate and synchronization time for which is configurable on the on-premises backup system.
 
Implementation and set up is simple and management can be remote or local.  
Another feature is the ability to manage and monitor multiple devices at multiple branch offices from a single management console.
 
For cloud sensitive environments, a box to box replication is also offered. For example, consider a head office with 3 branches. With box to box replication, each of 3 branch office backup units can perform local backups of data and synchronize that data to the head office backup unit. These units can also upload data to the cloud as a secondary disaster recovery site.
 
Because we enable continuous data protection, we can avoid backup windows, which given 24 x 7 nature of working environments today, means that backup no longer needs to interfere with branch employee productivity. Finally, because of the “incremental” nature of continuous data protection, branch office data can be replicated off site even over narrow bandwidth.
 
Most IT professionals will agree with me that complexity is one of the most self defeating aspects of data protection. The more complex the backup process the more likely that your backups will be prone to errors. The net effect is the risk of data loss increases.
 
Barracuda solutions not only enhance the backup process, they simplify it too. Nowhere is this truer than in the branch office scenario and by simplifying we not only make your life easier we also significantly reduce your risk of lost data.