Phase Forward, a division of Oracle, is a clinical trial management company with 1,100 employees and multiple regional sites worldwide. Operating in a regulated climate, Phase Forward sought to establish reliable controls that would ensure the protection of information on users’ laptops.
Challenges:
- After evaluating a leading PC solution, users complained about slowdowns and crashes
- Time consuming process to do a full restore when a PC fails
- Need ability to perform legal hold on end user data without user consent
Solution:
The Copiun solution was deployed in Phase Forward’s private cloud (within 2 hours). PC agents were remotely distributed across the enterprise and began backups immediately with no end user training needed.
Benefits:
- Since the agent only processes deduplicated changes when a user is idle, productivity is not impacted
- Backups are auditable and reliable while being transparent to end users
- Backup data is now controlled centrally in the Phase Forward private cloud
- Legal hold can now be imposed on laptop data to preserve information subject to litigation
- In addition to fast self-service file restores, full recoveries are timely and assured
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Moduslink is a billion dollar supply chain corporation with about 4,000 employees and 30 offices worldwide. Each location held file servers and home directories where end users could save files and in turn, have them backed up according to tape backup schedules. This common practice can work at times but has inherent drawbacks that challenge many enterprises like Moduslink …
Challenges:
- Remote storage management proved to be costly
- Home directory backups of the PC population were inconsistent
- Management of remote tape solutions was cumbersome
- PST files were not consistently backed up
Solution:
The deployment of Copiun included installation of backup appliances (known as Copiun Data Manager) in two Moduslink data centers and PC agents mass distributed without any end-user disruption or training needed.
Benefits:
- The need for home directories was eliminated, liberating IT and end users
- 30 Backup sites were reduced to a very manageable 2
- Corporate edge data protection became centralized and auditable
- Service level error tracking enabled effective management of “real” issues
- Policies were tailored per functional group to meet departmental needs
- Full-text search via Windows search enabled self-service recovery
- The agent and its “CDP-when-idle” processing was invisible to the end users
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Profile
Monitor is a publicly held management consulting firm with about 1,500 worldwide employees and 21 sites covering most major cities across the globe.
Challenges
Mobile users were given an internally developed tool to perform laptop backups however many didn't VPN-in and even if they did, there would be too much data and too little bandwidth to handle the capacity. For governance and administration, Monitor wished to employ central management policies that would enable oversight and error threshhold filtering.
Like many large, distributed enterprises, Monitor also wanted users at remote sites to be recoverable in a short period of time, without having to download data from the central data center. Lastly, personal iPads had started to enter the workforce - providing access to the backup repository would make mobile users more productive, giving Monitor a competitive edge.
Solution
To construct a platform to support Monitor's mobile data requirements, the Copiun Data Manager was deployed in Monitor's private cloud in Cambridge, MA. Cache Servers were deployed in each remote site using existing hardware and 1 Constant Access Gateway was installed for VPN-less backup and access. Agents were remotely deployed out to PCs.
Benefits
Given Monitor's distributed network, they were now able to obtain secure, near-continuous coverage for remote users who don't VPN-in and could do this without having to punch a hole in the firewall. Backups are invisible and non-intrusive to users, including those at remote sites who can also benefit from fast LAN-speed restores due to installed cache servers.
Protected data, safe in Monitor's private cloud, is now subject to federated search and discovery should the need arise. Administration also benefits from service-level based management where thresholds can be calibrated to filter out false-negative errors and focus on "real" issues.
Lastly, users make fewer calls to the help desk since they can perform full-text search for files using the Windows search utility.