How to Save Money Playing The Data Protection Game

How to Save Money Playing
The Data Protection Game

Brought to you by the Cisco Innovators Program

Does your company play a daily game of risk with its data?

Think of the information sitting on your laptops, PCs, smartphones, and servers - critical data such as employee and customer records, surveillance images, financial reports, and product and service information.

Could you lose it to theft? To malware? To hardware failure . . . power loss . . . or employee error?

New ways to securely store and back up data onsite or online ("in the cloud") are now available within small business budgets.

The cost is lower than for traditional solutions, and much less than the crushing costs of data loss.
Traditional High-Stakes Strategies

Count the costs of previous solutions for data storage and backup:

• Attaching an external hard drive directly to each employee's computer for backup can cost upward of $100 per device. It's also slow. Plus, human error is a huge risk: employees must schedule frequent backups and not override automated ones.
• Backing up each computer directly to an online service can cost $60 or more annually per device. Plus, it's slow and relies on the employee to specify the critical data to back up.
• Dedicating a server to store everyone's data can cost upward of $4000 for the hardware and software of a business-class server. And that doesn't include the air-conditioning expense and the costs to purchase and manage the backup and security software.

A Game Changer: An Explosion of Data

With video, audio, photos, X-rays, and other digital images, the quantity of data on business networks is mushrooming. By 2020, the average "digital footprint" per person will be 14 times what it is now, according to IBM. But none of the traditional storage strategies can expand efficiently, so you'll continue to lose the cost game.
The Winning Solution

Now small businesses can find expandable data storage and backup in a single, affordable shared solution.

This smarter storage technology uses the intelligence, performance, and security capabilities of a business-class network to provide onsite data storage, with backup locally (onsite) or online "in the cloud." Here's how it works:

• A centralized network attached storage (NAS) device at your business collects the data from laptops, file servers, and PCs (through which smartphone data can also be collected), and securely stores it.
• The NAS device can do automatic backups. Choose the data your business wants to back up locally, or specify the files you want a cloud service to back up so you'll have an offsite copy (which you can access over the web).

An example is Cisco® NSS300 Series Smart Storage. It includes local backup and offers fully integrated online backup powered by Mozy [LINK http://cisco.mozy.com], the world's most popular online backup service.
Prices of the Cisco solution range from several hundred dollars, if you want to insert your own hard drives into its internal bays, to several thousand dollars for 12 TB of storage arrayed on six drives. Prices for the Mozy online backup, with business-class security and performance, start at $145 a year for 25GB.
Gaining an Advantage

The comprehensive data protection of Cisco NSS300 Series Smart Storage delivers several advantages over similar solutions:

• Class-leading performance. Its processor speeds file sharing and onsite backup; built-in support for Mozy enables fast online backup.
• The security of on-disk encryption. It can protect stored data even if hard drives are stolen.
• Cost-efficient expansion. Its drive arrays and eSATA expansion ports easily accommodate more drive capacity.
• Easy setup and use. It can be set up in minutes. Selecting what to back up locally or online is straightforward with the browser-based interface.
• Extraordinary value. It can do double duty as a file-share, web, or multimedia server, eliminating those equipment costs. Its cool apps let your business stream audio or video, as well as create and run blogs, wikis, forums, and internal websites.

When you play the data protection game, you can also win the money game.
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Next Steps

Find the Cisco NSS300 Series Smart Storage and Mozy [LINK http://www.cisco.com/cisco/web/solutions/small_business/products/storage/nss300/index.html] solution that's the best fit for your business, or ask a nearby Cisco Certified Partner [LINK http://tools.cisco.com/WWChannels/LOCATR/openBasicSearch.do] to help you.

Learn about financing available from Cisco Capital® [LINK
http://www.cisco.com/web/ordering/ciscocapital/cf/index.html].

Join the Cisco Innovators Program [LINK: www.cisco.com/go/innovators] to continue receiving small business-related articles, videos and offers. Already a member? Refer a friend [LINK: http://www.cisco.com/web/solutions/smb/programs/innovator/newsletter/refer_a_colleague.html?sid=195077_20]

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