Symantec Corp. announced Symantec Managed Backup Services, a comprehensive offering which provides management of backup and recovery operations, allowing customers to more effectively utilize IT resources and  focus on core business priorities. Organizations have increasingly more platforms, applications, servers, virtual machines and databases to protect than ever before. Out-tasking discrete IT functions such as backup and recovery, ensures 24x7 availability and enables IT resources to focus on more strategic initiatives, fulfill compliance requirements and mitigate their overall IT risk.  

Not only are organizations dealing with rising user expectations and service levels, they continue to deal with staffing challenges. Three quarters of the companies surveyed in Symantec’s State of the Data Center survey said user expectations were rising gradually or rapidly. Furthermore, 60 percent of the respondents said meeting the service levels demanded by the organization are more or much more difficult to meet. Additionally, 43 percent of respondents said finding qualified applicants is a big or huge problem.  

Symantec Managed Backup Services help customers manage their Symantec NetBackup environments on an ongoing basis – optimizing their current technology investment. The service is designed for customers who want to take a proactive approach to their backup and recovery strategy by having Symantec experts manage their day-to-day backup operations, while leveraging existing Symantec NetBackup infrastructure.  

“The current economic climate is driving many organizations to consider which functions can be out-tasked,” said Adam Couture, principal analyst for Gartner. “With caps on capital spending and hiring freezes becoming commonplace, IT organizations will have to decide which functions are business critical and which can be more effectively managed by an external service provider.”

Based on the ITIL processes and deep product knowledge, Symantec Managed Backup Services combine local management - on-site or off-site - with remote round-the-clock monitoring, incident management, restore requests, planning and optimization assistance, and reporting capabilities. The services are managed by a local Service Delivery Manager, who supervises day-to-day operations and provides customers with comprehensive monthly account reviews.  

Symantec’s Managed Backup Services
deliver the following:

• Managed Problem Escalation: Working closely with the Managed Services Operation Center, the Service Delivery Manager provides proactive problem management and escalation, ensuring that issues are resolved swiftly.
• Improved Backup and Recovery Performance: Symantec’s deep expertise on architecture and operations provides proactive guidance on engineering, deployment and ongoing management of backup and recovery operations in order to meet strict SLAs.
• Improved Audit and Regulatory Compliance: Out-tasking backup and recovery operations ensures that critical business data is under strict service control and customers maintain audit and regulatory compliance.
• Strategic Use of IT Resources: As organizations experience difficulty with hiring, training and retaining data protection professionals, out-tasking backup and recovery operations enables valuable staff to focus on important strategic initiatives.
• Cost Control: Out-tasking backup and recovery operations helps customers optimize existing and future hardware and facilities expenditures. Furthermore, out-tasking ensures transparent and predictable costs for backup and recovery operations.

“Many organizations are currently upgrading and modernizing their backup infrastructures to keep pace with data growth and heightened requirements for recovery,” said Anil Chakravarthy, senior vice president, Symantec Enterprise Services. “At the same time, they are also evaluating out-tasking to experts as a way to reduce costs and gain higher reliability. Symantec’s Managed Backup Services can deliver up to 20 percent savings in operational costs, while also ensuring a backup success rate of 97 percent.”

Symantec Managed Backup Services are now available. Pricing is based on a monthly fee per client server under management.