Swisscom Secures Data With Iron Mountain Digital

For the introduction of its online backup service, Swisscom – Switzerland’s leading telecom enterprise and IT outsourcing service provider – chose Iron Mountain Digital’s Connected Backup for PC solution.

The Connected Backup for PC software forms the technological basis for Swisscom’s flexible and scalable backup service. With this solution, companies’ mobile staff can backup local data on their PCs and laptops via the internet to Swisscom’s data centers and retrieve the information at any time. Data losses frequently caused by head crashes or the theft of PCs or laptops – which each year cause businesses enormous costs and tarnished images – are thus a thing of the past.

Iron Mountain Digital succeeded in fending off the competition in a selection procedure lasting several months and covering everything from market analyses to testing. The main reasons for choosing Iron Mountain Digital were the solution’s efficient data compression algorithms, administration and user friendliness. The prospect of a fast return on investment (ROI) was another compelling reason. Also: Swisscom already uses Iron Mountain Digital’s Connected Backup for PC internally to backup its 17,500 staff PCs, thereby promising the telco additional potential synergies.

Massive market potential for online backup services
According to the latest IDC surveys, 47.1% of the gainfully employed population across Europe works in areas where spatial flexibility is required – a trend that is rising. At the same time, 16.8% of these individuals work permanently on a mobile basis – a figure set to grow to 25.8% by 2010 according to IDC’s predictions. Swisscom’s own market research points to massive demand for online backup services for the rising numbers of mobile corporate staff, especially in the SME sector. The enterprise also predicts lucrative potential in the field of workplace management: thanks to its competence in the outsourcing sector, Swisscom will be able to offer businesses improved service level agreements (SLAs), thereby reducing the support workload placed on company’s internal IT departments.

Connected Backup for PC from Iron Mountain Digital prevails
In the course of a multi-month selection procedure, Iron Mountain Digital’s Connected Backup for PC solution succeeded in prevailing over the competition. The solution provides for secure data transfer and uses patented data reduction technologies to automatically compress the data volume. It avoids all forms of redundancy, i.e. user files to be secured are only transferred fully during the initial backup. Only file changes are transferred in subsequent backup runs, thereby optimizing storage space and transmission time and reducing bandwidth requirements. The entire information is also fully encrypted and stored centrally in a secure environment at the Swisscom data center. Users can access their password protected data worldwide, any time, and restore them easily if need be. Swisscom’s ‘Online Backup Business’ service is aimed at enterprises with over 50 mobile users, while ‘Online Backup Professional’ addresses SMEs with up to 50 mobile staff.

“Many surveys have shown that no company nowadays can get around treating its distributed data on mobile devices any differently from all its other corporate data and integrating them into its data backup strategy,” says Georges Schlegel, head of Swisscom’s product management division for large businesses. “But it is a lot harder to keep track of distributed data than data stored directly on servers, especially when staff is often on the road. Our online backup service offers businesses a simple means of solving this problem by running automatic backups to central offsite data centers. In doing so, Iron Mountain Digital’s technology plays a central role behind the scenes, enabling us to combine data backup and data security in such a way as to offer our customers optimal terms of use.”

Sascha Rosbach, Director Business Development at Iron Mountain Digital: “We are pleased that Swisscom offers a compelling and cost-transparent service with the help of our technology. For us, Swisscom is a strategically strong and important partner with whom we have already cooperated successfully for some years. The service Swisscom offers with our technology is a premium product: it combines Swisscom’s excellent service quality with our well engineered data backup and recovery technology.”