Swisscom Secures Mobile Workforce

To launch its new online backup service, Swisscom, Switzerland’s telecom enterprise and IT outsourcing service provider, turned to Iron Mountain Digital, the technology arm of Iron Mountain Incorporated. Swisscom has selected the Company’s Connected Backup for PC solution to be the technological backbone of its new flexible and scalable backup offering. Using 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. Companies that once faced the significant costs and challenges of data loss due to system crashes or laptop theft, are now able to easily and efficiently ensure that their information is securely protected.

With features such as sophisticated data reduction and de-duplication technologies, along with the prospect of a fast return on investment (ROI), easy administration and user friendliness, Swisscom’s decision to implement Connected Backup for PC was an easy choice. Plus, Swisscom had already implemented Iron Mountain Digital’s solution to protect its own 17,500 staff PCs, promising even more potential synergies.

Swisscom’s market research points to massive demand for online backup services for the rising numbers of mobile corporate staff, especially in the small and medium sized enterprise 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 companies’ internal IT departments.

“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,” said 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.”

Iron Mountain Digital’s Connected Backup for PC solution provides secure data transfer and uses patented data reduction technologies to automatically compress data volume. It avoids all forms of redundancy, i.e. user files waiting 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.

At the Swisscom data center, information is also fully encrypted and stored centrally in a secure environment. Users can access their password protected data worldwide, any time, and restore them easily if needed. Swisscom’s ‘Online Backup Business’ service is aimed at enterprises with more than 50 mobile users, while ‘Online Backup Professional’ addresses small and medium sized enterprises with up to 50 mobile staff. John Clancy, president of Iron Mountain Digital, said: “Iron Mountain Digital provides our customers and partners around the world with the most advanced data backup and protection solutions to meet their business needs. Swisscom’s unique online backup service combines the best of the best – their expertise in leading service quality, with our undisputed No. 1 solution for automatic desktop and laptop data protection and recovery.”