The Collective Group Offers “Backup as a Service”

The Collective Group, a backup and recovery consulting and managed services firm, announced a partnership with BakBone Software, Inc. to make available the industry’s first true ‘Backup as a Service‘ offering.

The new service, named ‘NetVault: OpsPlus,’ is powered by unique and proven managed service technology from Collective. With NetVault: OpsPlus, users completely out-task responsibility for monitoring and managing backup and recovery operations, freeing up in-house IT staff to focus on core business initiatives. Starting with an expert review of a customer’s backup architecture, NetVault: OpsPlus realigns the backup infrastructure to reflect the current and planned needs of the overall IT environment. Then the site is upgraded to the latest release of BakBone’s NetVault: Backup product. The NetVault: OpsPlus Remote Management Center then assumes complete responsibility for all backup and recovery operations going forward.

With NetVault: OpsPlus, Collective’s dedicated RAMP (Remote Administration Management Platform) appliance sits securely behind a customer’s firewall. keeping a 24×7 finger on the pulse of all backup related activity. In the event of a backup failure the RAMP intelligently interprets error codes, responds instantly with automated processes and escalates to a Remote Management Center staffed with backup product experts as needed. Web accessible portals provide the customer with detailed reporting capabilities and insight into the status of their backups. The service incorporates the latest version of NetVault: Backup, BakBone’s award-winning enterprise data protection software.

"We are excited to be working with BakBone to bring a new service offering to our customers. The combination of our comprehensive managed service offering that completely out-tasks backup and recovery operations with BakBone’s data protection software yields a new model for delivering true Backup as a Service," said Ed Taylor, CEO, The Collective Group. "For organizations that choose to retain their critical corporate data on-site, NetVault: OpsPlus provides a cost-effective and robust solution without the need to dedicate valuable IT staff time to the maintenance and operation of backups."

A growing number of remote backup providers currently offer services that export backup data to a remote location. While this solution can be appropriate for small companies with limited data requirements, it doesn’t scale for mid-size and enterprise-class customers. These types of customers typically require advanced data security, are required to meet audit and regulatory compliance, are dealing with growing data volumes and need to maximize the use of existing IT investments which require them to keep backup activity on-site and at existing disaster recovery locations. This in turn, puts great strain on in-house IT operations teams already overburdened with the tasks of keeping complex IT systems running while trying to adopt compelling new technologies like virtualization and data deduplication. All too often, backup operations suffer. The statistics are troubling:

• Over 50% of employees backing up data misconfigure backup software. (Iron Mountain)
• Over 34% do not test their backups and of those that tested 77% found their tape backups fail to recover. (Storage Magazine)
• Nearly 50% of tape-based backups fail to restore correctly. (Gartner Group)

NetVault: OpsPlus addresses these issues by offering the best of both scenarios; customer data remains on-site and can be securely and quickly accessed by the customer. However, the customer is completely freed from the arduous tasks of backup operations. Additionally, customers benefit from the most current backup product technology without the need to retrain or hire new operations staff.

Jim Johnson, CEO of BakBone Software said: "Many customers have expressed the desire to out task their on-site backup and recovery operations and reassign their critical IT staff resources to other initiatives. I am pleased that through our partnership with Collective, BakBone customers now have the ability to leverage a managed backup service to keep costs down and backup administration time to a minimum."

NetVault: OpsPlus is available for existing NetVault: Backup customers as well as companies wishing to replace their existing backup software with a new and complete solution.