German EFI Adds Remote Data Protection for Print Providers

Marking its twelfth year of delivering cloud-based solutions, with more than 2,500 customers utilising the company’s on-demand managed services, Electronics For Imaging, Inc. launched an additional cloud service offering – off-site data protection services utilising its own data centre in North America and additional sites in Europe.

Available now, EFI is offering new online back-up, storage and data recovery options for Print MIS and web-to-print customers that wish to host their own solutions, to ensure protection, redundancy and speedy recovery in case of disaster. Operations are monitored continuously and customers are notified of conditions that could impact service.

"EFI has been a pioneer in cloud-based services with active customers since 2000. We are the largest managed services provider for print providers, with thousands of locations and millions of users accessing the cloud," said Ghilad Dziesietnik, CTO of EFI. "Software in the cloud offers numerous benefits, most notably reduced maintenance costs for users, 24/7 care and management by a team of experts, anywhere access to information, redundancy, back-up and highly secure data. Our new remote data protection services provide many of these advantages for clients that wish to host their own applications."

EFI’s current cloud-based Software as a service offerings include EFI Pace and EFI PrintSmith Vision management systems, the EFI Digital StoreFront web-to-print platform, and the new EFI Fiery Dashboard business information service. Unlike other applications on the market designed as client-server products, EFI applications were designed from the ground up to run in a browser; their performance and reliability have been fine-tuned over the years to work optimally in a cloud-based deployment.

EFI cloud offerings enable customers to utilise Web-based tools without investing in any hardware or dedicated IT personnel on site. The system is continuously available to administrators, print operations personnel and print requestors via the Internet, without any need for local software other than a browser.

Commercial printer Freeport Press, Inc. is an EFI MIS client that hosts their own solution and was an early adopter of EFI’s disaster recovery services. "We had a fire in our facility and EFI was able to recover our backup data and have us up and running from their cloud as soon as our replacement hardware was available," said David G. Pilcher, president and CEO of Freeport Press. "Without EFI’s help and quick response, and their expertise in delivering cloud-based solutions, we would have lost countless hours of business from not having our systems available."

"The cloud is not only ideal for hosting services, but also for providing other critical capabilities such as disaster recovery," said Greg Carter, director of EFI cloud services. "With their data safely stored off-site with EFI, customers are more prepared than they could be on their own. Our capacity and expertise ensure a timely recovery at a moment that is trying and critical for any organisation."

Customer data are transferred automatically every day using secure protocols to allow a recovery into EFI’s cloud which uses border security, access control techniques, active virus filtering, and centralised monitoring. EFI provides MIS and Internet know-how combined with 24×7, real-time situation handling to deliver reliable services from the cloud as well as recovery into the cloud.