By EVault Guest Blog 2

Martha Stewart

While there’s not much that can be done about your mother-in-law, fortunately there are lots of ways you can make things easier for yourself in the rest of your life. One of those ways is by helping your customers simplify their data backup and recovery plans. In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, many companies are rethinking their business continuity plans to ensure they’re properly protected in the event of a disaster. They may be thinking that coming up with a plan is going to be a complicated process, but if you go with the right provider, a DR plan not only gives your customers peace of mind, it can also dramatically simplify day-to-day operations.

Built for Speed

Around the holidays, it always seems like there’s never enough time to do everything. When it comes to cooking a turkey or holiday shopping, there’s only so much you can do to streamline the process. However, for your customers who are still backing up to tape, there’s an opportunity to save hours and hours of wasted time by moving their backup to the cloud. But not all cloud backup solutions are created equal. You want to look for cloud backup that enables all of the following:

Going Social

The holidays are a wonderful opportunity to bring families and friends together. It’s also a time when the expression “too many cooks in the kitchen” can be interpreted at a very literal level. Managing data backup can also be a situation when many people want to be involved, but not all cloud backup solutions make this easy.

Look for a backup and recovery solution with a centralized management platform that allows people within your customers’ organization and you to communicate about backups. Social technology has proven valuable in the workplace, and the IT department is no exception. The EVault Portal, available in EVault 7, is a great example of a social solution.  The EVault Portal is a backup and recovery management dashboard that is built on a social management platform. It helps IT to streamline backup and recovery operations by allowing role-based owners to directly interact with each other and the backup management interface – all in real-time.

The EVault Portal is the first backup and recovery solution that truly mirrors how your people, systems and data connect. With the EVault Portal, an IT administrator can see what jobs have completed with success or failure, what and who made a change to an agent configuration or backup job, and at the same time, directly post comments or questions for the team to resolve issues collaboratively.

Imagine if you could plan your holiday dinners with out-of-town relatives the same way? Maybe in 2015…

Flexible

You know how Aunt Sally always insists on making those same creamed green beans even though nobody likes them? It’s something that everyone has to deal with, but the IT solutions you offer your customers should allow to customize the menu to their liking. You and your customers should be able to choose the deployment model that fits them best. Choose a solution that enables you to back up to their cloud, your cloud, the partner’s cloud or some combination thereof. You also want to choose a solution that offers storage appliances that fit in with existing networks or enables customers to use existing hardware. Unlike your relatives, a backup and recovery solution shouldn’t force you to change your environment to meet its needs.

Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

At EVault, we know that IT solutions aren’t supposed to cause more problems. Efficiency and effectiveness are key, especially when it comes to protecting something as critical as your customers’ data. If you’re interesting in learning more about how you can help your customers simplify (and become an IT hero the process), we’d love to talk to you about partnering with EVault.  Meanwhile, happy holidays!

Kim Davis, EVault