More than 120 laptops are stolen or lost every day in Australia while major system breakdowns, tape restoration failures and even sabotage by disgruntled employees play havoc with business data.
The Integrated Financial Group’s Greg Milner said banks and financial institutions are increasingly regarding data protection and disaster recovery plans as being as, or more, important than general business insurance.
“According to America’s International Data Corporation, the data back-up market in the US alone was worth $US16 billion last year and will reach $US46 billion by 2003,” Mr Milner said.
“Offsite is the logical place for data storage and this is a boom area for information technology.”
Mr Milner said WA businesses could back-up their data off-site to anywhere in Australia but still control it from their offices.
“New Brisbane-based company sureVault has spent $3 million on technology that ensures a client’s data is tightly encrypted before it leaves their network – and can’t be unscrambled even by SureVault – until back at the source,” he said.
“It’s automated – so you can set and forget – and takes less than 10 minutes to do the initial, very simple set-up from CD.
“The initial data dump is done either over the Internet or via a transfer to disc, and from then on it backs up every night or even several times a day if needed.”
Mr Milner said sureVault would float on the New York Stock Exchange next year.
WA Internet service provider WestNet recently launched an online back-up service called ExpressBackup.
ExpressBackup director Leah Stacpoole said the solution was automated as forgetting to back-up was a common problem for clients.
