Efficient pc backups bring peace of mind

With Iron Mountain PC Backup, Hitachi Consulting improves productivity and compliance for 700 mobile staff.

Challenge:

Inefficient and time-consuming backup software was jeopardising data integrity for the company and its clients

Solution:

Hitachi Consulting chose the PC Backup service from Iron Mountain. Flexible contract terms were offered to manage the transition

Value:

Improvements in productivity pay for an Iron Mountain solution that mitigates risk and assures compliance

Client

In November 2000, Hitachi Limited bought the consulting arm of Grant Thornton to form Hitachi Consulting. Today it is a recognised global leader in delivering proven business and IT solutions to Global 2000 companies. Its consultants strive to understand the unique business needs of their clients and help them realise measurable business value.

Michael Shisko, Director of IT at Hitachi Consulting and previously employed by Grant Thornton, was adamant that Hitachi Consulting should continue to use Iron Mountain services following the buy out. “It quickly became apparent that Iron Mountain is the gold standard for PC data protection,” he says.

While PC data protection had solved the problem of insufficient storage for Grant Thornton, Michael Shisko knew that Iron Mountain service benefits had gone beyond that. Enabling employees to move their data quickly and securely to and from their laptops for safe storage had not only protected data, but had also relieved the burden on Exchange.

“It quickly became apparent that Iron Mountain is the gold standard for PC data protection.”

Michael Shisko
Director of IT
Hitachi Consulting

Challenge

Nevertheless, in 2004, Hitachi cancelled the Iron Mountain contract after receiving free backup and recovery utilities with replacement laptops. The new software claimed to make local backups and PC-to-server backups at scheduled intervals.

Michael Shisko soon saw the inferiority of the new product. The free software backed up files inefficiently as a simple file transfer. For example, there was no data compression and, with such a time-consuming process, Hitachi Consulting was putting itself and its clients at risk of data loss. The company has 1,000 employees, nearly 70 per cent of whom are mobile laptop users. “The free software we were using was horribly inefficient,” says Michael Shisko. “Since most of our users are remote, people just weren’t using it.”

Contract clauses often mandate that Hitachi Consulting complies with security regulations for protecting privacy and intellectual property, but there was zero confidence in the new software’s ability to ensure this. Hitachi Consulting recognised the need to eliminate this threat, fast.

Solution

“We quickly learned what the definition of free is when it comes to software. Just two months after implementing the free product, we knew we wanted to come back to Iron Mountain because it works,” recalls Michael Shisko. “The product we previously used just didn’t compare. It wasn’t nearly as robust or sophisticated, and we weren’t comfortable relying on it as our company’s only means of backup. We went away looking to save some money, but we returned because we realised the value we got from Iron Mountain’s solution outweighed any cost.”

The Iron Mountain PC Backup solution offers automatic data protection that works even over dial-up connections. It determines intelligently which files need to be saved, eliminating duplicate copies that only burden servers.

Hitachi Consulting selected the Licensed Software option, which allows the company to backup data to its own servers. In a three-month transitional period, Hitachi Consulting benefited from an Iron Mountain Subscription Service (a temporary measure while a new data centre was constructed at the company’s Dallas headquarters). Within months, the product was fully integrated and Hitachi Consulting once again got peace of mind thanks to PC data protection across its 17 offices in twelve American states.

“The time and effort it saves more than pays for itself. From a cost perspective, it’s easy to justify.”

Michael Shisko
Director of IT
Hitachi Consulting

Value

With the Iron Mountain solution, employees no longer need to find a high-speed internet connection to facilitate a backup. By recognising only new files and file changes, rather than identical files from multiple machines, the Iron Mountain solution enables smaller, faster backups.

“Say I’ve got two gigs of new data,” explains Michael Shisko. “Because of Iron Mountain’s Delta Block™ and SendOnce™ capabilities, that’s only going to be about 800K, and that’s going to compress down to something like 32K, so my actual backup time is almost instantaneous, and yet I backed up a significant amount of data.”

The Iron Mountain PC Backup solution has other benefits. By restoring data without requiring prior installation of user applications and files, the time spent setting up a user on a new piece of hardware is significantly reduced. “With this capability, we’re able to run on a lean inventory of extra hardware,” says Michael Shisko. “When someone leaves the company, we do a final backup and ship the hardware out to a new person immediately. That way, we have the comfort level of still having access to the original person’s data without having to hold on to the laptop.”

According to Michael Shisko, even the company’s experienced consultants suffer from their share of data disasters. “On a pretty regular basis, we have machines coming back that need to be restored,” he notes. “So, from a disaster recovery perspective, Iron Mountain is being used on a regular basis, improving overall productivity since our consultants can easily restore lost data themselves.”

From a cost benefit standpoint, Iron Mountain was the logical solution for Hitachi Consulting. Michael Shisko concludes: “Essentially, I’m looking at one billable hour per employee per year to pay for Iron Mountain’s Licensed Software solution, which is nothing compared to the time it takes if that employee loses his hard drive, if his laptop is stolen, or if he installs something and it just destroys the system. The time and effort it saves more than pays for itself. From a cost perspective, it’s easy to justify.”