Concentric Debuts Hosted Backup Service

Concentric, a business unit of XO Communications, announced the company’s continuous commitment to provide enterprise-class hosted services for SMBs with the introduction of Concentric Managed Backup. The new hosted service provides small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) with an advanced, affordable, and scalable data backup and recovery solution. Concentric Managed Backup addresses the challenges of explosive data growth while helping to solve critical business problems including regulatory compliance, disaster recovery, and data protection for local and remote offices.

Research firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) estimates annual data growth at 50% to 60% per year for many organizations. The inability to keep pace with data growth is putting increased pressure on already-strained backup windows and/or recovery objectives. In a survey of North American medium-sized businesses, ESG found that "internal pressure to reduce overall costs of doing business" ranked second in factors impacting IT infrastructure decisions. Businesses are also faced with increasing compliance regulations that involve data retention. Not meeting requirements can lead to penalties, legal sanctions or damaged company reputation.

Concentric Managed Backup, powered by EVault backup and recovery technology from i365, A Seagate Company, is an online, disk-to-disk solution providing 24×7 data protection and recovery without the need for additional investment in network or backup infrastructure. Concentric Managed Backup eliminates the inadequacies, inconvenience and expense associated with tape backup by providing faster backup and recoveries, and addressing offsite data protection for regulatory compliance and disaster recovery.

Concentric Managed Backup delivers state-of-the-art automated online backup and recovery services using proprietary patent-pending technology to optimize performance and decrease storage footprint. Only new and changed data at the block level is compressed, encrypted, and transmitted offsite to one of Concentric’s secure data centers where it is further de-duplicated. Customers can easily access, manage and restore data through an easy-to-use web interface that simplifies data protection and frees IT staff to focus on other business critical applications.

"The Concentric Managed Backup offering reinforces the company’s commitment to providing SMBs with robust and affordable IT solutions that meet critical business needs," said Craig Collins, president, Concentric. "Managed Backup provides compelling benefits to SMBs including easy implementation, scalability, reliability, and increased flexibility and control. We are delighted to partner with i365, a proven leader in data backup and recovery services."

George Hoenig, vice president of product operations at i365, said: "The Concentric and i365 partnership represents a valuable proposition for small to medium size companies who need to protect their critical business data. Combining our proven EVault online backup and recovery SaaS solution with Concentric’s family of proven hosted applications makes a strong offering in a market where customers want and need a complete solution at an affordable price."

Managed Backup Features and Benefits
Concentric Managed Backup provides secure and reliable data backup and recovery from a few gigabytes to multiple terabytes. With a wide breadth of operating systems and applications support, Concentric Managed Backup can easily backup and recover data on servers, applications, desktops, and notebooks. With data safely stored off-site in world-class data centers, Managed Backup is more reliable than tape back-up and makes restoring data a simple process.

Other features and benefits include:

• Reliable – Reduced risks to business continuity and revenue loss, strong disaster recovery capability, regulatory and statutory requirements for data retention.
• Affordable – Enterprise features and benefits at SMB prices, lowered administrative, infrastructure and operational costs, reduced downtime costs, IT resources freed to pursue other priorities.
• Efficient – Easy-to-use yet powerful web-based administration, far greater convenience, higher reliability and lower costs compared to tape backup, highly efficient, proprietary data compression and delta technology.
• Manageable – Outstanding, US-based customer service and support, complementary Hosted IT and connectivity solutions.
• Comprehensive Platform Support including – Novell, NetWare, Linux, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBM, AIX, IBM i and VMWare, as well as application support including Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Cluster Services, Oracle, and other applications.
• Secure – FIPS-approved AES encryption secures data end-to-end, from the moment that it leaves customer systems – and only customers have the password to unlock their own data.

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Availability
Concentric Managed Backup is available now.