Bar-S Foods Implements Symantec Backup Exec

Symantec announced that Bar-S Foods, one of the nation’s largest meat processing companies, has replaced its data back up and restore system with Symantec Backup Exec. As a result, the company’s data restores are quicker and to date have been 100 percent accurate, significantly reducing the burden on the IT department and restoring employees’ confidence in the company’s backup system. Using Symantec, Bar-S has significantly reduced the time and costs associated with data backup and restores, and eliminated the severe security risks associated with employees manually backing up data to external drives and personal storage devices.

Founded in 1981, Bar-S Foods has 1,500 employees and sales of more than $400 million a year. Orders are entered electronically and the company is responsible not only for fulfilling those orders but also for protecting confidential customer records from loss or theft. Failure to backup data or not being able to recover specific files could increase the company’s legal risks during litigation. The company’s previous backup solution did not provide backups with the level of accuracy required. Before implementing Backup Exec 11d, if a restore failed, Bar-S Foods would have to manually re-enter the missing data, representing an impact of 14 to 30 percent on average of an employee’s weekly productivity.

"If we can’t get to the data we’ve backed up, especially with the legal requirements these days, we’re in trouble," said Dave McEldowney, division vice president, Information Technology, Bar-S Foods. "Before implementing Symantec Backup Exec, backups failed about six times per year and almost half of what we would try to restore would not work."

The backup and restore failures associated with their previous solution created a sense of unease among Bar-S employees, who often resorted to copying sensitive business data to their own personal thumb drives and external drives. This created a significant data security risk if one of those personal devices was lost or stolen because they were not encrypted and their use could not be monitored or controlled by the IT department.

As a result, Bar-S Foods implemented Symantec Backup Exec and immediately realized improvements in its backup and restore process. Since deploying Symantec’s data and system protection solution, restore accuracy has been 100 percent.

"Symantec Backup Exec 11d allows us to do a lot more because the restores are faster and more accurate, and the resulting time and cost savings are significant," noted McEldowney. "The user interface is simpler than our previous application and it’s easier to go in and restore the data you need from a particular point in time."

Bar-S also uses the Backup Exec Desktop and Laptop Option to backup to a Network Attached Storage device. The Desktop and Laptop Option delivers continuous data protection to desktops and laptops whether in the office or on the road. Not only improving data protection and efficiency, this option also enables users to restore their own files and maintains synchronization between multiple desktops and laptops so the most up-to-date file versions are available on all of a user’s computers.

In addition to Backup Exec, Bar-S has deployed Symantec Ghost Solution Suite to help with provisioning of desktops and Symantec Mail Security SMTP to stop spam and malware from infiltrating the company’s email system.

"We’re blocking about 900,000 spam emails a month, up from about 40,000 when we were using Microsoft’s spam filter," McEldowney added. "It takes an employee an average of 10 seconds to deal with each spam message, so we estimate that this alone saves the company about $7,000 every month. Mail Security blocks more than 700 viruses, trojans, worms, and other types of malware every month."