Driving New On-Net Revenue with Remote Storage Services

Today’s leading network service providers are continuously looking for new on-net revenue streams to mitigate downward price pressures and decreasing margins. This has heightened interest in layering managed services on top of their networks to differentiate their offerings, extend their reach into existing customers, attract new customers and reduce customer churn.

One prime example of these ‘layered services’ is remote data protection, such as data backup and restoration, data replication and remote storage management, which are core components of business continuity planning –- one of the highest priorities for today’s IT organizations. Much the way telephone companies layered highly profitable services such as caller ID and voice mail on their phone networks, today’s network service providers have the same opportunity with data protection and storage management services. One such network service provider reaching out to the market with network-based storage management services is OpenAccess.

OpenAccess is a New York-based metropolitan area network provider offering customers on Long Island and Manhattan an array of telecommunications and business services. The company sees remote data protection services as an exceptional growth opportunity.

With the growing cost and complexity of managing internal storage systems, the continued growth and importance of corporate data, new regulatory requirements, technological threats, and the devastating impact of downtime, businesses are continually looking for more reliable and affordable ways to protect themselves and their corporate information. In turn, companies of every size have been quietly converting to the convenience and cost-effectiveness of remote data protection to augment or replace existing backup and restoration practices. In fact, across companies of all sizes, IDC found that nearly 80 percent plan on implementing business continuity with a redundant data site within the next 12 months.

Because the market for network-based data protection is still in its early market phase, OpenAccess felt the market was ripe for it to enter this market and capture early market share. So timing was of the essence. However, OpenAccess realized entering this market on its own would be time-consuming and expensive. To do so would require building out a storage infrastructure, hiring and training specialized resources, developing the needed management software, and developing and packaging the service offerings. According to Jimmy Tam, vice president of business development for OpenAccess, “We knew our market was ready for network-based backups. It was just a matter of how much sooner we could deliver than our competitors. The only way we saw to do this was by partnering with the right provider -- someone who had packaged, proven technology, and who understood how to help us deliver this to our customers profitably.”

For these reasons, OpenAccess decided to partner with Arsenal Digital Solutions to deploy and deliver these services to OpenAccess’ clients.

OpenAccess has positioned its new data protection service, Data Protection access, as a way to simplify every aspect of protecting data – it’s easy to set-up, provides automated backups and features rapid Web-based restores. It minimizes the impact on servers and networks to reduce both operating and storage management costs.

Traditionally, many of OpenAccess’ customers’ data protection and business continuance plans relied on internal staff to backup tapes in-house, then physically transport the tapes off-site to a backup data center. However, to avoid the time delays, human error, expense and security risk of physically transporting tapes, many of its customers expressed interest in the affordability, performance and security of using this service over their existing network connections to backup their data to a remote site.

These remote data protection services use proprietary technology to securely centralize data from multiple remotely located servers and laptops/workstations on a daily basis. These proprietary technologies are also significantly more efficient in both bandwidth and storage space requirements than traditional backup systems, providing customers with the security of a full backup every day with an impact on the target server and network that is lower than a traditional local incremental backup. Backups that used to take hours can now be completed in minutes, requiring only a tiny fraction of the actual data on a server to be copied in order to protect it, while retaining the ability to restore as if a full backup had been made.

With as much as 60 percent of company data created and stored outside the traditional ‘glass house’, network-based backup and restore has been particularly popular with large businesses that are lacking enterprise-class data protection for their branch offices and remote workers. In turn, these highly efficient network-based backup services are helping organizations justify backing up more of their business-critical enterprise data than previously thought possible, and provide a higher level of data protection and recoverability in the event of an outage or disaster.

These remote backup services also can significantly reduce ramp up times – for both network providers and their customers since they typically include all the hardware, software, installation, provisioning, operational support, and usage-based billing in a single turn-key service.

Sam Sigarto is COO with Arsenal Digital Solutions.

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