Asigra's Televaulting platform addresses growing data storage challenges through its agentless architecture and intelligent data retention capabilities. It allows for efficient backup and recovery without overburdening system resources. The platform is well-suited for both large enterprises and SMBs through its scalability and pay-as-you-grow pricing. It offers benefits to both customers and managed service providers by reducing costs and complexity of backup management.

1. TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT
Vendor View point: Asigra
Krista Collins
IDC OPINION
Unprecedented data growth is challenging companies of all sizes, placing increasing
pressure on their backup and recovery initiatives. With mounting pressure to comply
with regulatory requirements and improve disaster recovery practices, companies are
experiencing dissatisfaction with traditional backup methods that are falling short
regarding efficiency, reliability, and ease of use. The need for innovative and cost-
effective backup and recovery is driving interest in managed storage solutions. While
storage as a service offers many benefits, these solutions often require agents to be
installed on target machines, which can represent additional costs and complexity for
service providers, reducing their margins.
Asigra is addressing the need for effective, affordable, and easy to manage backup
and recovery with its Information Recovery Management Platform — Asigra
Televaulting. Delivered to both small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and large
enterprises through managed service providers, including outsourcers and
36 Toronto Street Suite 300 Toronto, Ontario M5C2C5 Canada P.416.369.0033
integrators, the platform is designed to make it easy and cost-effective for customers
to achieve regulatory compliance and drive greater benefits from virtualization.
Asigra's key differentiation — its agentless service-oriented architecture (SOA) —
makes the solution less intrusive and simple to deploy and maintain, decreasing
management costs for service providers and increasing their profitability.
Based on Asigra's experience in the data storage market, the company has
demonstrated the following:
"Intelligent retention" reduces costs while enabling compliance. Asigra's
approach to tiering and categorizing backup data is based on a data value
continuum, storing and pricing information based on its value to the company.
This approach, called "intelligent retention", helps customers align the cost and
value of data over time with business expectations regarding recovery time and
recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs).
Agentless software drives profitability for service providers. While many
traditional backup and restore solutions require an agent installed on every target
server, workstation, and laptop, the Televaulting architecture is agentless, saving
deployment, management, and maintenance costs for service providers.
Televaulting can maximize virtualization investments. Customers with virtual
server environments can leverage the agentless architecture to achieve backup
and recovery without placing a "tax" on the CPU and RAM resources of the
physical hypervisor host.
Filing Information: July 2008, IDC #, Volume: 1
Canadian IT Advisor: Technology Assessment

2. IN THIS STUDY
In this study, sponsored by Asigra, IDC provides insight into Asigra's information
recovery management platform, called Asigra Televaulting. IDC studies the
capabilities and applications of Asigra's software, the size and trends of the market it
is addressing, and the company's challenges and opportunities for growth. All
currency figures in this document are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise stated.
SITUATION OVERVIEW
Since 1986, Asigra has been delivering agentless, secure online backup and recovery
solutions designed to centralize data management and reduce agent-based software
compliance, pricing, and performance challenges through SOA.
The company's software platform, Asigra Televaulting, was designed with some key
principles in mind, including minimal human involvement, offsite storage,
centralization of backed-up content, and quick and reliable recovery. Sold through
managed storage providers, outsourcers, and integrators, Asigra's software currently
protects about 50,000 remote sites across North America. Although the solution is
designed for large enterprises with multiple sites or complex lines of business, many
growth-oriented small and medium businesses (SMBs) that are looking for scalable,
affordable solutions to meet their future storage needs find the solution attractive.
Asigra's solution has gained the attention of organizations not only in North America,
but also abroad. One such organization, The British Red Cross, was facing a number
of key challenges in regard to its backup and recovery approach. Backups were being
made using a tape library, which was not always reliable and was prone to damage.
The organization was also indexing many files, which were becoming corrupt and
hard to restore. Furthermore, the Red Cross needed to back up file servers at each of
its 70 sites across the U.K., and required users at each site to change tapes in the
servers manually. This manual approach was time consuming, and posed a risk to
the data since tapes were not always changed, or were taken off-site. The
organization needed a more efficient way to manage and monitor its backups.
In 2006, the British Red Cross began evaluating solutions from various providers, and
came across Asigra during a Google search. According to Kevin Bush, Technical
Services Manager for the British Red Cross, "It was the technology that stood out for
us." Bush explains that the platform, delivered through a U.K. partner, delivers greater
efficiency and reliability now by backing up to disk. The Red Cross also values
Asigra's compressed capacity-based pricing model. While other providers charge a
license fee per server, with Asigra, the organization can backup as many servers as it
wants. In addition to backing up and restoring single and multiple files faster, the
solution also supports all of its diverse infrastructure from Linux, Windows, and
Novell. Mr. Bush says, "unlike some larger vendors, Asigra has been very
responsive, speaks with us live, and is providing great support."
©2008 IDC # 1

3. Organizations of all sizes are trying to cope with massive data growth, particularly
from unstructured data such as video, email, audio, and word processor documents
across geographically dispersed environments. IDC data shows that the amount of
digital information that will be created, captured, and replicated will grow from 161
exabytes (EB) in 2007 to 988EB in 2010, a six-fold increase (Worldwide Archiving
Software 2008–2012 Forecast, IDC #212216). With so much information being
digitized as well as mobilized through laptops and mobile devices, companies are
trying to define retention policies and retrieval processes to meet management
objectives and regulatory requirements (Worldwide Storage Services 2008–2012
Forecast, IDC #212063). IT managers are also addressing an emerging challenge —
virtual machine (VM) "sprawl", or the proliferation of virtual servers without
appropriate IT control — where administrators trying to reduce complexity and costs
through virtualization face the same basic management issues they faced several
years ago with physical servers.
Under pressure to find innovative and cost-effective ways to address these
challenges, companies are increasingly looking at managed storage services,
particularly from their primary storage providers. However, the management and
support of most solutions, which require agents on customer endpoints, can represent
additional costs and complexity for the storage service provider. Furthermore, the
costs associated with storing increasing amounts of data is concerning. If the cost
structures become too prohibitive, then service providers risk losing their recurring
service revenues from these customers.
To address these challenges, Asigra has developed its information backup and
recovery management software platform, Asigra Televaulting. The solution is
delivered to both SMEs and large enterprises through outsourcers, integrators, and
managed service providers on either a software-as-a-service (SaaS) utility or an on-
premise deployment basis.
From the perspective of SMEs and large enterprises, Asigra Televaulting helps to
properly manage and protect their data network offsite, from one centralized location.
Both structured and unstructured data on desktops, laptops, and file and print servers
are automatically backed up, providing a simple approach to data backup protection
for businesses in industries with regulation and compliance concerns such as legal,
financial, healthcare, and oil and gas. With Asigra's intelligent retention, content is
stored and priced, based on its value to the company. This tiering and categorization
of data allows organizations to retrieve critical information faster, and reduce
unnecessary storage costs. Information from all computers are backed up with
common data eliminated, further reducing storage costs (see Figure 1).
2 # ©2008 IDC

4. FIGURE 1
Information is stored and priced, based on its value to the company. Data can be categorized as
critical, important, or park data.
Source: Asigra, 2008
From the outsourcer or service providers' perspective, the solution delivers a wide
area network (WAN) optimized software platform to deploy, provision, and sell
storage-as-a-service, as well as a multitiered storage billing system to empower
remote service delivery. The platform can be delivered to SMEs and large enterprises
through a multitenant or one-to-one model, or to very large enterprises as an on-
premise solution. With agentless architecture, service providers and outsourcers can
deliver backup and recovery solutions remotely without interruption to the client,
reducing implementation and IT management expenditures, thus increasing their
margins. The solution also provides WAN optimization techniques, including common
file elimination, deduplication, and compression, that conserve bandwidth and storage
by transmitting only unique instances of data.
Security, a critical requirement for corporate customers and outsourcers, is addressed
with Asigra Televaulting's use of AES256 bit protection and advanced authentication,
notification and other security elements and layers. Asigra's authentication processes,
©2008 IDC # 3

5. which include both login and auditing capabilities, are designed to ensure that no
individual can impersonate an account through client-side attack. Asigra's software
requires unique identifiers for login to the account, use of the proper encryption keys
with one-way hashes used for verification, and the need for login requests to originate
from valid hardware using a specific IP address. These multiple authentication
mechanisms are designed to reduce information exposure and provide a reliable first
layer of protection.
Asigra's platform is comprised of two major components: the DS-Client (one installed
at each remote site) and the DS-System (installed at the vaulting location). This
scalability enables Asigra to support additional backup loads and multiple operating
systems, servers, databases, email systems, and storage environments. While these
features were developed with the storage needs of large business and enterprises in
mind, the pay-as-you-grow pricing model and scalability makes the solution well
suited to, and increasingly popular with, growth-oriented SMBs.
Asigra Televaulting distinguishes itself in the market as follows:
Agentless architecture is less invasive and easy for service providers to deploy
and manage, as well as being optimal for protecting virtual servers.
Delta processing, compression, and deduplication reduce network bandwidth and
storage consumption.
Scheduled automatic backups ensure continuous protection.
Restores are designed to be fast, easy, and manageable.
Planning, reporting, and charge-back billing empowers remote service delivery.
Intelligent retention through backup life-cycle management enables customers to
classify data and develop retention policies to reflect business requirements in
accordance with a data value continuum.
Supports virtual servers of leading vendors.
The Asigra Televaulting software removes the need for locally installed agents as it
leverages the protocols, APIs, methods, and functionality that platform, operating
system, database, and other application vendors use for remotely accessing and
managing their own systems. While traditional backup and restore solutions might
require backup agents installed on every target server, workstation, and laptop, for
each type of system and application, the Televaulting architecture is designed to
integrate support for all major platforms and applications into a single software
"footprint" on a local area network (LAN). Service providers can therefore service their
customers with greater ease, reducing their costs and improving their margins.
With intelligent retention, Asigra allows customers to segment data on a value
continuum, from newer/younger "critical data" that is essential for the resumption of
operations and meeting recovery time objectives, to older "important data" or "park
4 # ©2008 IDC

6. data" that needs to be stored for longer-term compliance. This segmentation enables
customers to achieve three objectives: align the business value of data with the cost
of storage; reduce the cost of retention through a backup file's life cycle, and address
RTOs and RPOs driven by business requirements and provisions that government
regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 have specified. The solution can
be configured to move data automatically from one segment on the data value
continuum to another after a specified amount of time, or given a certain event, such
as a newer version/generation of a file. The platform is designed to integrate with
cloud storage providers, enabling managed storage providers to offload some of the
less critical "park data", and reduce their own costs of managing and storing this
information.
For customers with virtual server environments, Asigra’s platform ensures the
anticipated total cost of ownership (TCO) efficiencies and savings from virtualization
deployments are realized. Asigra's agentless architecture enables customers to
achieve backup and recovery without placing a "tax" on the CPU and RAM resources
of the physical hypervisor host. Additionally, Asigra enables enterprises to bridge the
physical and virtual worlds, without having to pick point-solutions for each. As the
virtual server market matures, companies that choose to select multiple virtual server
platforms can also leverage Asigra to protect leading platforms such as VMware,
Microsoft, Parallels, Virtual Iron, and Citrix. When a new virtual server is added,
Asigra Televaulting is designed to automatically discover these servers, and include
them in a backup schedule. Furthermore, live VM backup allows administrators to
back up VMs in the middle of production operations without disruption to production
windows.
MARKET OPPORTUNITY
With exploding data growth and the increasing mobility of data on laptops and cell
phones, organizations are trying to improve how they manage, store, and retrieve
information for corporate governance and regulatory compliance (Worldwide Storage
Services 2008–2012 Forecast, IDC #212063). Data growth and regulatory pressures,
combined with greater acceptance of hosted SaaS models, widespread and cheap
broadband connections, and familiarity with cloud computing, is driving companies to
consider managed services for data backup. While still a nascent market, worldwide
online backup services are forecast to grow from $235 million in 2007 to $715 million
by 2011 (Worldwide Online Backup Services 2007–2011 Forecast: A New Market
Emerges, IDC #209868).
According to a recent IDC survey of 300 U.S. organizations, customers most
frequently cited backup and recovery/archiving (BURA) issues as drivers behind their
storage professional services spending (Storage Professional Services Survey:
Customer Needs and Buying Intentions, IDC #210426). Customers have indicated
that they will increase their spending on storage professional services in the
foreseeable future in response to pressures they feel about managing their storage
environments more effectively, and many plan to use their primary storage providers
for these services.
©2008 IDC # 5

7. From a regulatory perspective, customers of all sizes are looking for help to develop
more effective data protection and disaster recovery plans as their current processes
in these areas are revealed to be inadequate in the context of an audit, litigation, or
specific regulation addressing these processes (Worldwide Storage Services 2008–
2012 Forecast, IDC #212063). Vendors with solutions that not only address these
needs, but that are also easy to deploy and maintain, will be well positioned for
growth.
As data growth continues, there are a number of trends in the storage market that will
continue to impact customer storage strategies. One development that may create
efficiencies, and has gained attention in the industry, is data deduplication — the
elimination of redundant copies of data. This process allows backup and recovery to
be performed faster and more cost-effectively (Storage Optimization: Understanding
Data Deduplication, IDC #207218). Solutions such as Asigra Televaulting that
leverage deduplication can reduce the amount of storage that needs to be purchased
and managed, and expedite data backups of remote sites, which is important for
service providers and outsourcers.
Another trend impacting organizations is virtualization and virtual server sprawl. While
server virtualization projects are intended to achieve consolidation and efficiency, the
uncontrolled proliferation of virtual machines due to the ease with which they can be
generated, is causing administrators to face similar management challenges to those
they faced with physical machines years ago. Administrators are finding it difficult to
track and manage servers in the virtual world, and contend with the moves, adds, and
changes for these virtual servers, which can, in some instances, quadruple
administrative tasks (Worldwide Network Controller and Block-Level Storage
Virtualization 2008–2012 Forecast: A Key Component in Building the Virtual
Datacenter, IDC #211635). With $20 billion forecast to be spent on server
virtualization in 2010, up 68% in five years, the problem of sprawl will only mushroom
unless companies gain greater control over their virtual environments. These
challenges are driving demand for solutions and services that can help them
automate the management of these virtual environments, as well as plan, design,
and implement storage and protection plans that are geared toward virtualized
environments (Worldwide Enterprise Server 2008 Top 10 Predictions, IDC #210085).
T reduce the administrative burden, companies could turn to solutions that leverage
agentless integration and block-level storage, such as Asigra Televaulting, to help
with automated storage provisioning and data replication in a virtualized environment.
Dissatisfaction with the performance of tape systems is also impacting storage
strategies. While tape systems will remain part of the storage ecosystem in the
foreseeable future, organizations are evaluating alternative disk-based solutions that
can offer faster data retrieval and restore. Exploiting this trend are a variety of online
service-based storage companies, including Asigra, that have opportunities for growth
as companies become more familiar and comfortable with the idea of storage
services (Canadian Storage Systems 2008–2012 Forecast, IDC #CA2IH8).
6 # ©2008 IDC

8. FUTURE OUTLOOK
IDC believes the need for improved levels of recovery software that facilitate system,
application and data recovery will grow over the next few years, as customers
continue to invest in next-generation data protection, business continuity, and disaster
recovery technologies (Worldwide Data Protection and Recovery Software 2008–
2012 Forecast, IDC #212213). Early adopters of storage services have praised their
simplicity, predictable pricing, reliable restores, and flexibility, although other
companies are just starting to learn about what storage as a service entails, and what
it means for their organizations. IDC believes more companies will become
comfortable with storage services as the concept becomes increasingly common, and
prospective customers see the successes of early adopters.
With cheaper broadband access, greater comfort level with Web-based services, and
the need for a second site for remote data protection purposes, online backup is
becoming an attractive option for companies of all sizes (Worldwide Online Backup
Services 2007–2011 Forecast: A New Market Emerges, IDC #209868). IDC believes
that SMBs will be the earliest to adopt managed backup and recovery services in
significant numbers, as they look for alternative approaches to storage management
and disaster recovery that relieve them of the storage management burden
(Worldwide Storage Services 2008–2012 Forecast, IDC #212063). Large businesses
— those in the 1,000–9,999 employee range — will probably have the greatest
storage services needs overall, as they are experiencing data growth rates similar to
very large enterprise businesses, but do not have the resources to manage that
growth (Storage Professional Services Survey: Customer Needs and Buying
Intentions, IDC #210426).
IDC expects demand of network-based storage virtualization solutions to remain
strong for the next several years. As companies undertake virtualization of their
server environments, storage solutions such as Asigra's will enable companies to
realize greater functionality and value of their virtualized environments (Canadian
Storage Systems 2008–2012 Forecast, IDC #CA2IH8).
Finally, IT managers across a number of verticals will struggle to meet internal
corporate policies regarding data storage management as well as externally enforced
standards in the form of audits, regulations, and industry standards that must be
adhered to. These drivers will continue to lead customers to seek outside assistance
pertaining to these pressures as well as to disaster recovery/business continuity.
Companies in financial services, utilities, retail, and communications and media are
some of the fastest growing verticals for storage spending. IDC believes that
companies addressing data retention and protection processes, remote data
replication, and ediscovery will continue to be in demand for the foreseeable future
(Worldwide Storage Services 2008–2012 Forecast, IDC #212063).
IDC expects to see new entrants and acquisitions in the emerging storage-as-a-
service market in the years to come. While there are several established companies
in the backup, archiving, and replication management markets, IDC believes there is
opportunity for emerging companies to provide cost-effective solutions that address
the specific needs and challenges of companies, particularly in the midmarket.
©2008 IDC # 7

9. OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLE NGES
Based on Asigra's experience in the data storage market, and the increasing demand
for data backup and recovery solutions, IDC believes that:
Increasing acceptance and adoption of managed storage services presents
lucrative opportunities. With cheaper broadband access, greater comfort level
with Web-based services, and some early success stories, online backup is
becoming a more attractive consideration for companies of all sizes. As more
organizations begin to look for managed storage solutions, Asigra has an
opportunity to capture increasing market share by providing an affordable and
flexible solution that meets the needs of both large organizations and SMEs.
Education is needed to drive solution awareness and sales. Asigra's
agentless approach to backup and recovery storage is different to traditional
methods, and requires some explanation. Helping managed service providers,
outsourcers, and integrators understand the cost savings, simplicity, and
improved margins they can achieve as a result of agentless architecture, and
supporting that with case examples and success stories, will be key to expanding
Asigra's relationships with outsourcers and service providers and thus increasing
its reach with end users in the market.
ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE
Asigra has established a sound business by providing simple to use and deploy
agentless backup and recovery solutions through service providers, outsourcers, and
integrators in either a SaaS utility or an on-premise deployment model. To continue
its success in North America and abroad, Asigra will focus on the following:
Continuing to work closely with service providers and outsourcers to understand
their challenges, help them become more successful, and attract prospective
customers. The company's recent storage services event held in June 2008 for
its customers and prospects was a good example of how the company is
promoting opportunities to communicate with and get feedback from the industry,
while also educating them about its solution.
Demonstrating its success stories with organizations and service providers that
have used Asigra Televaulting and have praised the solution for its simplicity and
cost savings, to promote testing and adoption of the platform with other
prospective customers and partners.
VENDOR DETAI LS
Headquarters:
1120 Finch Avenue West, Suite 400
Toronto, ON M3J 3H7
Telephone: +1 416-736-8111
Fax: +1 416-736-7120
www.asigra.com
8 # ©2008 IDC

10. Number of employees: 100.
Revenue: Asigra is a privately held company and does not report revenues.
Go-to-market strategy: Asigra's software is licensed to OEMs or sold through
outsourcers, integrators, and service providers to SMEs and large organizations as a
complete software package or a managed service. The software platform is licensed
based on a compressed capacity model, regardless of the number of sites or target
machines to be protected. About 50% of Asigra's customers are located in North
America, while the remainder are located abroad.
Technology partners: Some of Asigra's technology partners include BlueArc, HP,
Level Platforms, Network Appliance, OnStor, VMware, Citrix, Parallels, Virtual Iron,
and Microsoft.
Awards: Asigra has received a number of awards for its technology, including the
2008 CRN Top Emerging Technology award, Byte and Switch 2007 Product of the
Year, 2007 Healthcare IT Magazine Best in Class award, Service Provider Weekly
Top Technology Award, IT Week Editor's Choice award for 2007, and the 2007 CRN
Top Emerging Technology award, among others.
LE ARN MORE
Worldwide Storage Services 2008–2012 Forecast (IDC #212063, May 2008)
Worldwide Archiving Software 2008–2012 Forecast (IDC #212216, May 2008)
Worldwide Data Protection and Recovery Software 2008–2012 Forecast (IDC
#212213, May 2008)
Canadian Storage Systems 2008–2012 Forecast (IDC #CA2IH8, May 2008)
Worldwide Network Controller and Block-Level Storage Virtualization 2008–2012
Forecast: A Key Component in Building the Virtual Datacenter (IDC #211635, April
2008)
Storage Professional Services Survey: Customer Needs and Buying Intentions (IDC
#210426, February 2008)
Worldwide Online Backup Services 2007–2011 Forecast: A New Market Emerges
(IDC #209868, December 2007)
Worldwide Enterprise Server 2008 Top 10 Predictions (IDC #210085, December
2007)
Storage Optimization: Understanding Data Deduplication (IDC #207218, June 2007)
Deduplicated World of Storage (IDC Link Comment by Natalya Yezhkova, May 2007)
©2008 IDC # 9

11. IDC segments the market into the following categories:
Small: 1–99 employees
Medium: 100–999 employees
Large: 1,000–9,999 employees
Enterprise: 10,000+ employees
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10 # ©2008 IDC