Laptop Backup for Remote Workforce
About 200 million employees work remotely, i.e. they are not at their desk while accessing emails, sending work updates or editing financial sheets and about 70% of this working force never plans a backup before starting or during the travel.
With over 600,000 notebooks lost on US airports, this post discusses the key concerns in remote-backup, shortcomings in existing solutions and how they can be addressed.
Remote Backup Requirements
Some of the key requirements for remote or on-the-move laptop backup are -
1. Availability of sufficient bandwidth - Statistics show that on an average a business PC has about 8GB of important corporate data with over 80% of this data is usually in form of archived emails. The differential change in this data is about 2% (blame the email archival formats and post processing used by most of the email clients like Microsoft Outlook). Transferring this differential data (160 MB) over a WAN connection can be a problem especially when the user wants to spend that limited time accessing and answering the new emails.
2. Network access to backup server -While traveling, the users often cannot access enterprise LAN or VPN, which restricts their access to organization's secure resources. While working over the WAN the user's PC does not even have a static (publically visible) IP address. This makes it impossible for the backup server to contact the user's PC and fire a backup.
3. Security -Working on the WAN, un-encrypted data backup/restore can expose the corporate information making it vulnerable to eavesdropping or stealing.
Limitations of Existing Solutions
There are two major design limitations in most of the existing solutions inherited from the tape-backup legacy -
1. Server triggered backup - Earlier when mobility was not an option, network backups used to be driven by a central backup server. The legacy still continues, and the server-triggered backup architecture imposes three limitations on network access and security especially when the user is traveling. The server initiates and sends network requests out-side the corporate network and unlike the web or email server, this is a special case and needs more attention.
Also, the PC must be visible to the server on a published IP address all the time.
2. Dependence of low latency, high bandwidth network - Thanks to the tape-backup legacy, most network backup systems today use same old R-Sync style checksum algorithms for incremental backups. And because of large no. of network interactions required in these algorithms, the backup systems works better on low-latency networks for less network turn-around time and faster execution.
Solution
Two features are a must for all the remote bacukup solutions -
1. Client Triggered Architecture - Backup agents/clients equipped with intelligence to initiate backup and restore can make backups over WAN possible. It would also add to the security and scalability of the system.
2. Data de-duplication - Al most 80% of the corporate data on PCs is duplicate between users. Data De-duplication and compression intelligence in the backup agent can effectively reduce the backup size by 90% and boosting the backup speed by 10 times and reducing bandwidth and storage usage by 90%.
About the Author
Jaspreet Singh is product evangelist at Druvaa Software. Druvaa is a leading provider for Enterprise data protection solutions. Find out more at http://blog.druvaa.com/ Original Post at http://blog.druvaa.com/2008/11/12/laptop-backup-for-remote-workforce/
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