EVault Protect data protection service helps Canadian mutual funds firm manage IT resources with minimal manpower

With approximately CAN$3 billion in assets, Clarington Funds offers a distinctive approach to managing mutual funds. Rather than managing their own funds, Clarington hires world renowned portfolio management companies, giving the ClaringtonFunds investor a wide range of choices.

The firm's successful outsourcing philosophy crosses into its IT practices. In an effort to maintain low costs and invest in core competencies, Clarington contracts out a number of its crucial IT tasks to experts specializing in those areas. When managing Clarington's backup and recovery system in house became increasingly cumbersome, George Ho, the firm's technology manager, sought out a solution that would better verify backup tasks, provide remote management, increase the reliability and security of backups, and help automate the manual and often arduous backup and recovery process associated with conventional tape-based backup systems. After careful evaluation, Ho chose the EVault ProtectSM online data protection service to provide their backup and disaster recovery plans with a higher degree of reliability without creating an even more resource intensive strategy.

Helping Initiate IT Policies

With the responsibility for managing multiple Windows 2000 servers in cities across Canada, it became increasingly difficult to manage and ensure the reliability of the backup processes of remote servers.

"As we moved forward and as our company grew, it became evermore difficult to protect our data on our remote servers. The simplest task of all backups, changing of tapes, can be enough to jeopardize the success and reliability of a backup set," remarked Ho.

With a relatively small IT department, Ho wanted to expand his department's capabilities and knew that the best way to accomplish his goals were to set policies around important tasks "rather than just doing stop gap measures." His need to set policies, and improve the reliability over his conventional tape-based backup systems, led to the decision to implement EVault Protect. "The EVault service allows us to create off-site backups without jeopardizing our need for a high level of data security and integrity," says Ho.

Deploying EVault Protect

EVault Protect is used by hundreds of organizations like Clarington who are experiencing rapid data growth and other challenges such as managing backups across remote servers with limited staff. The EVault InfoStage software powering EVault Protect enables customers like Clarington to enjoy efficient and secure data protection and seamless recovery service without having to incur additional hardware and media procurement and management costs.

Greater Operational Efficiency through Automation

Working with an EVault support professional, Ho installed backup agents on his five existing Windows 2000 servers across the country and immediately started to experience the benefits. From his office in Toronto, he was able to easily manage the entire process, from backup scheduling and deployment to file recovery.

At the assigned times, software "Agents" wake up and scan for files altered since the last backup. EVault DeltaPro™ technology takes those altered data blocks and compresses and encrypts the information before it is transmitted to one of EVault's secure data centers. Depending on the file type, this delta-processing and data transport technology reduces the data volumes of the original backup by as much as 98 percent.

After being unsatisfied with the manual processes associated with tape-based backup and restores, Clarington found significant value through the automation capabilities of EVault Protect. Managing local and remote backups is no longer an IT nightmare and if Clarington needs to recover a file, it can be restored with a few mouse-clicks to a target server of their choice, regardless of location.

Conclusion

Armed with the EVault Protect service, Clarington Funds found significant value using EVault Protect. Through successfully automating its backup and recovery process the internal IT challenge of adding additional offices and growing data volumes can now be easily managed by Clarington Funds.

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