PC Data growth and concerns surrounding its backup are not new, but some of the new age factors like mobility and ever growing emails have brought an interesting twist to the story. The pace of growth of data is now much more rapid, its location more dispersed and the linkage between data sets more complex. And this is especially true with large financial institutions, which have several “branch offices” and a large pool of mobile workforce.
When we approached major financial institutions in India, we were surprised to find that most of them did not have an end-user backup policy in place especially for the mobile workforce. Interestingly they had tried the available solutions, but were not convinced with the proposition.
After further dialogues, we could summarize unsolved concerns as follows –
- The backup solution should not impact the user
- Centralized backup for multiple branch offices and mobile workforce
- Efficient bandwidth throttling and management
- Low impact on storage
We showcased and proposed inSync solution and proud to say that a large percentage of initial test deployments have already placed an order.
So, what makes inSync a favourite with this big brand names ?
Firstly, I think because its Simple.
Although none of the customers explicitly mentioned it, but I think “simplicity” is one of the most underrated characteristics of any product and specially when it comes to backup.
I must confess, not so long back, I personally tried to installed a product which starts with a “T” and ends with “li”. The battle ended after 2 days and I still not sure if I won it 
I strongly feel, that in this new “twitter” age, complexity is that last thing the world wants.
Simple “under 30 minutes” installation and clear-n-crisp pricing are the two features which have fuelled the exponential growth of this product. Most of these accounts didn’t have to spend more than a day to fully understand all the features and deploy within the first set of test users. In fact for one of the accounts, it was just 2 hours
Secondly, because it comes with some Unmatched Features.
InSync comes with some very disruptive features like –
- Global source based data deduplication
- Continuous data protection
- Dynamic bandwidth and CPU scheduling
- WAN optimization
- Search based point-in-time recovery
- Managed end-point (client) upgrades
- Bare metal restore
And to best of my knowledge, most of these features are not offered by the existing products.
Third, because its Focused
Most of the existing products were developed to take care of traditional tape backups and now have been made to evolve to “backup servers, PCs and Laptops to disk/ tapes over LAN. And maybe sometimes help you to make some coffee”
We designed inSync from scratch, just focussed on “laptops”.
For example, a server backup has strict calendar based schedule which doesn’t make much sense for laptops. The server backup solutions are designed for secure and reliable local networks, but the laptop backup solution must be friendly towards the insecure weak WAN links.
Almost all the administrators regularly use 95% of it’s features. And all the new additions are planned keeping in mind the laptop users.
Lastly, The Product Quality
Most of these accounts paid a premium for inSync compared to existing “established” products. But, I guess quality is surely remembered much after the cost is forgotten.