Services

Data deduplication describes the act of reducing data volume by processing and eliminating redundant duplicate data.  Deduplication is a fantastic initiative with long term benefits.  The NowX deduplication process analyzes your backup data and removes any and all instances of data duplication, replacing the full size stripped files with references to maintain data integrity.  This ultimately translates as reduced network bandwidth usage, reduced backup process time, reduced storage needs and reduced overheads and costs.

Other backup methods, from tape through to other conventional though less advanced solutions usually offer unsophisticated data analysis resulting in your data being backed up at a 1:1 ratio.  That means your data is backed up and transferred to your data store in its unaltered entirety.  Now ask yourself, as a computer user, how many times have you had a copy of the same file in more than one location on your PC?  Perhaps an important document stored on your desktop, as well as a project folder, as well as in a folder you created when a colleague emailed you the document back amongst other attachments.  Sound familiar?

It’s easily done in an environment where sensible data storage and management is secondary to business functionality.  Now extrapolate the number of times the above has happened to you across every member of staff at your branch; then again across every branch in your corporation.  Now cross reference every single corporate staff members file store against every other corporate staff member.  The amount of redundant duplicate data in existence quickly becomes mindboggling.

If NowX only analyzed the data your organization accrued since your last backup, deduplication would have the potential to offer massive savings on your data transfer and backup footprint.  However, NowX doesn’t just analyze your new data – it also compares it against your existing backup store to ensure only new/changed data is transmitted and backed up.  This means your data transfer and storage footprint is always at its absolute minimum – forever!

For some businesses, releasing control of their backup data housing is simply not an option; others perhaps already have their own data centers.

By creating a Private Cloud, it becomes possible twin your private system with the user-friendly NowX service, expertise and agentless architecture; while maintaining privacy and cost—effectiveness.

A Private Cloud will allow you to secure and transfer your data from your local to cloud storage locations while enjoying the full NowX feature set of data encryption, volume reduction, de-duplication techniques and much more.

For clients preferring the Private Cloud path, various options exist which can be tailored to your needs.  For example, you may provide your own hardware, or NowX can provide hardware for you to use.

You can internally staff and manage your cloud, or you can utilize our managed service option in order to have NowX expert staff take care of your backup system for you.  Variations of the two are also possible.  For example you may wish to take care of in-house backup and recovery, but have NowX engineers take care of all cloud utilizing processes.

Private clouds provide companies with extensive control.  NowX’s easy to deploy platform allows users to exercise minute level control over backup and recovery while remaining inside their own infrastructure – therefore receiving the speed boost that comes with full internal housing across your LAN/WAN.

Security and privacy protocols are also met by ensuring your data never leaves your companies network.

Cloud storage, at its simplest, is a storage solution which happens to be located on the internet - as an alternative, or addition to, just using local based storage.  Your data is stored on highly secure, scalable servers which allow you to store and access any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.  Put simply, cloud storage is essentially nothing more than an unlimited amount of online storage space which is ultra-secure and non-expensive.

Cloud backup and restore, from NowX, is an infrastructure which leverages cloud storage in order to facilitate effective storage and to safeguard against data loss.

Utilizing the NowX cloud allows clients to back-up to NowX secure servers, thus bypassing any hardware, software and maintenance costs.

The NowX public cloud backup solution stores your data off-site in two geographically different secure data centers providing additional layers of disaster recovery.  The NowX data centres are already locked down using the absolute latest in security methods as you might imagine.  The duplication of your data across these centers virtually eliminates the threat of any data loss.  That alone makes online backup the only choice for business data storage.

Your backup remit can range from individual files through to entire systems, according to your needs and business requirements.  The NowX automated backup system is controlled by you to match these requirements.  NowX meets even the highest data security protocols and protection parameters.  Data restoration takes no more than a few mouse clicks with our intuitive easy-to-use platform.

The NowX platform provides a massive amount of features – all designed to minimize your data transfer and to keep your costs down.  The NowX architecture provides solutions for the most complex company structures, factoring remote offices, companies with laptop only remote users and more.

NowX requires no agents, making it easier to install and support and more secure than other backup and recovery options.

Backup and recovery software typically requires that agents are installed on all the servers that an enterprise wishes to back up. This can fast become an intricate web when your system administrators have to account for differing operating systems, different revision levels, and other parameters. An ever increasing number of modern software packages also require agents running on host servers, which only increases the complexity of agent management. Agents also pose a major threat to security by requiring a port by open on the firewall in order to function.

NowX has no such requirements. NowX does not require that agents be installed for each machine or software application that you wish to protect. NowX instead uses innovative technology to pole out across the network to back up operating systems, file systems and applications; all by utilizing industry standard programming interfaces.

Agentless architecture allows companies to sidestep the cumbersome time consuming tasks associated with dealing with backup software agents. Compatibility issues, revisions with OS level issues and other manual labor tasks are a thing of the past under NowX.

Traditional, the major problems administrators face when managing their backup software are due to agents bugs and incompatibilities with host servers. By using an agentless architecture, NowX instantly reduces the risk of problems to a minimum while also aiding easier support delivery.

Former backup solutions which require agents on each server typically cause processing power to be diverted away from key processes and services in order to facilitate the poorly suited backup agents. Due to NowX circumventing the need for per server installation – such resource drains are no longer a factor.

Due to its centralized hub architecture, NowX also allows for quick and simple zero-touch silent upgrades, the ability to add servers, applications and databases on the fly, and mass deployment to unlimited sites within minutes.

Continuous data protection from NowX allows data recovery from any point in time in the event of a computer fatal event. The ultimate in data backup is a system which backs up data as soon as it is created or updated – an asynchronous backup environment. Continuous data protection from NowX allows almost real-time data copying, capturing all versions of the data as and when the user commits it to disk by saving it. This allows the data to be restored to an on-demand time state.

NowX agentless continuous data protection functionality allows an unprecedented and unlimited level of restoration control. Users have full capability to restore from any recovery point objectives.

How it works:

• Files designated for continuous data protection and backed up whenever they are saved by the user at the source computer
• Data is backed up locally (if local storage is available) and also encrypted and transmitted at the same time over the wide area network to your offsite data repository
• NowX continues to monitor any changes to the source files and backs them up again as soon as modifications are detected
• Backup window and recovery time objectives become zero

Continuous data protection from NowX is a backup option and can be applied not only to file systems, but to email backup sets in order to aid the recovery level of critical data and thus providing your data with supreme critical data protection; and your users with increased peace of mind.

All backup systems operate under the same law - restore points exist only when requested. For traditional backup methods, those restore points would be based on the backup schedule.

Not so with NowX continuous data protection – where the backup schedule for your designated data is on-demand! As a backup is generated each time the data is saved, not only the latest version is available. Previous iterations are available dating back to the first time your data user clicked save.

NowX not only functions on both physical and virtual machines. It also supports backup and restore, agentlessy leveraging the latest API’s from XenServer, VMWare and Hyper-V.

Traditional backup and recovery options do not provide the level of precision recovery required by the modern business. Also, and usually more significantly, the financial implications of traditional or agent based methodologies usually outweighs any cost benefits which virtualization may provide an organization.

The frequently seen agent-based backup and recovery structured approach will inevitably force most organizations into making a series of impossible decisions. Agent-based solutions, by proxy of their design, lack cohesion and do not function well inside virtual environments.

The required process of installation of the required agents to cover each application within the virtual server, and furthermore each machine on the LAN is time, labor, and ultimately cost intensive and redundant in terms of efficiency. Beyond the initial outlay, a single agent in a virtualized environment can add as much as 16% server overhead for each associated application. Factor in the security risks inherent in the use of agents and it’s clear that far from being a best-fit solution in a virtualized environment they serve the opposite function by impacting performance and increasing the total cost of ownership.

NowX provides the architecture and features required for a best-fit virtual environment backup and restore solution.

NowX allows companies to not only maintain the benefits associated with virtualized environments, but to build upon them with complimentary information protection and recovery management with no impact on performance. NowX provides simple implementation, operation and management by functioning as virtual appliances on both a client and server level.

NowX offers VM protection and recovery simplicity. NowX works to automatically discover new guest VM’s while providing backup configuration and management from a single centralized hub. Initial and ongoing backup configuration and management is a minimalized breeze with NowX; not least due it’s far reaching support for a broad range of applications and operating systems, as well as multiple backup sets such as SQL, Exchange, Sharepoint and other that are VSS aware.

Tested and verified on a wide range of virtualization platforms including:

• VMware VSphere 4, ESX 3.5, ESX 3.0, ESXi, Workstation and Server
• Citrix XenServer
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• Parallels and Virtual Containers
• VADP

Modern business data storage practices come with stipulations, guidelines and compliancy requirements which the majority of companies must adhere to. NowX adds ease to this process by arriving pre-compliant with all major certifications and compliances.

NowX security not only covers data held locally, but also data during transit between local store and either your company’s public or private cloud as necessary. Due to the shared-occupancy nature of the cloud environment, security is the highest concern and NowX takes all precautions necessary on your organization’s behalf.

NowX Cloud Backup and Recovery is the most secure agentless data protection platform in the industry.

NowX Encryption Facts:

• NowX encrypts all data for the lifetime of your data, no matter if it’s in-flight or at-rest.
• FIPS 140-2¹ certified – an independent third-party certification.
• Fully encrypted transfer between laptops, remote offices, central data repositories, local storage and private or public cloud.
• Key escrow management
• Password rotation support
• Data destruction certificate protocol capable

NowX offers encryption strengths ranging from triple DES 56-bit (8-character key) to AES 256-bit (32-character key). NowX also features legacy compatibility ensuring that no matter if your data is encrypted today, you will still be able to access it ten years from now.

The Asigra core at the heart of the NowX platform has an unquestionable security track record:

• Zero breaches or compromised systems in the last 25 years of operation
• IANA² registered ports
• All data stored in compressed and encrypted format
• Digital signature for every file and block of data
• Data on disk resides in self-describing format
• Background Autonomic Healing and System Admin
• Restorability Validation Process (digital signature check)

It is possible to align your organization’s existing security protocols with your data protection policies. NowX includes a feature set which allows for auto generation of passwords. Passwords are changed on a random basis for specific backup user accounts, adding an extra layer of protection against unauthorized account or data access.

NowX can also aid your business in its quest to obtain and retain compliancy. The mere fact that NowX is a disk-based, automated solution as opposed to a manually assisted tape backup procedure qualifies for compliancy with regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley (SOX), U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), and Gram-Leach-Billey Act (GLBA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Basel II, Safe Harbour, Patriot Act, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and others.

Tape and other traditional backup solutions are not centralized in structure and therefore can lead to difficulties and delays in obtaining and providing data to auditors in a timely manner. NowX’s aggregated backup approach allows for immediate on-demand recovery.

Traditional backup methodology requires additional involvement or extra products in order to execute offsite data transfer from disk or tape. All data being passed through NowX for backup to offsite private or public clouds is automatically and securely processed under FIPS 140-2 certified security requirements.

¹ FIPS 140-2 is the standard for security requirements for cryptographic modules by The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Federal Information Processing Standards Publications (FIPS PUBS) are issued by the NIST.
² The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is responsible for the global coordination of the DNS Root, IP addressing, and other Internet protocol resources. Ports 4400 through 4406 are registered to Asigra and cannot be used by any other application.

In the majority of modern organizations, data from mobile laptop users resides solely mobile, presenting IT administrators with the difficult challenge of properly backing up and protecting this data.

In almost all cases, the data which organizations hold on their laptops is equally as important as the information they hold elsewhere. However, most organizations do not treat it as such, allowing laptops to stay “off the backup grid” for extended periods of time – leaving that precious data vulnerable to accidental deletion, theft or corruption.

For companies which do have some kind of backup system in place for laptops – these systems typically require continuous maintenance, support for the remote unskilled user, and tend to hog the laptops resources.

NowX meets business needs with a laptop architecture specific mobile client designed from the ground up to facilitate extremely quick backup and recovery through an array of intuitive customizable options allowing your mobile users to backup and recover their data at any point in time, anywhere!

NowX provides a cost effective solution to mobile data protection allowing companies to pay only for the data they wish to protect, rather than the number of computers containing that data. NowX clients only pay for the total amount of compressed data they backup – across their entire local and remote network – no matter how many desktop computers or laptops that encompasses.

NowX allows users with their own IT staff to self-manage their online data repository, track backup consumption on a user-by-user basis, and perform other high-level operations.

Accountability and verification are also possible through inbuilt schedules and web-based reporting functionality. This centralized approach provides clients with a complete view of the entire LAN and WAN from one single interface allowing IT staff to easily and efficiently connect to laptops network-wide in order to schedule backup jobs and restore lost files as necessary. NowX is also easily integrated into existing SNMP-based monitoring and notification systems.

Traditional backup solutions are not engineered for the purpose of protecting data held both locally and at remote office locations. Typically this presents companies with remote offices with the challenge of attempting to protect remote data without the use of the IT resources of the local office.

Remote offices present a very unique challenge to any business which has then and wishes to backup data. Companies who attempt to tackle this situation head-on are faced with far higher network bandwidth usage, often at much higher expense.

Due to this, some companies simple choose not to backup remote office data in order to avoid the extra cost and difficulty. Alternately, companies often leave themselves exposed to data loss due to infrequent and inadequate remote office backup procedures.

NowX provides a solution through WAN-Optimized architecture, built exclusively to meet the demands of companies with remote offices.

The agentless nature of NowX allows for simple integration of remote assets into a structure which is easy to manage remotely from your companies IT base of operations.

The NowX remote office backup solution minimizes network overheads, resource usage and man hours by virtually automating the entire backup process in a constantly encrypted environment in accordance with applicable compliancy requirements. NowX also outperforms human involvement through maximum data transfer efficiency through standard NowX innovations such as data deduplication and other inbuilt methods tailored to reduce costs and increase speed.

An efficient backup protocol also has the added advantage of enabling efficient data restoration when necessary. NowX allows data retrieval of all levels down to the individual file while also presenting you with a flexible number of backup structure options ranging from local storage to maximum security cloud backup locations; both utilizing either continuous data protection, or scheduled interval backup cycles dependent on your business needs.