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Companies of all sizes and industries share the need to protect critical business data, and do so in a cost-efficient manner. SMBs have many common objectives with larger enterprises when it comes to protecting critical data, but bust because of cost and manpower restraints, significant distinctions exist in the scope of SMB and Enterprise data protection requirements and present SMBs with unique challenges:

• Lack of backup & recovery expertise - In very small businesses, data protection responsibilities may be assigned to “generalists” ranging in rank from the principal of the business to administrative support staff. They typically work with less than well-defined processes and often lack the cycles given the balance of their other duties. Evaluating the success of a backup and troubleshooting results require expertise that may not be available on staff. Backup may not be perceived as a strategic, value-added activity — if not given the attention it requires, backups may be being neglected or forgotten.
• Fewer IT staff are available for backup processes - Tape-based backup and recovery procedures require significant time investment, placing additional task burden on smaller SMB IT staff and taking their focus away from support related to core business operations.
• Smaller SMB data volume dictates storage methods - As discussed previously, it’s the storage cost of their terabytes of data that drives continued investment in tape backup technology by larger companies. But most SMBs measure their data in gigabytes, not terabytes, with critical applications like accounting, customer information and email running a fraction of the number of servers. In fact, the majority of smaller business are managing one to three servers.
• Onsite backup data continues to be at risk - Since SMBs operate with a smaller volume of data than Enterprises, it is not cost-effective to have backup tapes regularly moved offsite. Backup business data residing onsite therefore remains vulnerable to human-error, natural or other disasters, negating the very purpose of performing the backup in the first place.

It is difficult or impossible for SMBs to meet disaster recovery objectives using tape backup when the above factors dictate their data protection strategy. Despite these constraints, the fact remains that data protection is every bit as critical for operations for SMBs as for Enterprises. SMBs therefore require a single solution that operates effectively within their constraints while addressing all points of the data lifecycle with the same degree of security and reliability as Enterprise-class protection.

CRC DataProtection - Enterprise-Class Protection for SMBs

CRC DataProtection Enterprise Data Backup & Recovery is a comprehensive online data protection solution that addresses the needs of SMBs while simultaneously eliminating excessive costs incurred by outdated tape backup technology. Some of the features that make CRC the best option for SMB IT managers include:

• Ease-of-use - With CRC DataProtection's agentless backup, administrators and IT staff can perform backup from a single machine, without having to install agents on each machine you wish to protect, saving valuable time and productivity.
• Volume-based storage costs - Protect as many machines as you'd like, with only the partitions or shares you designate. Rather than pay licensing fees per protected machine, you only pay per unit of total storage volume.
• Offsite protection of data - Your backup data is only useful if it is protected from disaster, and with CRC your data is transferred securely to an offsite redundant data center.
• Increased compliance - Working within the constraints of tape-based backup makes it increasingly difficult for SMB management to meet regulatory compliance for business data, but CRC's offsite backup makes compliance significantly easier to achieve, saving potential auditing costs.
• Increased productivity - IT staff can focus on core business tasks, since CRC's offsite backup is configured to backup incrementally, saving bandwidth resources while simultaneously reducing backup windows significantly.
• Scalability - CRC Data Protection's efficient disk-based offsite backup solution is designed to scale seamlessly to fit your data storage needs as your business grows.
• Tiered storage - Reduce costs by archiving inactive data on more economical storage media.

CRC DataProtection addresses all the steps in the data lifecycle, delivering to SMBs greater levels of reliability, productivity and cost containment than can be achieved with tape backup methods.