DataFort Lowers the Price of its Mid-Market Offering, But Warns of Impending Disaster in the Disaster Recovery Market
Release date: June 2006
DataFort, the UK provider of managed off-site data backup, has today announced a drop in the price of its DataFort Select mid-market offering, with prices per GB of compressed storage dropping by as much as 35%. The price changes, which will apply to both new and existing customers, will make DataFort one of the most competitive managed service offerings on the UK market. But whilst DataFort is lowering its own prices, the company is quick to set itself apart from the growing number of low-end offerings, forecasting serious problems on the horizon for users of some of the cheaper offsite backup services.
“The market price of disk storage is constantly falling and, although this is only a small part of the cost for a managed service, we felt this has to be reflected in the prices we offer to the customer,” comments Marcie Terman, managing director at DataFort. “With our current size and capacity, we can lower our price and continue to offer truly secure enterprise-class backup. But we are fearful of some of the players out there who are offering prices that we know can only be achieved by skimping on the service.”
According to DataFort, insufficient monitoring and proofing of the backup process, over-compression of delicate files, and the overuse of ‘delta blocking’ or ‘snapshots’ (saving only changes to data) with insufficient full backups, are now common practice at the low end of the market. All of these failings increase the time taken to restore data, but more worryingly they exponentially increase the likelihood of the restore process failing all together.
“Data backup is one area where you really can’t afford to cut corners, whatever the saving. We are fearful that some of the cheaper services out there may damage the reputation of the managed data backup market as a whole when things go wrong for their customers,” continues Terman. “Low price managed backup is great but if the restore process doesn’t work effectively, it can be a seriously false economy. With any disaster recovery solution we urge users to fully test the restore process.”
ABOUT DATAFORT
DataFort provides dependable secure off-site computer information storage with a focus on functionality and convenience for the end user. The company was founded in 2000 and is headquartered in Guildford, UK and New York, USA. It’s software and services are used by thousands of businesses worldwide - ranging from small SMEs and schools through to quoted companies and local government. Every hour of every day someone, somewhere backs up with DataFort.
CONTACTS
Marcie Terman
T: +44 (0) 1483 872 052
