This weekend I came across an incredible report – “The Billion Dollar Lost Laptop Problem” (PDF), published by Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Intel. The report highlighted the (true) fact that enterprises are losing billions of dollars from lost laptops.

The report surveyed 329 enterprises to find that they had lost 86,455 laptops in past one year.  Using another report “Cost of a Lost Laptop” (PDF), they quantified the total loss for the surveyed enterprise to be $2.2  Billion.

Here is the quick math from both these reports –

1. On an avg. 9.44% of corporate laptops are lost/damaged every year
2. Education and health care face the highest risk of about 10.5%
3. 76% of these laptops are lost off-site or during transit
4. 46% of laptops contain confidential data
5. Combining the loss of business, confidential data, time and hardware the avg. cost of lost laptop is $25,000
6. Backup and encryption can significantly reduce the cost (by approx. 40%)

I would be on my way to India this Tuesday evening. Will make sure my data is backed up and I don’t take it out at Starbucks

According to the same study, which examined losses at 106 of the U.S.’s largest airports, the top 36 “Class B” airports averaged 286 lost laptops per month, which is about one laptop lost every 2.6 hours at these airports. The study also found that only 66% of the lost laptops were never recovered and about a third of those recovered were reclaimed.

Enterprise data is more dispersed and diverse than ever. And with over 30% corporate data sitting on PCs, administrators can no longer hold the end user responsible for protection of this critical corporate data.

The the above statistics clearly states the need for the following two solution on every single corporate PC  -

• Data Protection Solution – Designed for laptops, keeping in mind the mobile workforce
• Disk Encryption and Data Leakage Prevention Solution

Shameless Plug: Druvaa inSync is a simple, fast scalable and solution especially designed for mobile workforce. Learn more here – http://www.druvaa.com/insync/laptop-backup

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 -

1. The backup solution should not impact the user
2. Centralized backup for multiple branch offices and mobile workforce
3. Efficient bandwidth throttling and management
4. 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. Here are some of the brands we are proud to associate with -

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 -

1. Global source based data deduplication
2. Continuous data protection
3. Dynamic bandwidth and CPU scheduling
4. WAN optimization
5. Search based point-in-time recovery
6. Managed end-point (client) upgrades
7. 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.

Half way through the quarter, a post on customer wins sounds strange. But I just couldn’t resist breaking this news on the (lately sleepy) blog.

Druvaa acquired a couple of very interesting customers.  NASA is a relatively small Federal deployment, but we are happy to add this brand name to our list of valuable customers. Just the fact that they tested and loved the product against the existing ones, make me feel very proud.

Zee-Turner is special, because this was one of the large accounts of a competing global-deduplication-backup product, until they dumped it for Druvaa inSync. The customer was not happy with the backup performance and the maintenance/training required for the heavy weight product.

I personally met this customer and I insisted that his support staff tries to play with the product while we have our 1 hours meeting going on. The support engineer installed and backed up the entire IT-staff within 1 hour, which was fr them shocking as they had spent over a week learning and setting up the heavy weight.

InSync was simple, elegant and fast. We closed the deal within 14 days

Emerson and Serco are again enterprise accounts we won fighting small but interesting battles.

A snapshot of key customers can be found here – http://www.druvaa.com/case-studies/customers . I am planning to write a series of blog posts to highlight the value proposition offered by InSync in each of these cases.

As a company policy we don’t engage in traditional enterprise selling, instead just help the interested customers buy mainly through the website. With this model, its even more important for to know what the customer likes and dislikes about the product.

I tried to reach almost all major customers to see why they purchased inSync and some others on why they did not. In this post I have tried to summarize the response I received.

Six things the customers really love about the product -

1. Usability and ease of use – Especially the quick 20 minutes setup time for inSync v3 was very much appreciated
2. Data deduplication and time savings - On an average the customers are seeing 1:15 storage and bandwidth savings compared to traditional softwares.
3. WAN performance – Most of the customers are backing up mobile workforce easily and enjoying this feature.
4. Search based restore – Search is used by almost 100% of the users and absolutely loved by all. This is  something truly unique with inSync.
5. Granular user policy control – Control over bandwidth, folders and restore policies is appreciated by all.
6. Invisible backups – Smaller, smarter backup and specially the flexible scheduling is liked by all.

One of the fast emerging hot favorite feature is Bare Metal Restore, but I believe it may take some more time for this feature to get adopted properly.

Three things the customers or prospects would like to see improve -

1. Mac Client - We do have Linux and Windows client, and all I can say is that Mac client is on its way
2. Price - In the current economic scenario, unfortunately pricing is a major issue. This is probably a reason we saw sharp rise in sales when we offered the online introductory discount on v3. We do plan to release a low cost offering for inSync in near future
3. Performance for large backup/restore- With the new release there are a few performance issues for non-compressible data especially over the Gigabit network. This is expected to be taken care of with next release.

With the new v3 release now production ready, in the next few posts I would like to outline the product roadmap and whats happening with the new product – Druvaa Pheonix.

1. Almost 200M employees work remotely (off their desk)
2. Close to 637K laptops are lost on US airports annually
3. 65% of users do not do a backup before they start the travel
4. 90% of users do not backup while on the move

In the last 6 weeks I (personally) have heard same statement from at least 8 VPs or CXOs – “I lost my data/notebook during last travel at …” and none of them had a backup

If I have to summarize, the top three reasons I heard from these guys are -

1. My backup software dose not work over WAN
2. I had limited bandwidth connectivity
3. I hate backups – they slow down my PC and work

So, the main problem looks like availability of bandwidth and inability of the backup softwares to work well over WAN/Internet.

The Bandwidth Problem
One very vital aspect missed by administrators is the extent of data duplicate between corporate users. Not very surprisingly, over 80% of data across corporate PCs (emails/docs etc.) is duplicate. And its not the data, but these duplicates which actually choke the bandwidth and the storage.

One of the most disruptive technology in storage today is “data deduplication” – ability to save single copy of duplicate content. This feature in particular can be very very useful for corporate PC backups as it can cut down on duplicates and shrink the backup size. This can potentially save up to 80% of backup time, bandwidth and storage !!

Server Accessibility
Thanks to the tape-backup legacy, most existing softwares have server triggered backup mechanism which creates a problem for the travelling user connected to company’s infrastructure using WAN. Since the PC does not have a fixed IP address the server can’t reach it and hence the backup fails. This particular problem has been addressed by new generation PC backup softwares which use client triggered backup mechanism as opposed to server triggered.

Summary
Summarizing the above, the following features is what (IMO) you should look for before choosing any laptop backup product -

1. Smart bandwidth prioritization – Sets only a percentage of bandwidth for backup
2. Super Secure – SSL encryption over WAN/VPN for backup
3. WAN Optimization – Automatic Network sensing for choosing appropriate packet size and bandwidth.
4. Data Deduplication – Saving single copy of duplicate data.

So, next time you plan to purchase a PC backup solution for your company, keep these points in mind.