South African small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) will now have access to IBM's enterprise-grade backup and recovery solution, supported by expert managed services, in a new bundled complete managed backup solution for SMEs launched by Pretoria-based IBM partner Pedion Technologies.

IBM Spectrum Protect, previously available primarily as an enterprise solution providing backup, snapshot, archive, recovery, space management, bare machine recovery and disaster recovery capabilities, will now be available for SMEs at a competitive price point.

Pieter Swart, Senior TSM Specialist at Pedion, says there has long been a need in the South African market for a world-class backup and recovery solution that was accessible to local SMEs. "We find that many smaller businesses do not understand the risks involved in not backing up effectively and regularly, following the old 3-2-1 rule. Others overdo backups by saving absolutely all their data to tape every day; or worse – by backing up to an external hard drive and keeping original data and copies at the same site. By not backing up at least every day, they face potentially costly data loss and compliance risks, and for a small business, losing all their data due to error, theft or disaster could be catastrophic in terms of business continuity and reputational damage," he says.

Swart says that while local businesses may see fire and flood as their biggest risks to continuity, the reality is that more data is lost through human error and theft than through natural disasters in South Africa. "We frequently find instances where people have accidentally deleted important mails, or where a laptop containing crucial information has been stolen. You may even find that malware corrupts all the company's data, or ransomware locks down their servers. In cases like these, their future business depends on their ability to recover their company data and applications and get back up and running as quickly as possible."

Pedion, specialists in automation, licensing management, backup and storage, had long seen a need in South Africa for a backup and recovery solution that addressed the challenges facing local SMEs. However, many of the backup and recovery options were priced out of reach of small business, or were too bandwidth-intensive to be viable.

"Some years ago, we began rolling out IBM Spectrum Protect for public sector organisations' branch offices and mobile offices, and realised there was potential to offer this solution to SMEs too," says Swart. "Because the solution automatically deduplicates data, the bandwidth and storage requirements are slashed; and thanks to built-in encryption, the automated backup and recovery processes are secure and compliant. We have added a managed services component to give SMEs access to backup and recovery skills and offer offsite backup should they not have their own DR sites."

The solution also offers a user-friendly interface that can be configured to support each business's individual needs, enabling simple administration, scheduling, reporting and alerts, says Swart. "With customised events management, the business goes from reactive to proactive backup and recovery management," he says.

"With our new complete managed backup solution for SMEs, small businesses can enjoy compliance and continuity peace of mind at a pricing model aligned to the small company budget."

As data backup and recovery specialists, Pedion partners with its clients to customise data backup, storage and recovery plans to align with each business's unique needs. Pedion consultants carry out a complete systems audit before recommending, architecting and implementing solutions to optimise disaster recovery, data backup and storage, data management and data retention policies.

For more information, visit http://www.pedion.co.za/