Connected® Corporation : présentation de la société et du marché

The world's leading provider of storage software for automated protection, archiving and recovery of distributed data.

Market Overview

Helping Companies Achieve Legal and Regulatory Compliance Related to Electronic Communications

The rapid proliferation of email as one of the primary forms of business communication, coupled with increasing compliance regulations that require organizations to store emails for certain periods of time, are forcing companies to grapple with the prospect and expense of managing the storage of vast amounts of data. To provide more perspective, industry experts project that an estimated 376 petabytes of compliant records in 2003 will increase to more than 1,644 petabytes in 2006, a compound annual growth of 64 percent. Consequently, companies are struggling with how to meet these legal requirements without placing more strain on storage budgets.

Connected ArchiveStore/EM™ offers organizations a powerful, efficient way to securely archive and store data for the long-term. Based on technology from the acquisition of Archive-it, a UK-based provider of tamper-proof email archiving solutions built on open standards, Connected ArchiveStore/EM provides the only tamper-evident email archiving and mail storage management solution designed specifically to help companies achieve legal compliance with electronic communications regulations.

Unlike other archiving solutions, Connected ArchiveStore/EM is based on open standards, not tied to proprietary systems or software vendors, so companies do not have to be concerned about retrieving a file that originated on an outdated solution platform. The solution supports Microsoft Exchange/Outlook  email systems, and possesses legal discovery capabilities that allow companies to easily conduct email searches and quickly recover data. To ensure the highest levels of security, the solution stores all archived email and accompanying journaling in an encrypted format for tough, tamper-evident security and legal admissibility. Most importantly, Connected ArchiveStore/EM will scale to meet companies’ storage requirements by automatically applying retention policies to every email that meets definable criteria, allowing organizations to save on unnecessary costs associated with installing more storage to support increasing data. In addition, there is no client-side software installation, which allows for a fast deployment and easier management.

Reducing Storage Requirements
According to industry experts, a typical corporate email account processes about 9.6 MB of data each day, an amount that will likely double over the next four years. With more data being generated than ever before from daily business communication via email, along with new federal compliance regulations that require companies to be held accountable for more business critical data, many organizations feel compelled to purchase more storage and incur all of the costs associated with administering and managing those resources. Unfortunately, new storage capacity is often quickly filled – requiring yet more servers and related storage – creating a vicious and expensive cycle. Through proven storage reduction technology, Connected’s solutions have the capacity to scale to meet organizational storage needs, offering a more cost-effective way to manage increasing volumes of data. Since today’s CIO is responsible for both infrastructure cost reduction and the technology that underpins regulatory and legal compliance, Connected’s solutions are designed to help meet the legal compliance demands of corporations, while still meeting the need for storage efficiency.

Connected’s solutions – Connected ArchiveStore/EM, Connected DataProtector/PC™ and Connected DataProtector/SV™ – will enable organizations to reduce storage requirements for all corporate data that’s currently stored on PCs, Windows servers in remote offices, and in email. As a result, corporations need less networked storage capacity, reducing the high costs associated with storage growth and storage management. Connected’s solutions are based on patented data reduction technology that automatically compresses data, removing any instance of redundancy to ensure that all data is stored at a fraction of its original size. For example, Connected can store information from up to 20,000 PCs onto a single server, five times more than many competitive solutions can handle. And, Windows servers can be efficiently backed-up to a single Connected DataCenter server pair. Unlike backup technology from other vendors which fuels the storage bloat, Connected’s solution can dramatically reduce the amount of storage required by an enterprise by up to 80 percent over time, resulting in a significant cost savings.

How the Solutions Reduce Data
The foundation of Connected’s solutions is a patented data reduction technology that minimizes the amount of data captured during any backup session, while at the same time ensuring that all the important data and system state are captured and protected in the data center.

This is accomplished through:

· Delta Block® – Technology that allows only the change sets, at a block level, to be sent, instead of whole files.

· SendOnce® – Technology that allows common files to be stored in one user’s archive set, and then in a SendOnce pool, prevents extra copies of common files from being stored in multiple user archives.

· Compression – Data is heavily compressed before it’s sent over the wire.

The application of these patented technologies to the information on PC hard drives and Windows servers reduces the data captured, sent and ultimately stored in the data center by up to 80 percent.

Protecting All Distributed Data
Many companies think they are fully protected by simply asking employees to save data to the server and then relying on a server backup system. Research shows that this is definitely not the case, and could even be setting the stage for a large-scale data-loss disaster. Corporations have steadily moved critical applications and data from the mainframe to servers, and now to desktop and mobile PCs. In fact, industry analysts (IDC) state that up to 60 percent of a company’s critical information is now stored unprotected on individual PCs. Given this fact, it is clear a server-based backup solution is not enough to support ALL of the distributed data within an organization. All data, on the server and at the edge of a company’s network, needs to be backed up on a consistent basis to ensure business efficiency and continuity – yet many corporations simply ignore vast amounts of their information because they think it’s too difficult or costly to protect and store highly distributed data.

Since its inception, Connected has been the undisputed leader and innovator in developing software solutions for protecting distributed data on desktop and laptop PCs within the enterprise. With the availability of Connected DataProtector/SV, companies will also be able to safeguard the critical data residing on Windows file and print servers in remote, departmental and workgroup settings. While products for server-based data backup are common, there have been few solutions available for automatically capturing, protecting and managing a corporation’s data from the server to the edge of the network.

With solutions from Connected, this enterprise information is automatically captured and centrally stored by Connected Data Center servers. For maximum security, all data is A.E.S. encrypted before it leaves the PC or Windows server and is also stored encrypted on the Data Center server. Because the capture and archiving processes are automatic, requiring no user intervention, it’s a truly effective and comprehensive corporate data protection/recovery measure.