Backing Up Your Mobile Workforce

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Backing Up Your Mobile Workforce

Laptops are now considered an integral piece of IT infrastructure, so data protection can be just as important for mobile devices as it is for back-end systems. To adequately protect the potentially massive amounts of data stored on these devices, enterprises must acknowledge the importance, risks and costs of mobile computing tools and start building processes to protect their data.

Plan Your Backup Strategy

The scope of laptop backup can present a daunting challenge to some. After all, backup policies, operations and management of thousands of distributed systems can be difficult, even under the best of circumstances. Determine your scope and business strategy. It may be helpful to run an ROI analysis calculating the average downtime and relevant cost to your IT infrastructure beforehand.

CMS Products’ backup solutions currently are deployed in many large global companies. Our portable backup solutions allow the people of your mobile workforce to maintain a fully bootable replica of their laptop hard drive in a rugged device bundled with state-of-the-art, easy-to-use backup software.

Bare Metal Recovery Made Easy

Chances are, a significant percentage of your mobile workforce has experienced some kind of system crash on their laptops. A call to your help desk starts the ball rolling toward recovery. In some cases, system crashes can be fairly easy and inexpensive to diagnose and repair, while others can be more time consuming and eat up IT resources. Keep in mind, your employees at this point probably are not able to do their job to the organization’s standards without a working system. If the problem is significant, you may have the employees ship their laptops to headquarters for repair, perhaps cross-shipping replacement laptops back to them. Or, if they are technically savvy, you walk them through a re-load of your corporate image CDs. If you do reload from an image, chances are any recently created files will be missing.

The ABSplus™ Automatic Backup Systems from CMS are designed for the mobile worker. ABSplus™ solutions are highly rugged and designed to withstand the rigors of daily use, shock resistent up to 1100gs. The ABSplus™ solutions couple rugged hardware with sophisticated client backup software to create a fully bootable backup solution. In the event of a full system crash on a laptop, your employees now have several options open to them as they set out on their system recovery effort.

Option 1 – Plug & Play

The ABSplus™ saves all data from the employees’ laptops in native file format. This means the drive can be plugged in to any working computer and accessed in seconds. Your employees can continue to work on files and access data on their backup drive while a recovery is planned for the failed laptop. If for example, the laptop was stolen, the employee would still be able to access presentations, spreadsheets and other data from a rented or borrowed computer.

Option 2 – Bare Metal Recovery Made Easy!

The portable ABSplus™ solutions are packaged with a bootable rescue CD that in the event of a corrupted primary hard drive, can execute a full recovery of the entire contents of the ABSplus™ backup system to the laptop. It is assumed that the hard drive on the laptop is still a good drive, and merely has data corruption which prevents the Operating System or applications to function properly. The Rescue CD process takes a few hours, but will ensure your employees can recover with all of their originally installed applications working, and their most recently backed up data recovered to their laptop. The ease of recovery and expedient nature of recovery means bottom line cost savings to your IT organization, and productivity gains to the enterprise.

Option 3 - Drive Swap

In cases where an employee has encountered a hardware failure/crashed hard drive, the recovery can be performed in a matter of minutes by installing the hard drive from the ABSplus™ backup system in the failed laptop. We have designed the ABSplus™ so that even novice users can remove the drive from its enclosure and use it in the laptop as a replacement. Most laptop manufacturers are making the hard drive bay quite accessible, and fitting the hard drive from the ABSplus™ into the laptop can be done in less than 20 minutes by your employee, or taken to a local computer store for installation. All your employees need to do is restart their machine and boot up. Because the files from the backup are on the hard drive in native file format, the drive is a full working drive.

At this point it is just a matter of obtaining a replacement hard drive from the laptop manufacturer to put into your backup system if the drive is still in warranty, or ordering a replacement hard drive from CMS Products.

Contact our Corporate Sales Team

For more information on CMS Portable Backup Solutions contact our Corporate Sales Team or call us at 800-327-5773. If you are located in Europe you can reach our european office at +44 (0) 1256 766692.

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Enterprise Backup Solution for Clients

My computer crashed yesterday. Blue screen of death. Couldn't even get to Safe Mode in windows. My backup system was at home, but our two local experts (and these guys are GOOD) worked on it all day trying to recover. Nothing. I went home certain that nothing short of a new hard drive or complete reimage would work. But figured I would try using my Rescue Disk... It worked like a charm.

I am still in shock as is everyone else in the office. I think we all figured that we'd be able to recover data, but not likely from a catastrophic failure. Thank you thank you thank you!!!!!

Sue Lake
Agilent Technologies

ISO 9001:2000 Certified