The days of "brute force" backup may be numbered.

By James Dowd
The Commercial Appeal

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — An electronic data tsunami fast approaches, leaders at Electronic Vaulting Services say, but most businesses are ill-prepared to manage the storm.

As more companies gather and maintain electronic records, the ability to access that information quickly and efficiently is increasing in importance.

That's where EVS comes in.

A key player in the data backup and recovery industry, EVS is launching a tiered data storage and retrieval service that the firm's officials believe is the wave of the future.

"The business world is faced with two overarching diametrics, with the need to be economically prudent on one hand and the necessity to handle the explosive growth of electronic data on the other," said Gayle S. Rose, EVS principal owner. "Our tiered system addresses both concerns."

The new program segments a company's electronic files, allowing critical data to be restored first in the event of an emergency and preserving less-vital information for retrieval at a later date.

The client determines which information is most vital and is billed along a variable scale, as opposed to being charged a flat rate to back up and restore all data.

The result is that information that is less critical to a business costs less to store.

The approach, Rose explained during the recent Emergency Preparedness and Incident Conference at the FedEx Institute of Technology, allows greater flexibility and affordability for businesses.

The system also promises a quicker recovery time should an emergency occur and provides greater sustainability than other storage methods.

"The traditional backup method is to copy everything - what I consider brute force - with no differentiation between files that have been around for years and more immediate, critical data," said Gary Aulfinger, chief storage architect at EVS. "Our tiered system allows for those distinctions.

"Clients are always able to access their records, but they're not paying the same price to store data that's 10 years old as they would to store something that was created yesterday."

In addition to backup and recovery equipment installed onsite at each business client, EVS maintains offsite centers in Memphis and Dallas to store the data.

The ability to store and retrieve information onsite, as well as the security of having that data stored elsewhere, attracted Robert Schmidt, director of computer networks and systems for Kemmons Wilson Companies .

"It takes a lot of uncertainty out of our backup system, and it's more economical," Schmidt said. "We noticed a financial benefit almost immediately. The multitiered system is going to be significant in the industry."

Hank Word, vice president of information systems and operations at Paragon National Bank , agreed.

"It's a user-friendly, robust backup and retrieval system," Word said. "Also, like everyone else, we're trying to conserve costs these days, and with the tiered system we store just as much data, but we pay less to do it."

Copyright 2008 The Commercial Appeal, Inc.