Excerpts:

CIOL: Compared to large enterprises, are Indian SMBs showing increase in data volumes?

Ajay Verma: Every business has unique information protection and disaster recovery challenges. But organizations of all sizes face the same issues when it comes to keeping their data protected and available.

For one thing, consider the growth of corporate data. By numerous accounts, the amount of data that needs to be protected is growing at a rate of 50 percent per year. For small and midsize businesses, the challenge of backing up this data and recovering it quickly is proving more onerous than ever. At the same time, Microsoft Exchange has become a mission-critical application for many companies. Today, various reports estimate that the majority of a typical company's intellectual property is contained in email. It's not surprising, then, that keeping this application highly available and protecting the associated data is not an option, but a critical necessity.

According to Forrester Research, the world's data doubles approximately every three years, which is expected to lead to a more than six fold increase in data between 2003 and 2010. Feeding the worldwide demand for information and rich digital content is the enormous expansion of search engines, blogs, social networks, e-mail, text messages and online video and images.

Data growth means SMBs must seek out ways to improve their IT infrastructure and recovery processes, or they run the following risks:

• Inability to retrieve data in the event of a disaster
• Non-compliance by not retaining data that is secured for a specified amount of time
• Exposure to business outages
• Exposure to hardware failure

CIOL: In order to secure their data, how robust are SMBs in disaster recovery planning?

AV: According to an industry report, SMBs typically go through three distinctive phases of IT deployment - from building infrastructure solutions (Wave I) to deploying connectivity solutions (Wave II) and ultimately enterprise solutions for extending their business reach with their remote locations, customers and business partners (Wave III).

A majority of India small businesses (SBs) are also in the first wave of IT adoption but are fast adopting new technologies to move to the second level. However, almost all India medium businesses (MBs) have migrated to the second wave of IT adoption. Computing and Internet are likely to dominate IT spending as SMBs move to build a robust IT infrastructure. Internet penetration is growing at 60 percent in SBs and 96 percent in MBs owning PCs. Hence, it is evident that SMBs are waking to up to a stronger IT infrastructure.

Implementation of a Network Access Control (NAC) solution is highly recommended to control and monitor access to your network. To help prevent accidental or intentional data leaks, SMBs should employ data leakage prevention solutions. Symantec also advises businesses to develop and implement policies that prevent users from viewing, opening, or executing any email attachment unless the attachment is expected and comes from a known and trusted source, and unless the purpose of the attachment is known.

CIOL: Are SMBs liberal enough in spending on solutions offering data protection?

AV: Data is the blood of every business and in today's world invaluable data are stored in the virtual world. Today's workforce is increasingly mobile, and that means more workers are using a wide range of mobile devices to access business data over insecure public and home networks -all potential sources of data leaks. Thus, the challenge that organizations face is to keep their information widely available while at the same time asserting control over how it is being used and who has access to it.

In fact, a 2007 Gartner report identifies the influx of consumer-based technology into the workplace, like IM, social networking sites and USB devices, as the biggest threat to a company's security.

Specifically, the report names four technologies that present the most risk - USB Devices, Social networking, Mobile Devices and Remote Connectivity. Hence, with the increase in the infrastructure it has become essential to invest in security.

According to a recent report, SMBs or companies with up to 999 employees in India are on track to spend $289 million on security related investments this year, up a robust 32 percent over last year. MBs or companies with 100 to 999 employees are generating the majority of this increased demand accounting for 54 percent of the country's total SMB security expenditure. SBs or companies with up to 99 employees are also expected to have an almost equal share in the total India SMB security spending pie.

CIOL: How effective is Symantec's technology for Storage and Backup in the SMB space?

AV: Regardless of the cause, developing strategies for backing up data and systems - and even more importantly, for recovering them in the event of a failure - is critical to your company's long-term success. Symantec Backup Exec and Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery can help you realize the immediate benefits of shorter backup times, faster system recoveries, and reduced data loss. It also provides flexible protection for VMware and Microsoft virtual servers, including the ability to recover systems in minutes to a physical or virtual server.

Symantec Enterprise Vault is an intelligent, software-based archiving solution that stores, manages, and enables the discovery of data in email and instant messaging systems, file server environments, and content management and collaboration platforms. It uses intelligent classification engines to manage data, improving a company's ability to retain and protect corporate information - all while reducing storage costs and simplifying management.

Accidents happen. So do power outages, natural disasters, and malicious attacks. Systems wear out and have to be replaced. But downtime is never acceptable. That's why disaster recovery planning is mandatory. Symantec can help you prepare for disasters ahead of time to minimize downtime and recover in minutes, not hours or days.

CIOL: What are the backup trends for SMBs?

AV: According to a Gartner report, the backup/recovery market is undergoing a significant change. The report goes on to predict that, "By 2013, surviving enterprise backup/recovery products will have transformed into recovery management solutions that unite traditional backup, replication, snapshot, and continuous data protection."

In the light of this market change, Gartner sees "the management of these capabilities is becoming more unified to meet client demand for a single recovery management platform rather than having the user becoming the integrator for multiple point solutions."

According to IDC, this has resulted in a situation where IT departments now routinely face the following backup and recovery challenges:

• Meet shrinking backup windows while facing data growth
• Manage disparate, distributed data protection products
• Manage and improve backup and restore reliability
• Support virtualized server environments
• Protect remote and branch offices
• Enable disaster recovery

Of course, the challenges don't stop there. IT departments also face numerous business challenges, such as meeting stringent service-level agreements, supporting rollouts of new business applications, containing costs, and conducting compliance audits.

Symantec believes that many of these technical and business challenges can be met by making use of next-generation disk-based data protection to increase performance, improve reliability, shorten recovery times, and eliminate the need to back up redundant data.

The answer is to integrate next-generation technologies as part of a broader backup management platform. Recently Symantec announced a series of product updates to its Veritas NetBackup platform, including the integration of data de-duplication and continuous data protection, to provide improved manageability from a single solution. The NetBackup platform also now offers granular recovery capabilities for Windows and VMware environments, allowing administrators to restore a single file or an entire image with one backup pass, thus saving time, storage, and bandwidth.