The risks of losing critical data are daunting-and dangerous-for banks, credit unions, insurance companies, health care providers, retailers, and other businesses with remote and branch offices. The remote/branch office (ROBO) can be a competitive differentiator for a business, but it can be uniquely vulnerable in the event of system failure or employee malfeasance. Worse, a data systems failure or loss of critical data can create organizational risk that goes beyond the branch office level. Regulatory compliance, business continuity, and litigation preparedness-all may be put at risk for the parent company if critical data is lost at even one remote office.

Yet remote offices, outfitted with high-performance hardware and software, are often left without data protection, backup, and recovery processes of comparable quality to those at the headquarters' office and, as a result, can leave business-critical data dangerously exposed and place the business at risk.

This white paper examines the vulnerabilities of today's remote and branch office IT landscape, and details the advantages of a disk-based backup and recovery strategy for managing, and protecting, the data contained in these systems.