This customer has major datacenters in North America and Europe and many very small satellite offices around the world. They don't currently have a requirement to backup all those small places but as seems unfortunately usual, backups come last in the pecking order of project lists and funding.
It was in my previous employer life that I came to appreciate the magnitude of what may lay ahead for them, albeit not across borders in this example, but how the number of remote sites will pose the first issue. The backup solution needs to be able to handle this large list of systems and their many different connection speeds - a great way to mess up bandwidth to your datacenter is to backup myriad different sites with tiny, tiny network links.
There is an answer in the Data Protection realm of course, and as is more and more common these days, its name is 'deduplication'.
The good ol' Gartner statement runs along the lines of '75% of backups will have deduplication applied to them by 2012' - while I very much like this statement as it gets our customers to think seriously about it, I believe it's a little aggressive. For large enterprises then maybe, but most small customers will continue to use regular disk or tape until the prices of dedupe get lower.
But I digress. Dedupe will help solve their cross-border Data Protection needs. Those international lines between a company's offices are already choked with email, file shares and whatnot without adding backups to the list - so dedupe is a natural fit. Mix this with maybe having some help from the time-zone differences, a backup environment can run very well with this mixture. Throw in some proper 'backup reporting' and your Ops guys will put you back on his seasonal holiday card list.
Legal issues around this data movement can throw the next spanner in the works so we need to watch out for encrypting this replication/copy/backup data, but so far I've only run into curiosity from customers rather than blanket refusal to (basic) encryption of this data. As referenced above, a decent backup reporting app will help allay any fears from the legal people in the nice business suits who carry those little folders and are always 'at the gym' when you need to speak with them.
My customer is more concerned about sorting out their email at the moment, as this is a big legal area of concern for them, but addressing their growing backup needs is on the list for sure. They are smart enough to know they'll have challenges and to be honest that is half of the battle sometimes - 'Denial' is not just a river in Egypt. We can get down to working with them on architecting a solution soon, and I preface our discussions with 'no need to take a deep breath, we can do it, it's ok.'
So, expand your business, go international, prosper. Dedupe has your back.
