Protecting laptops, tablets, and smartphones (endpoints) are more critical than ever. Users use endpoints of all types to create data essential to the organization, but the user may never store that data on a corporate (and protected) fileserver. One of the most common concerns with endpoints is loss or theft. According to Gartner, someone steals a laptop every three seconds. The organization loses the data on that laptop forever if the organization is not actively protecting the endpoint.
In addition to theft or loss, endpoints face new cyber threats like viruses and ransomware. Within an organization, cyber attacks are most prone to start with a laptop. The only safe way to effectively stop the attack is to secure the laptop, wipe it clean and restore its data.
Protecting endpoints is no longer up for debate. Organizations can’t get by with a “just copy important files to the file server” protection strategy. Also, organizations shouldn’t count on file sync and share solutions to “act” as the backup solution. In all fairness, (FSS) solutions can do a passable job of restoring users’ data, including some historical information. However, an FSS solution does not provide an organization with visibility of its data, and it doesn’t protect items outside of the shared folder. Endpoint protection is not a pass/fail situation. Organizations must get an “A” in their endpoint protection process.
Getting an “A” means the organization must select an endpoint protection solution that runs at an organizational level, and is controlled by IT administrators. It also means selecting a solution that is continuously updated to support new platforms and provide protection from new threats.
For years Mozy customers have counted on the service to protect their endpoint data. Now with Carbonite’s purchase of Mozy, those customers can switch to the Carbonite platform and be confident in continuous updates to the product as well as new, advanced features.
Comparing Carbonite Endpoint to Mozy Endpoint
What’s the Same?
Transitioning from protecting endpoints on Mozy to Carbonite should be easy. From a user perspective, both products deploy silently and support Windows and Mac devices. Carbonite Endpoint also supports mobile devices (iOS 8 and later and Android 4.1 and later), which are increasingly becoming a significant part of user workflow. Both products feature a web-based administration portal enabling IT to manage hundreds of endpoints easily. Both solutions also provide centralized control of policies as well as administration. The solutions are both secure providing data encryption for data in-flight and at rest as well as LDAP based management for end users.
What’s Missing?
Mozy had a few features that may seem missing at first glance. The Mozy solution could backup external hard drives, NAS and Linux systems. It also could protect a select number of applications. The Carbonite Server solution provides a much more robust server backup solution, and protects dozens of platforms, NAS systems, and applications.
Mozy also had a sync service which Carbonite does not. Bear in mind that customer data shows that most Mozy customers did not use the sync service. File sync and share is a separate capability, one with which most organizations already have a well-established relationship. It is better for the backup process to run separately and to store its data outside of the collaboration process.
What Can Carbonite Do?
While there are some similarities between the solutions, Carbonite also brings some unique capabilities to the table that will benefit the Mozy customer. First, the solution allows for more flexible deployment. Carbonite Endpoint can run in the organization’s Azure EA, in a private data center or use a Carbonite Azure-hosted vault which is available in almost every geographic region in the world.
Carbonite Endpoint also provides client-side, global deduplication. Redundant data is eliminated before transfer, not after, which saves on network bandwidth consumption. Redundancy checks are not only performed within the endpoint’s data but also across all of the organization’s endpoints’ data. This global deduplication means that if a file has been backed up once from one endpoint, it doesn’t need to be backed up on others. A feature like Global Deduplication also helps on initial seeding. Since there are a lot of data similarities between an organization’s endpoints, each successive unit backed up shortens the backup window for the next system.
In addition to using global deduplication to speed up backups, Carbonite Endpoint backup also supports QuickCache. Users in larger offices can have their data first backed up locally and then copied to the cloud repository. While Mozy customers are used to the product local backup feature, QuickCache provides a superior experience and makes administrative tasks easier since they don’t have to manage an additional set of hardware.
Carbonite Endpoint also helps businesses comply with their document preservation obligations, which endpoints are often left out of because of a lack of technical capabilities. With Carbonite Endpoint, a legal hold can be implemented through the Carbonite console or through APIs. When the organization places an Endpoint on legal hold all data backed up past, present and future remains in the Carbonite vault unit and can’t be deleted until the administrator lifts the legal hold. With Carbonite Endpoint, the organization has an unobtrusive way to comply with legal hold requirements.
Another interesting new feature is the incremental restore capability which detects when a file on the backup is newer than the one on the device. This capability enables the administrator to restore only new or changed files, significantly reducing the time required to get an end-user’s device operational again. It also enables an administrator to prep a new device for the user based on the most recent backup of the device. The administrator can then ship the device to the user and, using incremental restore, update the new device with data that was changed while the new device was in transit.
A common challenge for users is upgrading to a new system. Configuring a new system and especially getting personal settings just right is a time-consuming process. Carbonite Endpoint provides User State Migration to move user profiles and settings between devices. With the endpoint agent installed, the administrator can restore to any device anywhere at any point in time.
The Carbonite Administrative Advantages
Endpoint protection is primarily in place to protect the organization as much as it is to protect individual users. With any endpoint protection solution, administrative capabilities are critical. In addition to the necessary features mentioned above, Carbonite also adds very fine-grained policy controlled backups. Administrators can set backups to occur as frequently as every minute. From a restore standpoint, administrator driven restore enables them to assist users in recovering files or previous versions of files.
Given the startling statistics regarding laptop theft, endpoint protection solutions need to offer a more sophisticated set of security features. Carbonite Endpoint provides global location tracking, remote wipe or poison pill. Comprehensive monitoring enables the organization to identify the location of the device once it is connected to the Internet in case they want to retrieve it. Remote wipe enables administrators to remotely delete data if a device is lost or stolen. A poison pill is similar but can automatically trigger the remote wipe based on policy.
Conclusion
Mozy endpoint customers have a decision to make. Since doing nothing is not an option, they are likely to move their organizations to another service. As part of that transition, these organizations should compare the capabilities and roadmaps of the various solutions. In most cases, they will find that Carbonite provides a similar experience for both end-user endpoints and the administrators that are assigned to protect them.
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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