Alvarez & Marsal Links 50 Worldwide Offices With Cloud Backup

Alvarez & Marsal (A&M), a global professional services firm specializing in turnaround and interim management, has worked with such names as Lehman Brothers, XM Radio, and Eddie Bauer on strategic corporate restructuring. The company decided to restructure its data backup strategy when it became clear that there was a significant gap between the expectations and the performance of its existing on-line backup system. "We were seeing a very high rate of individuals that stopped backing up because of corrupted software and out-of-date agents," says Roger Davies, director of corporate infrastructure at Alvarez & Marsal. "The reality is that we were disappointed in the product we had."

The needs of A&M's far-flung worldwide workforce made cloud backup with Mozy an easy choice. After a global pilot program including the U.S., Europe, South America and Hong Kong, the company quickly recognized the advantages of Mozy's easy-to-use interface, self-updating client, and unmatched flexibility. "Our previous system required administrative privileges for many common tasks, and our workforce is distributed throughout the world, everywhere from Mumbai to Moscow," Davies says. "We can't get a physical IT presence to all of those individuals, so it was clear that the best solution for us was Mozy."

With well over 1,000 A&M employees now using MozyPro, Davies notes a significant decrease in administrative demands. Many configuration and data recovery tasks can now be handled by field users—which make up over 90 percent of A&M's staff. With the previous backup system, most major data restoration tasks required machines to be sent back to central IT technicians for a complete system re-imaging. "Our service desk no longer has to flatten machines, and even complex configurations are at most a 15 minute investment," he says. "In the past, it might have taken that long just to change a password."

MozyPro's flexible administrative interface enables Davies and his staff to create fine-grained controls and filters for different employees, prioritizing bandwidth and including certain file types for users with especially critical needs. Detailed daily reports enable the support staff to see the errors and exceptions in backup processes for all users, and with proactive education and adjustments A&M has consistently cut down on the number of exception messages in the months since rolling out the solution.

A&M continues to aggressively deploy MozyPro to its considerable worldwide workforce and to enjoy the low-maintenance reliability of the MozyPro cloud backup solution. "We can roll out hundreds of users in an hour and support the backup needs of our 50 global offices," Davies says. "We are big adopters of EMC technology and are pleased to report that Mozy is working effectively for us in Sao Paolo, and in Moscow... just about anywhere we work in the world."