This content marketing piece was written for 3x Systems and subsequently leveraged to establish greater credibility with government agencies on the topic of secure backup of laptops in the field. The article addresses 6 key factors in laptop remote backup which, of course, the 3x solution was designed around.
Federal, state and local government agencies are increasingly under pressure to satisfy information security requirements for multiple regulatory mandates, including FISMA, FIPS, HIPAA and others. One of the thorniest compliance issues facing agencies is maintaining continuous data protection for laptops in the field.
Fortunately, thanks to advances in backup technologies and system architecture over the past several years, government agencies of all sizes now have the means to reliably backup and restore data on laptop hard disks, as part of their overall data storage and recovery operations.
Ideally, a remote backup solution should minimize or eliminate security risks by allowing IT departments to control and protect data in the field, regardless of the location or condition of the laptops themselves.
Although individual agency requirements may vary, the following questions provide a reliable benchmark for evaluating laptop data backup solutions:
Let’s look at each of these criteria in more detail.
Not all security architectures used in laptop data backup solutions are created equal. Be wary of solutions that maintain a copy of your agency’s data in a location beyond your control, or fail to encrypt it during transmission and storage. Backup solutions obviously should not create additional security risks, so review procedures carefully to ensure data is protected in transit and at rest.
Since laptops have intermittent and sometimes slow connections to the Internet, the amount of bandwidth consumed by a backup solution has a major impact on how quickly and successfully backups are completed. Look for solutions that use de-duplication to reduce bandwidth requirements. This process maintains a history of the files that have been backed up and only transmits changes made to existing files as well as small markers indicating duplicate data within each file. De-duplication eliminates the need to re-send the entire file once an initial copy has been captured.
Managing backups and restoration from a central console allows agencies to set and enforce backup policies in an automated fashion, without end-user intervention. Online back-up services often lack this centralized command-and-control capability, and allow end-users to disable or skip scheduled backups. Furthermore, without centralized control, agency IT departments have no way to assure that data stored on a cloud service provider’s servers are no longer accessible by employees after they have left the organization.
Data backups that cannot be fully recovered are no better than having no backup at all. Remote backup solutions for laptops should maintain a complete record of each backup step, and notify administrators if there is an error, locally or remotely. In addition, online backup providers are currently unable to backup files that are in use at the time of a backup. Meanwhile, some backup solutions duplicate the original file structure. Sometimes, a confusing file structure or files with obscure names can prevent a clean restore. This issue is compounded when applications store information in files with unintelligible names or obscure locations, by default; as is the case with many e-mail programs. It is a recommended best practice to run regular test restores against a data set on the backup to identify any problems and resolve them before critical data is lost or put at risk of loss.
Prices vary widely between remote backup solutions for laptops, so calculating total cost requires some legwork. For example, hosted solutions usually involve recurring fees and may charge additional fees per gigabit of data and for each endpoint. Meanwhile, maintenance fees may be listed separately, or bundled into the pricing. It’s also important to project costs into the future, since data storage capacity needs might increase over time. A 10GB online data backup subscription will only meet an agency’s needs for a limited time, depending on the amount of data the organization generates. Monthly fees can quickly balloon beyond authorized budgets with no reductions in sight.
Training costs for administrators, and end-users, if applicable, must also be calculated. Simpler and easier to use solutions can significantly reduce implementation, operation, and maintenance costs. Finally, appliance-based solutions that include backup software reduce overall costs by eliminating per-user and per-gigabit fees common in online solutions.
Solutions that require employees to actively decide when (or if) to backup their data are a recipe for missed or no backups. Policy-based, centrally-scheduled backup cycles virtually eliminate data loss due to human error. Evaluate whether solutions can operate unattended, and if they require a user to accept prompts or provide guidance in case of network interruptions or media errors.
Performing remote backups on laptops in the field no longer requires superhuman IT powers. A wide range of options, both premises- and cloud-based, are now available that enable government agencies, big and small, to extend continuous data protection outside the firewall. Use this six-point checklist to find the solution best suited to your agency’s business, technical needs and budget.
Alan Arman is the founder and CEO of 3X Systems, a provider of remote data backup technology. He can be contacted at alan.arman@3X.comThese concerns remain current and pressing--want to guess how long ago the article was published? The thumbnail gives you a clue as to what newsletters looked like at the time. The sad truth is that these 6 concerns remain a serious challenge for public and private sector businesses now, though the article was published in November 2009. 15 years have passed and reliable mobile and remote endpoint security is still a major struggle. Makes you wonder what could have been if 3x Systems was still around and not built expressly as a company that wanted to be sold within 5 years.
But this got me thinking...what DID happen behind the scenes?
By the time the company sold I had already moved on, so I wasn't privy to any of it. Knowing how useful and easy the product itself was, I couldn't explain how it had disappeared rather than catching on, especially since remote laptops and mobile devices are orders of magnitude more of an issue now in post-COVID 2025 than they could possibly have been in 2009.
Wikipedia, Owler and the other usual suspects for company research had nothing new to say, and even archive.org's wayback machine archiving old websites lost the thread in 2013 with no closing, name change or acquisition notices posted before the site simply ceased to be and all the archiving attempts for 3x.com or trustyd.com just showing a domain selling company had taken them over. Bing search came through, however, with this intriguing article from 2013 posted (sort of) on CRN.com.
Sort of posted because it currently loads blank, but the text is actually there, just not displaying. Sometimes if a page loads with a header and footer but otherwise empty, the text is there but just commented out, and that's the case here. The page retains the text of the 2013 article about Trustyd in its source code guts and is reprinted below, unaltered except for me redirecting the original relative links back to crn.com and having them open in a new tab. The metadata of the original page lists the author as <meta name="author" content="Joseph F. Kovar"> who wrote prolifically with CRN at that time.
Data protection appliance vendor Trustyd has closed its doors and sent its intellectual property to one of its investors, the State of Ohio's Department of Development.
Trustyd, founded in 2012 to acquire and nurture another storage startup, 3X Systems [link is live as of Feb 2024], was unable to turn around its data protection business fast enough to survive, said Robert Gueth, president of the Dublin, Ohio-based company.
"3X Systems was struggling," Gueth said. "Trustyd thought there was an opportunity to acquire the assets, redevelop the company, grow its base of resellers, and turn it around. But it took too long."
[Related: Spectra Logic Intros Deep Storage Appliance To Ease Long-Term Archiving ] [link works but text is buried in the HTML]
Trusted [sic] was formed in 2012 with investment from the State of Ohio Department of Development and two other private investors in order to acquire 3X Systems, Gueth said.
With its acquisition of 3X Systems in June 2012, Trustyd received a series of remote backup appliances [link is live as of Feb 2024] that help solution providers set up private cloud storage systems for SMB customers.
The appliances allowed Trustyd's channel partners to deliver on-premise and private cloud-based disaster recovery solutions to businesses that lack the resources to do it on their own. This included immediate, automatic backup of traveling laptops, as well as traditional on-premise servers, desktops, databases and applications.
It was a good product line, said Jim Whitecotton, project manager at HGO Technology, a Wheeling, W.Va.-based solution provider that partnered with 3X Systems and then Trustyd for nearly three years.
HGO had about 50 or 55 clients using the Trustyd technology, Whitecotton said.
"We would sell the appliance directly to our clients, or we had a few we kept in-house for use in selling chunks of backup space to multiple clients," he said. "It worked fairly well. Once installed, the appliances did a good job for us overall."
About one-third to one-half of HGO's Trustyd clients are small businesses that share space on the solution provider's appliances for their backup and recovery, Whitecotton said.
Starting in 2013, Trustyd seemed to be less responsive than in the past, Whitecotton said.
"But their shutting down completely blindsided us," he said. "It took us one-and-a-half weeks to contact anybody. We had two clients committed to buying two more appliances."
NEXT: The Trustyd Appliances Work For Now, But No More Support, Upgrades
The appliances clients have purchased still work fine, HGO's Whitecotton said. "One issue is that clients run out of capacity," he said. "They need a software key from Trustyd to unlock capacity, but now they can't get it. You would think they could at least provide the keys we need to unlock the extra space. The capacity is there, but it's not accessible without the keys."
Going forward, a big issue could come from a case where the database for the backups gets corrupted, Whitecotton said. "Unless we can find someone to repair it, customers could lose data," he said. "So we're looking for an alternative solution. We will do what we can to make sure clients don't get hurt."
Migrating data from the Trustyd appliances is not particularly easy, Whitecotton said. "The way their appliance is made, the data has to be restored to a server it thinks is the same server that originally created the data," he said.
Trustyd's Gueth acknowledged that customers will be disappointed by the closure of the company.
"Trustyd's operations have ceased," he said. "There are no more operations going on. It's a challenge for customers or resellers or IT consultants. They will have to deal with system support issues, and move to another supplier. How easy that is depends on circumstances. They can spin up a new server and back up the data. But certain policy implementations and backup capabilities are hard to replace."
The Trustyd appliances are self-contained appliances, and as long as there are no service issues with the appliances, getting data off the appliance is as easy as before, Gueth said. In the meantime, the appliances can continue to be used for backing up the data.
Going forward, Gueth said, there will be no more support or upgrades, and some patented features such as the Web service that allowed mobile PCs and the backup appliances to find each other wherever they are moved to will not be available.
For HGO, the closure of Trustyd means finding another way to help customers with their data protection requirements, Whitecotton said.
"We've been around for a while," he said. "We've never had something this extreme before. Some customers have been doing business with us for 25 years. They're not showing up at the door with torches and pitchforks yet. They're concerned. But they know we're going to find them the right solution."
PUBLISHED NOV. 11, 2013
How deep does the rabbit hole go? I haven't looked into HGO Technology yet, but that would be my next step.
I'll keep you posted with any new findings on this article!
(And if you have ideas or a hot tip, you can always contact me with the latest information.)
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