Unilever scales an Iron Mountain

Consumer packaged goods giant Unilever is rolling out automated back-up across its global operations to beef up its business continuity strategy and limit the risk of losing data.

Tony Farah, head of global desktop strategy at Unilever, told silicon.com the Iron Mountain service will remotely back up data from the 30,000 laptops across Unilever's IT estate. The system runs in the background, allowing users to go about their normal tasks so that they don't have to get involved in the process.

Farah said it's a far cry from the systems it is replacing. "It's replacing a mixed bag," he said. "We had back-up to our file and print servers which didn't work 100 per cent of the time and some staff were using removable media.

"We had numerous incidents where individuals thought they were backing up their data only to find they hadn't."

And that was when "people would start yelling and screaming", he added.

Farah told silicon.com that history and a record of human error, has shown that the only reliable way to back up data is to automate the process. He expects a healthy return on investment with saved man hours resulting from easier back-up and restore.

The Connected Backup/PC offering from Iron Mountain is currently being rolled out across Europe, and North and South America.

The rollout across North America hit its nine month implementation target, said Farah, and he is confident of further rollouts across the enterprise.