Historically, protecting data at the edge on desktops and laptops has been outside the scope of IT. Mostly, they haven’t wanted to bear the responsibility of end-user support and recovery or were not resourced to do so. Also, traditional products had performance issues such as long backup windows and performance degradation during backup, which limited endpoint backup adoption. In this vacuum of viable IT supported solutions, many employees, used to protecting their personal systems and forced to figure something out on their own, have turned to portable hard drives and cloud services like Dropbox and others.

But with an increasingly mobile workforce creating more critical information outside IT’s traditional domain, demands for anywhere anytime access to information, the potential cost and risk of compliance and eDiscovery requirements, the fear about sensitive data in unsecured clouds and unknown (to IT) locations, endpoint data protection has moved to the forefront in many organizations. They are scrambling to regain control of their data and standardize a policy for protecting and delivering access to it to minimize risk and enhance employee productivity without having to consume a lot of scarce resources. To address these challenges, organizations are turning to the latest generation of endpoint data protection solutions which provide far better levels of automation and backup performance, even over low bandwidth network links, than earlier generations of endpoint data protection products.