As a result, Situs opted to keep the majority of its production data in-house and utilize an offsite, cloud-based data system strictly for backup and recovery purposes for servers that handle email and Citrix applications, among others.

Situs' hybrid approach to storage includes a disk-based EVault appliance on a SAN in the data center that runs backups, replacing the dozen or so tapes the company previously used. Situs relies on EVault services in the cloud for replication and disaster recovery. Non-production data is sent from the appliance to the cloud via a VPN. To mitigate security concerns, Situs uses internal encryption on all of its data during backup, and that data is sent encrypted and remains encrypted offsite.

"We are able to keep data locked down and encrypted and less readily accessible," McCown says. "This satisfies our clients because it does not expose them to some of the regulatory and security issues." In the event of a disaster, Situs has the ability to bring the data online by utilizing the EVault Remote Disaster Recovery system.

One of the benefits Situs has realized is a significant reduction in the time it takes to run a full backup; the backup window is down from 2.5 days to about 7 hours. The volume of data isn't huge--typically about 8 TB--but a lot of it is distributed among the company's 10 offices and had to be pulled over the network.