Carlos Santana is senior manager for IT at MMM Healthcare Inc., a small health maintenance organization in Puerto Rico with about 90,000 members. He has been using AmeriVault for three years to back up his company's file servers, e-mail and Oracle and SQL production databases. This helps his company comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act's requirement for redundant off-site copies of data and for disaster recovery purposes.

"Its expensive in terms of recurring cost, but it's worth it. If you take into consideration the amount of money you have to invest to do it yourself, it kind of evens out. But it's not cheap. It's a couple thousand dollars a month," says Santana, whose 3TB of data is backed up to Waltham, Mass.-based AmeriVault's data center.

Focus on Security

Santana says he chose an outsourced service because of the capital costs involved in building out an internal architecture to support his company's fast-growing storage needs. "We also don't have a lot of time to get into that business," he says.

Still, Santana says he wasn't persuaded to use the third-party backup provider until the vendor proved its ability to encrypt his data and keep it that way until MMM Healthcare wanted it back. "They have the highest level of security. They don't even know the password to decrypt the data," he says. "They know how much data I have, but [they] can't see it."