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posted on 16 June 2008 09:42

London, England, 16th June 2008: Award-winning media agency OmnicomMediaGroup has sourced some of its disaster recovery, backup and compliance solutions from industry specialist Thinking SAFE™.

Supporting over 850 media planners and buyers in London and Manchester, and with data volumes growing at up to 30 per cent per year, the agency’s 5 strong IT team could no longer cope with the sheer volume of backup tapes and the escalating courier costs. Furthermore, as a US firm, SOX compliance meant that document retention was key.

Unlike traditional, tape-based backup methods, the Thinking SAFE™ solution has been designed to meet the recovery time demands of a 21st century business like Omnicom. As well as backing up the agency’s 3 terabytes of data, Thinking SAFE™ is providing continuous data protection and delivering higher availability of business systems.

David King, OmnicomMediaGroup’s Associate Director Shared Technology Services EMEA, explains: “Thinking SAFE’s solution provides the speed of recovery that’s so essential to a media agency like ours. The productivity benefits alone are incredible; our help desk has so much more time available to provide the support that the teams need. It’s simple, easy to use and there are no training costs. It has also allowed us to enforce a document management policy. It was initially installed nearly 3 years ago and the technology has stood the test of time. We are now reaping the real cost benefits that a solution like Thinking SAFE can provide.”

Omnicom’s data used to be backed up to tapes on a Compaq storage device. This required an expensive multitape drive library and the ongoing headache of tape rotation management.

King concludes: “From a compliance perspective, it’s a nightmare to have to go back over old tapes, hunting for specific documents. What used to take around 2 weeks can now be achieved in just 15 minutes, which is amazing. I’d estimate a payback of less than two years for the Thinking SAFE solution and would recommend it to anyone. As a group we have over 37 offices across Europe, and there’s the real possibility of a global roll out of this solution.”

Ed Jones, Managing Director at Thinking SAFE™ explains: “A small, in house IT team like Omnicom’s cannot cope with the compliance and security hassles of dealing with 3 terabytes of data, whilst providing the help desk and other IT support essential to running an effective business. Addressing these issues with solutions from a specialist like Thinking SAFE™ gives them the peace of mind they need.”

The Thinking SAFE™ solution delivers backup, recovery and archive solutions to solve today's challenges such as securing mobile data, backing up the ever increasing quantities of data, reduced backup windows, rising tape costs, fast recovery of critical data, and long term archiving.

The software brings together backup and recovery, de-duplication and the replication of backup data into a single platform. The policy-based processes are set so businesses can meet their IT service delivery requirements at a lower cost than ever before and the data is encrypted to ensure maximum security.

Thinking SAFE™ works with a host of blue chip customers, including Virgin Management, GB Airways and National Express.

About Thinking SAFE™ Limited 
Thinking SAFE™ provides data backup, recovery and archive solutions for enterprise data management that ensure high-performance data protection, and maximum data availability. The Thinking SAFE™ platform manages the data during its lifetime through integrated backup/recovery, archiving and replication. Information about Thinking SAFE™ is available by calling +44 (0) 1784 49 73 26 or at www.thinkingsafe.com. Thinking SAFE™ company headquarters is located in the SEEDA Enterprise Hub on the campus of The Royal Holloway University of London, England.

^{[Formatted by Majid Soltani.]}