Backup Reporter is designed to enable IT administrators to enhance back-up and recovery operations, verify back-up service level compliance, and run back-up as a shared IT service. These capabilities are a valuable asset for managed service providers or organisations that need to analyse and justify backup expenditures, the company says.

Backup Reporter aims to enable comprehensive data management, back-up consolidation, and reporting of heterogeneous environments which support Symantecs Veritas NetBackup and Backup Exec products, in addition to third-party backup solutions.

Exploding data volumes and heterogeneous environments make it difficult for IT administrators to gain essential visibility to accurately report on backup and recovery, says Sheldon Hand, storage specialist at Symantec Africa. Back-up Reporters centralised reporting view of single or multiple backup applications help customers to optimise their environment by aggregating historical data to better forecast trends and help justify the need for critical capital expenditures such as tape drives or additional backup servers and backup media.

Backup Reporter is designed to adapt back-up and recovery operations to the needs of the business. To address the variety of key stakeholders within an organisation, from CIO to back-up administrator, Backup Reporter aims to allow users to customise the definition of back-up success based on the audience need.

Furthermore, IT administrators can be proactive in assessing back-up operations as all views are hierarchical with drill-down capabilities, Hand adds. To jumpstart the reporting process, IT administrators can select any of the hundreds of out-of-the-box reports available, or can use the report wizard to create a customised report, he says.

IT administrators are forced to comply with not only internal Service Level Agreements (SLAs), but also, with external government regulations. Back-up Reporter puts back-up administrators in the drivers seat and allows them to be proactive about managing compliance with governing policies, Hand continues.

It aims to provide them with the ability to prove that critical data is backed up and business-critical clients and applications are recoverable within their established corporate or industry back-up and retention policies. Backup Reporter also aims to eliminate the time-consuming manual process of creating ad-hoc reporting spreadsheets. Reports can be scheduled and distributed via e-mail, thereby automating a process that can otherwise be prone to error, Hand concludes.