Asigra, Carbonite, Cosentry Improve Backup, Recovery Services

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By Perry Vandell

Several IT companies are stepping forward with updated backup and recovery services that partners can sell.

Asigra, for one, announced the latest version of its cloud backup software. The company says Cloud Backup V13 offers converged data protection with significantly faster data recovery for entire databases and individual files.

The software includes Office 365 data protection, improved support for open infrastructure options such as FreeBSD and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). There’s also geo-location for mobile devices so that if a device is lost of stolen, it can be wiped remotely.

Asigra isn’t alone. Carbonite is out with the latest version of its backup service, Carbonite Server Backup, which offers hybrid backup (a combination of cloud and local backup) for Microsoft Exchange Online in Office 365. The company notes that small-to-midsize businesses (SMB) traditionally don’t have access to the hybrid backup solutions normally offered to larger enterprises, and that the latest version of Carbonite’s software changes that.

“As growing numbers of [small-to-midsize businesses] adopt cloud-based applications for business productivity, they require powerful yet simple solutions that protect against user error, corrupted data, and unforeseen downtime,” said Brad Meiseles, Carbonite’s senior VP of product and engineering.

These changes come after an IDC report predicting that 30 percent of all small businesses in the U.S. will use Office 365 in 2015. IDC’s forecast suggests that cloud and hybrid backups will grow more common, possibly becoming larger targets for cybercriminals in the process.

Not to be outdone, Cosentry, the Omaha-based data center service provider, is enhancing its Disaster-Recovery-as-a-service offering with the goal of meeting the full range of Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).

The DRaaS was developed for Cosentry’s cloud and colocation customers, but also for businesses looking to leverage a service provider as part of their disaster recovery, hybrid-cloud initiatives. The company says its data centers lie outside of major natural disaster zones for extra protection.

Technology research firm Gartner predicts that hybrid clouds will play an integral role in the future of data recovery, but communication between internal and external support teams will become a necessity.

“The deployment of hybrid clouds is gaining increased interest, because it has the potential to improve both production operations availability and make recovery data-center location less of an issue,” Gartner noted. “As hybrid data implementation increases, one critical success factor will be the effectiveness of IT-SCM (service continuity management) that is jointly sustained by in-house IT operations and the external service provider(s).”

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