Unitrends Adds Ransomware Detection, Application Provisioning Support to Backup Solutions

Backup and continuity solutions supplier Unitrends, which sells exclusively through the channel, announced Wednesday the addition of ransomware detection, self-service application provisioning and centralized management of multiple branch sites to its Recovery Series physical appliances and Unitrends Backup virtual appliances.

Ransomware detection and prevention is a popular addition to backup appliances, for good reason. The Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that last year alone, ransomware events cost U.S. companies $24 million. No one expects that number to drop in 2017, and a strong backup and disaster-recovery strategy is critical to protecting customer data.

Alex Alvarez, Unitrends’ SVP worldwide channels, told Channel Partners that the new releases are meant to expand market opportunities for partners targeting all-size customers.

“The breadth of the Unitrends portfolio provides partners the ability to address customer backup and business-continuity needs with a single vendor,” said Alvarez. “Our partner program delivers more leads, more margin, fewer integration headaches and lower support costs in a 100-percent channel model.”

Alvarez joined Unitrends in September from Riverbed Technology, where he was VP, global enterprise solutions. The company’s channel program includes deal registration, sales and technical certification programs, MDF and volume-incentive rebates and integrated customer case management, leading to a “one throat to choke” motto. Unitrends announced earlier this month that it won three Stevie awards for sales and customer service, including taking gold in the “Customer Service Department of the Year – Computer Hardware” category.{ad}

The ransomware-detection feature uses predictive analytics to determine the probability that malware is on a server, workstation or desktop and alerts administrators if ransomware is detected. The user is then able to restore back to the last legitimate recovery point. Unitrends says the predictive analytics engine is entirely proprietary and built in-house.

The new self-service feature enables administrators of applications including SQL Server, Oracle, Exchange and SharePoint to initiate recoveries and manage backups. Advanced role-based access control ensures security. The Distributed Enterprise Manager console is useful for …

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… highly distributed customers. IT teams or MSPs can centrally manage and monitor thousands of Unitrends backup appliances.

“Unitrends’ enormous growth in the enterprise space is due to its radically simple and affordable capabilities, coupled with its enterprise-class reliability and core feature set,” said Paul Brady, Unitrends CEO, in a statement. The company added that while many of the enhancements in this release target enterprise-scale deployments, Unitrends’ portfolio is structured to serve a broad range of company sizes, including SMBs.{ad}

Pricing is straightforward and based on data under management. The Recovery Series hardware appliances start at $2,999, including Recovery Assurance for automated disaster-recovery testing, unlimited replication of virtual machines in AWS and Azure, and Kroll item-level recovery for Exchange. A free version of the software appliance is available for up to 1 TB of data; pricing tops out at $1,699 for the Enterprise Plus version to protect any size environment. Extra capacity in the Unitrends Cloud is priced from 9-14 cents per GB, depending on retention policy. The company supports Hyper-V, KVM, VMware, XenServer and other popular hypervisors, and software appliances can run in AWS and Azure. Unitrends offers a premium, one-hour spin-up SLA for critical VMs in its own cloud.

Gartner named Unitrends a Visionary in its 2016 Magic Quadrant for DRaaS, a market the consultancy says will grow from $1.68 billion this year to $11.11 billion by 2021.

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