For the average small business, backup is something that is both awkward and time-consuming to do properly. By the same token, Disaster Recovery is usually considered an unnecessary economic burden. A good few businesses may well prove those views true, but the risk is great, punitive, and quite often fatal to the continuation of the business.
“Most have to take the risk on both backup and Disaster Recovery, because they cannot afford the upfront costs of the systems needed to protect themselves,” said David Blackman, Northern Europe General Manager for backup storage specialist, Acronis. “This is why we have decided to come at the some subject from a different angle that accepts the hybrid nature of the SME’s world and offer them a single system, Backup & Recovery 10 Online, that can work on-premise and in the cloud. They have, and will have, on-premise systems, but they are also starting to look towards the cloud as the next stage of development.”
A recent survey undertaken by the company also suggests that many SME’s have a somewhat cavalier attitude to disaster recovery, typically estimating that they can recover and be in business again within a day. Blackman sees this as, at the very least, optimistic. “Most see it as just backing up files which can be reloaded,” he said, “but in practice disaster recovery means taking a full system image with all the patches and applications settings properly recorded.”
The majority of SMEs will still continue to operate with local backups but this is becoming more of a logistical problem for many businesses. “Many staff find it difficult to backup to the local system,” Blackman said, “not least because they are out on the road and not in the office, and they don’t have a set up which can accommodate remote backup.
“We surveyed our on-premise customers and asked `if you could backup to and recover from the cloud, would you?’ Their answer was yes, and the survey showed they would be willing to pay more than we are charging them for such a service. For many, online backup is just seen as insurance,” he said.
Acronis is also talking with partners that have a strong presence in sectors of the wide-scale SME marketplace about joint marketing Backup & Recovery 10 Online. It has not got as far as adding the relevant technology so the system can be skinned by the partners looking for white-labelling or co-branding opportunities, though Blackman indicated such a move was now on the company’s agenda.
Backup & Recovery 10 Online has been designed for SMEs which are typically backing up to tape or disk and storing the backups offsite, or even on-premise. With this service, IT administrators can recover files, folders or even complete images of systems.
It enables organisations to recover quickly and completely from a secure cloud computing environment in the wake of a full scale outage, without requiring a dedicated offsite storage facility and its associated costs.
The service includes support for mixed virtual and physical computing environments and is claimed to be one of the first data protection solutions to offer online, agent-less backup for virtual machines. It produces minimal impact on management overhead, since the management console controls both online and local backups for both physical and virtual machines, and can recover individual files or whole system images. Data protection is to AES-256 data encryption standards.
The company offers an initial seeding option for customers with large amounts of data, where the backup is placed on a hard drive and sent to its datacentre for uploading. Similarly, in the event of a large server outage, Acronis will load a server’s backups onto an external drive and ship it to the customer as part of its Large Scale Recovery option.
