Data protection and recovery software and services provider Arcserve announced the launch of the Arcserve Cloud, a service for off-site data protection.
Integrated with the company’s unified data protection (UDP) appliance, its Cloud could help businesses complete their data-protection goals, and adds an option for Arcserve managed service providers (MSPs) to extend their data-protection solution portfolio.
The offering lets users store valuable business data for disaster recovery without the cost and maintenance of dedicated hardware, racking, power, and IT resources or maintaining another third-party contract.
“The up-front capital of building an off-site recovery data center requires in some cases, and in general, the resources needed to implement a truly effective and efficient disaster recovery infrastructure on your own,” Christophe Bertrand, vice president of product marketing management at Arcserve, told eWEEK. “That’s why the Arcserve Cloud is a great solution that takes the complexity and cost away, while [businesses] still benefit from enhanced data recovery capabilities.”
Businesses can also spin up a virtual machine in the Arcserve Cloud for fast failover and failback—the cloud will first be offered as a service extension to Arcserve’s UDP appliance, which supports physical to physical, physical to virtual, and virtual to virtual.
Other features include the ability to test application failover at any time, as well as cloud storage for long-term data storage, as opposed to maintaining local magnetic media or leveraging a third party to meet compliance requirements.
Partners in the Arcserve MSP program can also leverage the company’s cloud service, and to accelerate deployment and protection of data, organizations have the option of copying data to a portable USB drive and then mailing the drive to the cloud through a Jumpstart courier service.
Built with the company’s Unified Data Protection Recovery Point Server (RPS) replication technologies, data is protected with encryption end-to-end, at the source, in flight and in the cloud, using 256-bit AES encryption.
“We expect to see a continued focus on the adoption of high-availability features and simplicity in the context of a technology consumption model that gives customers choices, such as software, cloud and appliances,” Bertrand said. “Also, on the planning side of the equation, more tools will keep emerging to simplify planning and preparedness in and beyond IT.”
He also noted that user-friendliness for a platform like this is absolutely critical, since many SMBs do not have the resources to hire specialists for every discipline in IT.
“Our UDP solution, in particular the appliance, was designed with ease of use as a critical objective,” he explained. “Combining ease of use with feature depth and breadth has become the name of the game. This in turn optimizes time to value for end users, and optimizes operational efficiency.”