Business continuity provider Carbonite is connecting an important dot to its cloud storage service: Microsoft Office 365, which is expected to grow to 30 percent market share in U.S. small businesses in 2015.
The Boston-based company, which markets to small and medium-size businesses, said Feb. 4 that it has added hybrid support for Microsoft Exchange Online in Office 365, which aims to provide SMBs data protection in a familiar environment as an increasing number of business processes move to the cloud.
The new support is included in Carbonite’s latest version of Carbonite Server Backup, made available for download on Feb. 4. Carbonite Server Backup also supports servers—both physical and virtual—databases, live applications, NAS drives, Hyper-V, and external hard drives.
IDC has predicted that adoption of Office 365 will double to 30 percent of all U.S. small businesses in 2015. As a result, hybrid backup of cloud-based data is becoming increasingly important in this market. While most cloud providers, such as Microsoft and AWS, offer protection from infrastructure failure, they cannot protect against user errors, malware attacks, or other drivers of data loss.
Carbonite Server Backup’s job is to ensure that cloud-based email and other Exchange data in Office 365 are always available.
The newest release of Carbonite Server Backup includes the following additional features:
—Mailbox-level backup and restore: Enables backup and recovery of individual Exchange mailboxes. Rather than restoring an entire Exchange database to recover corrupted or deleted individual user data, IT administrators can search for and restore specific Exchange mailboxes both locally and in Office 365.
—Improved customization: Administrators can apply the customization of Carbonite Server Backup—network utilization, storage capacity, retention periods, cloud and local backup targets, and more—to Office 365.
—Secure AES 128-bit encryption transmitted through a Secure Socket Layer (SSL): Users have the ability to create a 256-bit private key encryption.
“Hybrid backup of cloud-hosted data has to date been a capability only larger firms with more complex IT departments could utilize,” said Chris Chute, Vice President of IDC’s SMB Cloud and Mobility Practice. “Now SMB IT managers and owners can utilize hybrid backup with Carbonite Server Backup.”
For detailed information on various pricing plans for Carbonite Server Backup, go here.
Carbonite, which charges $55 per seat/per year for unlimited online backup for individuals, competes with providers that include Barracuda, iDrive, Google Drive, Amazon, i365, Box, Dropbox and EMC Mozy.