Data accessibility and protection specialist Acronis announced the release of Small Business: Server Cloud Backup, a platform designed to help small office/home office (SOHO) users securely back up files and data locally, as well as to Acronis cloud storage, where it is constantly available.
Small Office: Server Cloud Backup is available in a variety of subscription packages, starting at $499 for a one-year subscription, which includes 350GB of Acronis cloud storage, and scale up to a three-year subscription plan with 1TB of cloud storage. The company also offers potential users a free trial.
“Many small businesses and home office users we speak to have limited data protection and disaster recovery capabilities,” Robert Amatruda, research director for data protection and recovery at IT research firm IDC, said in a statement. “Acronis Small Office: Server Cloud Backup offers customers a full-featured cloud backup solution providing secure off-site data protection.”
The platform allows users to save a disk image containing the server’s operating system, applications and data to any USB drive or network-attached storage, and recover the entire system in case of a crash. Universal Restore technology built into the server backup software lets users migrate to a new machine or recover to a different server. Users can also ensure that backups are protected and only the user can recover the data using 256-bit advanced encryption standard (AES) encryption.
“Small business owners rely on their computers and mobile devices, and can’t afford downtime or data loss,” Dmitri Joukovski, senior vice president of product management for Acronis, said in a statement. “We provide SOHO users with a secure hybrid cloud solution, a reliable alternative to new-to-market or public cloud solutions, helping to ensure business continuity and secure data protection. Our solution is enterprise-grade, yet extremely easy to use, and is based on proven technology that millions of customers trust.”
In August 2012, Acronis broadened its service offerings with the acquisition of GroupLogic, whose software ensures secure enterprise file access, sharing and syncing. The synergy between the two companies is that Acronis offers disaster recovery and data protection, while GroupLogic specializes in file sharing in expanding mobile environments, and on collaboration platforms users are widely distributed but create and share content over the network.
Acronis gained from the acquisition with the ability to offer the GroupLogic file sharing and sync solution that many of its competitors in the backup and recovery space don’t have. Acronis faces some major competition in the backup and recovery space, including from Symantec, CA Technologies and Commvault. There is also a subset of vendors who also do backup and recovery but only of virtual machine data, including Veeam and, most recently, Dell.