eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Cloud-based recovery-as-a-service (RaaS) specialist Axcient announced the latest version of Business Recovery Cloud, providing faster system replication and recovery for physical and virtual environments, and accelerated file and folder recovery with the addition of drag-and-drop support.
The company’s latest release is currently in beta and will be rolled out for new and existing customers at no additional cost within the coming weeks.
Axcient has also extended its instant failover support. The company previously supported instant server failover for the most recent system snapshot, and with the announcement, enables businesses to recover systems from any point-in-time snapshot, and can be done both locally and in the cloud.
“The use of multiple tools pose a series of challenges, the most damaging being the inability to recover operations in time to avoid critical financial losses,” Justin Moore, Axcient’s CEO, told eWEEK. “Businesses are turning to cloud-based recovery services as a way to consolidate different technologies under one solution, to increase data protection, and most importantly to improve their recovery time objectives.”
Moore explained that even in cases where the physical facility housing a data center has been rendered inoperative, cloud-based recovery services can provide companies with a virtual data center on-demand that gives employees continued access to their data and applications at a fraction of the cost of traditional on-premise technologies.
The company is also working to re-architect the way companies protect, access and recover data and applications by delivering a business recovery cloud that goes beyond backup and mirrors an organization’s business in the cloud, including emails, files, applications, operating systems and all of the interconnected elements of a network.
The latest version of the Axcient solution improves performance by up to nine times faster than before and can help businesses to reduce their Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and failover systems.
The release also supports drag-and-drop recovery from the local appliance through integration with Windows Explorer, allowing users to move large numbers of files and entire folders to a target device more easily.
With the ability to restore more than 50 gigabytes in a few minutes, the new interface enables organizations to more quickly recover critical files and folders.
“We are now in a very interesting turning point for an industry that was dormant until a few years ago. Large incumbents that dominated the market but didn’t innovate are now facing break-ups of their companies,” Moore said. “Some entrants have been acquired by others trying to complement their offerings and some traditional players are still ignoring the cloud completely. We see a new wave of vendors evolving and taking over the market with RaaS offerings that give companies better protection and recovery as much lower prices.”
Moore said the market will start seeing RaaS also being used as a key IT initiative to lower IT operating expenses, while pricing models shifting significantly and bundled service offerings like DR testing, failovers, and virtualization offered at no additional cost.
“A few years from now it will be difficult to not think of data protection and recovery as a cloud offering, much like we do today with music or video streaming and even file sharing,” he said.