CA Technologies is the latest cloud vendor to hitch a ride on the hybrid model with a new product that gives small and medium sized businesses ( SMBs) a mix of on-premise and external cloud backup for about $50 a month.
Islandia, New York-based CA has teamed up with Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloudservice to launch CA ARCServe D2D On Demand. The cloud-based product is available in Canada and the U.S. It’s a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product that provides SMBs atwo-prongedway to back up and recover their data: they can keep a local copy oftheir data on-site, plus move all or some of it into Microsoft’s Azurecloud service for added protection.
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The hybrid model combining on-site and off-site backup is attractivefor SMBs because it alleviates a majorconcern about the publiccloud-only approach: what if you back up all your stuff in an externalcloud and then there’s a cloud service outage?
A breakdown of CA’s hybrid cloudmodel.
“You’re getting the full on-premise backup capabilities in addition tocloud storage,” said Steve Fairbanks, vice-president of productmanagement at CA’s data management division. “We store all that locallyfirst and then take the most critical files for your business and movethose up to the Azure cloud. So in the event of a local disaster youcan recover your business in minutes because it’s protected locally.”
“If for some reason the cloud is out you still have a local copy ofyour data,” he added.
For SMBs who want to customize the product a bit for their needs, itlets them control the number of backups per day and also decide howmuch of their data to allocate to on-site storage versus Microsoft’sAzure cloud. Although CA has partnered with Microsoft as itsinitial cloud provider for the product, customers can evenmigrate their data to another cloud service in future if they chooseto, Fairbanks said.
Hybrid cloud more popular
The service will be a licensed product available by monthly or annualsubscription. A monthly subscription will cost about $50 for 25gigabytes of storage with the option to buy additional blocks of 25 or50 gigabytes. In Canada, CA ARCserve D2D On Demand can be purchased through Ingram Micro Canada, Synnex Canada and Tech Data Canada and will be available through other distributors in the future.
Hybrid cloud is becoming a more popular option as headlines about cloudoutages at Amazon Inc. and Microsoft give users secondthoughts about usingexternal cloud as their sole backup. Gartner Inc. forecasts that themost popular cloud option through 2020 will be a hybrid combination ofon-premise and external cloud services.
“Vendors are catching on so we’re starting to see more hybrid models,”Fairbanks said. “They’re catching on that customers need both. As aresult we’ll continue to see minimum double digit growth (in hybridcloud adoption this year).”
Last year Hewlett-Packard Co. rolled out itsCloud Protection Programto deliver security for a hybrid cloud environment from a singlesource. And VMWare’s vCloud Connector 1.5 tool lets customers movebetween private and public clouds built using vCloud technology.
