Canadian firm Asigra Inc. yesterday unveiled the latest iteration of its cloud backup and recovery tool, Asigra Cloud Backup which now features support for Google Apps. The latest upgrade to Asigra Backup 12.2 is meant to provide enterprise users with greater data recovery capability over corporate data stored in software-as-service cloud applications.
The earlier version of Asigra Cloud Backup already features support for Salesforce.com and IBM SmartCloud. The enhancement announced Tuesday at the Asigra Summit in Toronto also coincided with the company’s rebranding as data recovery firm and its release of a new recovery licensing model that charges customers separate fees for data backup and data recovery.
There were 50 million business people provisioned in whole or part with office systems capabilities from the cloud at the start of 2013, according to Tom Austin, senior analyst for Gartner Research. The number of cloud-provisioned users will grow 28.5 per cent a year to 695 million users by 2022
However, Farajun said, while firms are saving on IT infrastructure they are losing a lot by way of data protection as services such as Google Apps focus mainly on providing cheap storage and the arrangements often lead to users spending more on other measures to meet regulatory compliance standards.
“What typically happens is that when you’re data gets lost Google will likely not be able to help you recover it because their cloud contracts stipulate that they provide a service and is not to recover your lost data,” said Farajun.
The latest advancement to Asigra Cloud Backup allows companies to backup and restore all important business information in Google Apps, including emails, calendars, contacts, documents, and sites. Users can automate and schedule the backup activities for the data in Google Apps, select the number of generations of the information that need protection, set retention rules and even decide different backup frequencies for different sets of data. Asigra also provides secure NIST FIPS 140 -2 certified storage of backup data.
“This is a huge jump from previous Cloud Backup versions,” said Guy Netaneli, chief technology officer of e-ternity.ca, a Mississauga, Ont.-based data recovery service provider which services small and medium sized businesses as well as large financial institutions in Toronto. “It’s a much simpler solution for my clients since they don’t need to deploy several tools to manage and recover data. This gives them greater peace of mind.”
With Asigra Cloud Backup 12.2, Netaneli said, service providers like e-ternity.ca can backup or recovery their customer’s Google Apps data at the entire domain level, the account level.
Erich Estanislao, project manager for Sandz Solutions, an information management solution that services medium and large enterprises in Asia, said the he likes Asigra’s ability to drill down to individual files.
“I imagine this would be very useful in recovering with data created by an employee who has left the firm,” said Estanislao.
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