BackupAssist has released a product that bridges backup and disaster recovery.
The company’s eponymous software provides backup for Windows virtual and physical servers and applications such as MS Exchange and Office 365.
Linus Chang, BackupAssist’s founder and CEO, provided a quote: “We’ve known for some time that legacy backup systems are becoming less effective each day, as cyber-attacks increase in sophistication and target backup data in addition to primary data. To compound problems, the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that traditional backup procedures, such as swapping hard disks, are difficult or impossible during a lockdown.”
According to BackupAssis, local backups do not provide disaster recovery, and DR products are expensive and proprietary.
BackupAssist new ER (Express Recovery) provides disk to disk to cloud protection, with local copies providing fast response and the cloud copy supplying the DR.
The company said the software is affordable because it uses low-cost S3 or Azure Blob storage, which is deduplicated and compressed, and has a recovery time measured in hour. Restore for the local copy take minutes. BackupAssist says the cloud recovery time is acceptable because disasters are rare, unlike local restores which can happen often. Backup data is encrypted and support includes AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean or any S3-compatible cloud, including self-hosted S3 clouds.
Restoring from the cloud can be via VM instant boot (booting a backup as a Hyper-V guest), bare metal server recovery or by downloading the backup to anywhere. Customers can recover entire applications or individual files.
The company said its CryptoSafeGuard feature protects backups from ransomware in two ways. The software prevents unauthorised processes from creating, deleting or updating backup data. Also, it scans backup data for signs of a ransomware infection and blocks jobs from running. CryptoSafeGuard sends an SMS and mail to alert customers to detected risks.
Chang said: “Our partners and end customers spoke and we heard – they wanted automatic offsite backups with history and retention, fast local recoveries, and the option to recover in the cloud when needed – all at a price an SMB could afford.”
BackupAssist ER can be bought online from BackupAssist or from its channel partners. It is priced at $299 annually per physical server, $199 per virtual guest machine annually or $699 per virtual host machine annually. There are discounts for bulk and multi-year purchases. The firm claims its pricing makes BackupAssist ER as much as 75 per cent cheaper than the competition.
The company
Just when you think you have a reasonable understanding of data protection suppliers along comes another one.
BackupAssist was founded in Melbourne, Australia in 2001. It is privately-owned, with no VC funding. The company has four products which are all versions of its core BackupAssist software: BackupAssist Classic; the new BackupAssist ER (Express Recovery and Expert Response); BackupAssist WFH (Work From Home) ;and BackupAssist 365.
The company says it provides affordable backup and disaster recovery software for small and medium business Windows Server customers. Its software protects more than 200,000 Windows servers.
The company supports physical and virtual servers and has thousands of customers in 165 countries with offices in Australia, Malaysia, Europe, Africa and the USA. Larger customers include NASA, Holiday Inn, Siemens, Stanford University and Rolls Royce.
