N2WS enhances data protection for AWS and Azure users

N2WS has updated its cloud-native backup and disaster recovery (BDR) software to address the growing threats of ransomware and other attacks.

There are new features in the latest version of its Backup and Recovery software for AWS and Azure users. Its enterprise and MSP customers can use them to cut operational costs and streamline cross-cloud and multi-cloud data management.

Ohad Kritz

Ohad Kritz, CEO and co-founder of N2WS, stated: “We excel in protecting data—that’s our specialty and our core strength. While others may branch into endpoint security or threat intelligence, losing focus, we remain dedicated to ensuring our customers are shielded from the evolving IT threat landscape. These latest multi cloud enhancements are a testament to our unwavering commitment to data protection and delivering vendor neutrality  to our customers.”

This hints that Google Cloud Platform support may be on N2WS’s roadmap. The point about losing focus is perhaps a criticism of data protection suppliers such as Cohesity amd Rubrik who are going deeper into cyber-resilience than N2WS.

The new software brings Data Lifecycle Management (DLM) to Azure virtual machine (VM) backups. By charging per VM rather than based on VM size, N2WS says it enables up to 500 percent in cost savings on both licensing and storage. It also supports a broader range of storage options (Azure Blob, AWS S3, Wasabi S3), offering enhanced flexibility for users. By adding support for Wasabi’s third-party S3-compatible storage repositories, N2WS now offers customers highly cost-effective storage options at competitive prices.

The N2WS platform now leverages cloud-native, platform-independent block-level snapshot technology to deliver maximum-speed read and write access across Azure, AWS, and third-party repositories.

Enhanced recovery scenarios functionality removes the uncertainty of identifying resources during a planned failover, ensuring a quick and efficient failback once operations  are restored. The new functionality introduces Custom Tags for Recovery Scenarios, enabling the retention of backup tags and the addition of fixed tags, such as marking Disaster Recovery targets. This improvement also enhances the differentiation between original and DR targets during failover. New recovery options for AWS FSx ONTAP storage have been added, further strengthening recovery capabilities.

A Partial Retry for Policy Execution Failures feature enhances backup efficiency and reliability by retrying only the failed resources, without reprocessing the successful  ones. This not only saves time and costs but also boosts reliability by targeting only the failed backups, minimizing unnecessary policy-wide failures.

S3 Compliance Locking has  a smarter algorithm which reduces API request volumes, “significantly lowering operational costs” while maintaining compliance and functionality.

Kritz said: “Efficiency and affordability are at the core of what sets us apart and resonates with our customers. Our mission is to provide exceptional protection while helping them cut costs, improve backup efficiency, and simplify restore and disaster recovery testing. This commitment to making things ridiculously easy and fast has been the cornerstone of our success, and we’re excited to continue supporting our customers in the years to come.”

N2WS is changing its name to N2W Software. We expect the company to start paying more attention to Gen AI in the future, rather than just saying its SW can work with AI tools. For example, an N2WS blog says: “Once AI-based features in disaster recovery tools have fully matured, they’ll remain just one of many types of capabilities necessary to enable successful disaster recovery.

“Businesses will also require features like automated disaster recovery testing, as well as the ability to immediately recover data across cloud regions, across cloud accounts and across entire cloud platforms – all of which you can already do with N2WS. This means that even as they experiment with AI-enabled disaster recovery, organizations will also need tried-and-true solutions like N2WS at their disposal to deliver core disaster recovery capabilities.”