Global IT solutions and services provider Dimension Data plc today announced the availability of a new Cloud Backup option to its “Compute-as-a-Service” offerings, part of an ongoing trend among cloud providers to bake backup and recovery into hosted solutions.

The new Dimension Data Cloud Backup will appear as an add-on to the company’s enterprise-class public, private and hosted CaaS products and will allow users to safeguard files, folders, systems, applications and data to Dimension’s cloud data centers “to ensure business continuity and protection for enterprise workloads,” officials said.

“Cloud users often manage their backup in-house, which can be complicated and costly,” said Steve Nola, CEO of the cloud business unit at the $5.8 billion South African IT services firm. “By offering the integrated Cloud Backup service, Dimension Data enables businesses to back up whole applications while providing assurance that historical data is secure and easy to access.”

The new cloud BCDR offering comes in three flavors to suit a variety of business sizes and needs: Cloud Backup Essentials, for basic file and folder backup and restore; Cloud Backup Advanced, which adds system-state backup and recovery; and Cloud Backup Enterprise, which includes application backup and restoration with other BCDR features.

Dimension Data customers in the U.S. and Australia will see the new Cloud Backup options appear in their cloud provisioning user interfaces in October. For a starting fee of $10 per cloud server plus $0.10 per GB of storage per month, users will be able to select a secondary data copy from any backup-enabled and configured Dimension Data Managed Cloud Platform, view backup status, coverage and success rates, choose pre-configured backup windows and retention periods from one month to seven years.

The Cloud Backup service is expected to roll out to Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa by the end of 2013, Dimension Data officials said.