Partners asked Asigra to provide an integration with the AWS cloud because AWS prices now make it feasible to use it and make money.
Eran Farajun, Asigra’s Executive Vice president
Cloud backup vendor Asigra, which sells its services entirely through channel partners, has announced its first integration of Asigra Cloud Backup with a third party cloud provider, Amazon Web Service (AWS).
“This release is an extension of our mission to be neutral about the cloud,” said Eran Farajun, Asigra’s Executive Vice president. “After our last partner summit, we asked about deployments they were interested in adopting, and some of the partners told us they wanted to operate their cloud services in a third party cloud, rather than run their own servers.”
AWS had been relatively expensive for corporate users, and other vendors in the last few years who wanted to offer a public cloud option tended to choose other cloud providers first, but AWS pricing has now come down to the point where it becomes a viable option.
“It’s the price wars between Amazon, Google and Microsoft that now make this feasible,” Farajun said. “It’s really become noticeable in the last twelve months. Partners came to us and said it’s now economically viable for them. A majority of partners wanted Amazon first, and this now allows partners to run Asigra software with the AWS cloud instead of only on-premise or co-lo, as has always been done in the past.”
Farajun said that some of Asigra’s older partners, who had previously run their own data centres, started to look at AWS when it became time for them to refresh their storage systems.
“They told us they were at a point where they had to rebuy storage again, and were on the street shopping, and they said they really need to think ‘should I bother spending all this money on storage or should I move it all into the cloud and rent it,” he said.
Farajun said that AWS was especially attractive to partners, because they would much rather co-operate with AWS than compete with them.
“It’s daunting for them as partners to compete with AWS and they would much rather partner with them, and are looking for a way to do that,” he said. “This is a way for them to partner with AWS rather than compete against them.”
AWS Elastic Block Storage serving as Asigra’s the backup vault offers a consumption-based OpEx model for affordable scalability without annual software licensing costs or costly upgrade cycles. Users simply choose the level of service that suits their organization, from self-service to a fully managed service.
“For partners with storage needs up to about 300TB, it makes sense to run it inside AWS, but above that they have to think about running it on their own floor,” Farajun said. “Partners with multiple petabytes of capacity are much less likely to go with AWS, as it would be too expensive for them.”
Asigra has many partners outside North America, and some of those, particularly in Europe, are unlikely to consider a cloud option.
“There are some who are not interested at all because of data sovereignty challenges,” Farajun said. “AWS is not a solution for all. In North America, it carries a better brand. In Europe, there is some fear of American clouds.”
As far as adding other public clouds as an option, Farajun said that decision has not been made, and will be market-driven.
“Partners, specifically Microsoft-focused partners, have also told us they would like us doing Microsoft Azure, but we want to be sure we have a business case, and not just sell it for the sake of selling it,” Farajun said. “We want to see what the takeup is with Amazon, and then see what the demand for Microsoft Azure is, before committing to that.”
