SecuriSync had backup technology before that Intermedia considered to be better than their standalone backup offering. Now the backup has been further rounded out, and SecuriSync has been upgraded to a formally converged offering, at the same price as the old file sharing service.
Jonathan Levine, Intermedia’s CTO
Cloud IT services provider Intermedia has launched what it believes to be a unique offering, with its SecuriSync converged file backup and file sync and share offering, that it says have a fuller feature set than any comparable set of services on the market.
“We think we have a great combination of features that solves the shortcomings of both product categories, and is a great opportunity for our channel partners,” said Jonathan Levine, Intermedia’s CTO.
SecuriSync is a brand that Intermedia had already been offering, but the service as it exists today is quite different from its original incarnation.
“When we introduced SecuriSync, it was an enterprise file sharing product, and was basically a direct competitor to Box,” Levine said. “We realized, however, that some of the technical decisions we had made with it made it superior as a backup product to the separate backup service we were already offering. In particular, it syncs files as they are changed and it maintains the history of all the changes. However we were missing a couple of features before we could call it a full backup service, so we added those recently and are relaunching.” The new SecuriSync thus differs from the original service in two key ways: it is now targeted at SMBs, as well as larger businesses, and it is a dual cloud backup and file sharing offering.
The pitch for customers is that SecuriSync provides a single tool for using, managing and protecting user files, rather than one tool for file sync and share, and another for backup. It can be deployed as part of Intermedia’s Office in the Cloud, as a standalone service, or to complement Office 365 with additional file backup and sharing capabilities.
Levine indicated that Intermedia believes the service to be unique — not just unique at a price range that is suitable for smaller businesses.
“The combination of real time backup and file sharing here we think is unique,” he said. “There are enterprise products that do file sharing and tape backups but they aren’t typically multi-platform and multi-device. There are also other backup products that have some elements of file sharing attached, but they don’t typically offer version-by-version restoree that we do, or point-in-time recovery, and they are also typically read only.”
Levine also pointed to the ability of users to continue working even while a restore is taking place as a key differentiation.
“In a typical backup-only solution, you could wait for days to restore,” he said. “But because SecuriSync is native file sharing, we also provide the ability to keep working during restores.”
Because SecuriSync is priced on a per-user basis rather than per device, users can use mobile devices without incurring additional costs. Admins can also remotely wipe SecuriSync data from lost or stolen mobile devices.
Levine said SecuriSync also offers significant new advantages to their partners, because they will be able to get more margin than on today’s commoditized backup services..
“Because we aren’t changing the price of the product to the partner, they can choose how to price the product with the additional features,” he said. “In addition to the thin backup margins, the partner also has to deal with the fact that restoring from a typical backup solution isn’t something that a typical customer can do. The call that the partner has to make to help the customer through the restore will eat those thin backup margins quickly. Our Mass Restore, on the other hand, is specifically designed to be done by the customers.”
Levine said that the converged offering also adds new professional services opportunities for partners.
“We provide professional services opportunities for the partners on both setup of file sharing and permissions, and also on the setup of backup and storage optimization,” he said.
The service is available with grey-labeled branding for greater margins, and Intermedia also provides partners with sales assistance, onboarding support, marketing campaigns-in-a-box and other benefits.
SecuriSync pricing with the backup features added is the same as it was before, starting at $4.99 per user, per month. It is available now.
