Asigra looks to fill a void in the marketplace by providing its MSPs with a tool for snapshot management in AWS, which will assist partners with workload migrations to AWS and provide a service for which they can charge.
Today, cloud backup and recovery manager Asigra is announcing general availability of a new software tool, Asigra AWS Snapshot Manager. It controls the costs of snapshot storage in AWS EC2 environments by automating the management of snapshots, particularly to ensure their timely deletion.
“There hasn’t been a nice, easy way of managing snapshots, and if you look on the forums, there’s a lot of griping about it,” said Eran Farajun, executive vice president at Asigra. “We decided to solve this problem, which seems to have been an oversight for Amazon.”
Farajun said that snapshot management today is something that is typically handled manually, by manual processes of writing scripts to perform the snapshots.
“It’s lots of script writing for admins to build a tool, as opposed to them using a tool,” Farajun said.
The Asigra tool, on the other hand, lets users quickly create, restore, copy, delete, migrate between regions, start, stop, launch, or delete snapshots on the fly in AWS through easy-to-set automated rules. Multiple VM snapshots can be managed within a single interface.
“Asigra AWS Snapshot Manager is web-based, and easy to use,” Farajun said. “It’s particularly important to have a smart delete capacity to prevent storage costs jumping from old, undeleted snapshots. It’s all rules-based permission for security, and so there are no surprises.”
The key question here of course is why Asigra is putting out a tool for this market at all, particularly on a freemium model where both their partners and their partners’ customers pay nothing.
“This is the first freemium product we have done,” Farajun stated. “We want to work with our MSP partners to offer this at zero cost to partners and end customers. For partners, offering it as a freemium is a ‘land and expand’ strategy. Partners tell us they are doing a lot of workload migrations. This demonstrates to customers moving workloads into AWS how we can help manage it.”
Asigra AWS Snapshot Manager also offers MSPs the ability to monetize it with new high-value services.
“Partners earn 3-4 per cent margins from AWS itself,” Farajun said. “The money isn’t in reselling the Infrastructure-as-a-Service. It is in the integrating – and now the protecting – of the workloads. While the licensing of the tool is free, partners can monetize it by managing the snapshots. That’s not free, and that’s something they should be charging for.”
Asigra AWS Snapshot Manager is multi-tenanted out of the box, so a partner can manage snapshots for multiple customers. It is also fully co-brandable for the partner. Partners can publish their co-branded AWS Snapshot Manager services in the AWS Marketplace to reach new customers and extend new services to existing clients.
Farajun indicated that Asigra may bring out similar tools for other cloud platforms, depending on the response to this one.
“It made sense to do AWS first, because they are the market leader,” he said. “The second one we would do would be Microsoft Azure, which has the second largest customer base, and they are picking up steam. We don’t have any no time frame for other platforms though. We will see how the market reacts to this one – see what customers and partners think.”
Asigra AWS Snapshot Manager is available to Asigra Partners free of charge at the AWS Marketplace.
