Acronis’ on-prem product in their hybrid cloud architecture now has the same feature set as their cloud offering.

Data protection vendor Acronis has added Microsoft Office 365 backup functionality to their Acronis Backup 12 solution. The move makes the Office 365 functionality that has been available in Acronis’s Backup Cloud solution since last July available in Acronis’s on-prem product within their hybrid cloud infrastructure.

“In 2013, we made a decision to focus on the cloud, since we determined that was the future and we needed to have products first in that environment,” said Frank Jablonski, Acronis’ VP of Product Marketing. “We have a single hybrid cloud architecture with one Web-based management interface that can be deployed on-prem or in the cloud. However, our cloud-first strategy means that we bring things to the cloud first, and then being them on-prem after.”

Jablonski said that this strategy meets market demand.

“We got the Office 365 capability into the cloud first because we had really strong demand coming from the service provider market,” he indicated. “We had much less pressure for the on-prem product.”

The on-prem Backup 12 was released last July, and even without the Office 365 capability, sales have been good.

“We have had over 40 per cent growth of Backup 12 since July,” Jablonski said.

With the new enhancement, Acronis Backup 12 provides full automatic backup of Microsoft Office 365 emails, including contacts, calendars, tasks, and attachments.

“You can store backup backup data locally or in the cloud,” Jablonski said. “You have the secondary copy and can decide how long you want to keep those emails, for compliance, or flexibility for moving if you decide to change clouds.”

Users can recover individual and shared mailboxes to the original or an alternative location, and can also recover and deliver individual items by email without restoring the entire backup.

“This is a neat little feature, being able to send recovery as an email to someone,” Jablonski said.

“These aren’t things that you get as standard features with Office 365,” he added, “You don’t have this level of data retention in that product alone.”

This update also provides support for the latest edition of VMware vSphere, which is 6.5. This includes agentless and agent-based VM and ESXi host backup, support of VMware CBT, Acronis vmFlashback, Replication with WAN optimization, and Acronis Instant Recovery.

“You can now boot any backup as a virtual machine to get a 15 second recovery time or less,” Jablonski said.

Acronis also previewed an upcoming feature, Acronis Active Protection against Ransomware, which is designed to block attacks and instantly restore affected data. It will be available in the next update.

Acronis Backup Office 365 Subscription Licenses are available now.