Arcserve combines four of its solutions into a single cloud offering that on-prem customers cam still use, but will also give them hybrid and full cloud options.
Data protection vendor Arcserve has introduced what it views as a breakthrough product in its new Arcserve Business Continuity Cloud, a fully integrated solution that combines what had been divergent backup, disaster recovery, high availability and email archiving products. It is suitable for on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
“This is a great and exciting moment for us,” said Oussama El-Hilali, vice president of products at Arcserve. “The idea behind Arcserve Business Continuity is the culmination of an effort that has lasted several years. We believe that this is a truly unique platform that will take all the on-prem and hybrid cloud and put it in the cloud.”
El-Hilali stressed that Arcserve Business Continuity is a total solution approach to something which Arcserve addressed previously with separate point products.
“In the past, we focused on products – availability product, backup product, direct-to-cloud product,” he said. “With this, the focus is changed to a total solution. This is a seamless integration of all those other solutions. As a result, instead of thinking ‘what data mover do I want to use,’ the customer just has to consider ‘what are my SLA and RPO requirements?’ and then we determine, based on that input, the right resource to use.”
El-Hilali also emphasized that Arcserve wants to shed its identification as being an on-prem vendor, which comes because the original solution predates the cloud.
“Traditionally, people thought of Arcserve as on-prem,” he said. “We want to make it clear that we have evolved, so that while we do continue to protect on prem, we also now protect hybrid environments, as well as purely cloud data protection. We anticipate that a good number of our existing customers, as well as new customers, will now see us as a cloud provider. We have a very large and loyal on-prem customer base, and they will be able to continue doing exactly what they are doing with ArcServe Business Continuity, if they want to do that. They will now, however, have the option to do some different things, like change the destination from on-prem to cloud, if they want.”
Arcserve Business Continuity Cloud integrates all data protection processes – backup, disaster recovery, high availability and email archiving – under one cloud-based console for a sweeping range of IT infrastructures, including non-x86, x86, and public and private clouds.
“We are really emphasizing simplicity with this, and have spent a lot of time and money to provide a consumer grade user experience,” El-Hilali said
“The email archiving has a bit different setup, because GDPR requirements have additional roles required and those can be set up in the cloud console,” El-Hilali added. “The cloud console providing the capability of all the solutions is provided to the customer at no additional cost. The only thing they would have to pay for is the capacity.”
The target audience for this is both the existing Arcserve customer base, as well as new customers in the managed services market.
“This will compete very well with managed DRaaS [Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service] providers, and will expand our presence in both the midmarket and the lower enterprise,” El-Hilali said.
From a partner angle, the new offering is big news for managed service providers.
“Business Continuity Cloud gives them the ability to manage multiple points of access more cohesively,” El-Hilali said. “Their customers will be able to do their own management and look at their SLS, while the MSP sets up administrator and access rights. Its being one united solution also makes it much easier to manage. We think that while we have plenty of existing partners who will be excited by this, it will also bring us new partners who have been focused from the beginning on the cloud and cloud offerings.”
