The new Unitrends offering is designed to allow both MSP and traditional business customers to back up straight to the Unitrends cloud without needing to use a local appliance.
Mike Sanders, Unitrends’ General Manager
Backup provider Unitrends, a Kaseya company, has announced a new Unitrends Cloud Backup (UCB) offering. It is designed to allow customers to back up data to the Unitrends cloud that they are either storing on their own local backup, or on a Unitrends appliance.
“Unitrends Cloud Backup fills a gap that we have had in our portfolio,” said Mike Sanders, Unitrends’ General Manager. “We have not had a direct to cloud backup. In addition, while Spanning [another Kaseya company] does cloud to cloud backup for Office 365, we didn’t have a direct to cloud capability from workstations. This is something that customers have asked for consistently, and this completes our story.”
The target market for this is the significant amount of critical data that continues to be created and stored outside the cloud, notwithstanding the growth of cloud-hosted applications like Salesforce and Microsoft Office 365.
“Our appliances already create a backup into the cloud, so that secondary backup capability is not what this is for,” Sanders said. “That’s already there today. UCB is really to give customers an affordable way to back up workstations without having to use valuable space on their appliances. This is the first time we have allowed backup directly to our cloud without needing an appliance locally.”
That capability adds a couple of new use cases, Sanders indicated. One is workstation deployments where customers have seen a local deployment as overkill. Another is users who have not been Unitrends customers at all before.
‘We would expect a lot would use this where there are no appliances locally at all,” he said. “There is demand for that. There is a healthy percentage of people who aren’t customers at all today.”
Unitrends started out as an on-prem vendor, but following their acquisition by Kaseya have built up a base of business among MSPs as well.
“We expect that this will play well among both Unitrends MSPs and our traditional business,” Sanders said. “We are seeing demand on both sides of the market.”
Sanders acknowledged that much of the demand for this will be from very small customers, or small locations of larger ones, but said that while individual deployments would not make partners much money, in bulk, they would.
“Most of our partners have some sort of service organization today, and many of them see the potential in using this capability as part of a service,” he said. “If they have one client doing this, it’s not very exciting. But if they have a lot of them, then it is very exciting. Some partners will sell it to larger customers to support smaller remote or branch locations, and that is inherently a strong opportunity. That, and the aggregation of services using this technology will be the primary use cases, and we do expect to see some of both.”
