Clumio’s new service is specifically focused on providing ransomware protection, making it ideal for customers with another vendor solution for their primary backup needs, who are looking for a separate service to provide protection that will be much harder to attack and corrupt.

Enterprise backup-as-a-service provider Clumio has launched Clumio RansomProtect, an air-gapped service designed to provide the protection provides in Clumio’s core backup service to customers who already have a substantial investment in another vendor’s offerings, but who want the additional protection against ransomware.

“This is aimed at customers who are already using another backup solution, who haven’t depreciated it, but who want to leverage a separate service in the cloud to provide added protection,” said Chadd Kenney, Clumio’s vice president and chief technologist. “Customers don’t want to buy more of what they have, so it’s easier for them to buy this as a focused service.”

Customers today are well aware of the ransomware issue. They also are aware that relying on the core backup solution for ransomware protection has some risk because the bad actors target these specifically to corrupt the backups.

“Many backup solutions have been getting compromised as part of attack because they were on a customer’s network or cloud account,” Kenney indicated. “It has to be a separate service to really be safe. That’s what we are offering to customers.”

Clumio RansomProtect is aimed at prospects who want this additional protection on top of the competition backup infrastructure they already have in place.

“Many customers know they need an air-gapped solution, but they also are early in the depreciation cycle on their existing backup product, so they are looking to augment this existing solution, and not replace it,” Kenney indicated. “This lets them continue their investment, and get themselves protected fast.”

As a service, it also means no management by the customer is needed.

“If you buy another solution, you have to manage it yourself,” Kennedy said. “We take that completely off the table.  It’s outside the customers’ security sphere, so they don’t have to manage the security themselves.” Because it’s a service, it can also easily be set up in 15 minutes, with no additional hardware or software required.

“Since we are a platform in the public cloud, data can come from anywhere and go to anywhere,” he added. “If you are attacked on-prem, with this you could restore to a Vmware cloud running on AWS. You don’t have to have an appliance, because we don’t have an appliance.”

Clumio RansomProtect is specifically designed for short-term storage.

“Our regular offering, which provides a full backup solution, is designed for longer  term protection of between one and seven years,” Kenney noted. Ransomware protection, on the other hand, is very short term, in the 30-day range. So the customer uses us for that and uses their existing backup for long term retention.”

Clumio RansomProtect sells for about 50% less than a full product – upwards of 60% if it is in the public cloud.

“That doesn’t include management, just the acquisition costs,” Kennedy noted.

For Clumio’s channel partners, Kenney stressed that this offering can create new opportunities, even if they sold the customer a backup solution from another vendor.

“It will help them grow quite a bit of pipeline, while helping customers deal with their ransomware problem,” he said. Ideally, some of these opportunities will lead to sales of the full Clumio service once the legacy backup product is ready for replacement.

Clumio has had a channel-first strategy from the beginning, and has about 75 partners today, most of them in North American, including Canada, where they opened up earlier this year.

“Those 75 partners include a lot of big national ones like SHI, Softchoice, Presidio and Logicalis,” Kenney noted.