The private cloud capability is the latest enhancement to Axcient’s new flagship solution, with more major adds set to be rolled out relatively soon.
Ben Nowacky, Senior Vice President of Product at Axcient
Last fall, Axcient unveiled their next-generation flagship offering, Axcient D2C, a Direct-to-Cloud solution designed to eliminate the need for a backup appliance while providing MSPs with image-based backup to the Axcient cloud for end-user desktops, laptops, client servers and workstations. Some situations warrant the data remaining on the customers’ sites however. So for those use cases, today Axcient is introducing what they are terming their Bring Your Own [BYO] data centre, which enables private cloud deployment within the Axcient D2C solution.
“When we think about private cloud, we think of MSPs who are running their own data centre, and who have high compliance requirements,” said Ben Nowacky, Senior Vice President of Product at Axcient. “It’s for those MSPs with customers in areas – defence, banking or others with compliance. Our Replibit and x360Recover solutions were always about backing up to our cloud or your cloud, while still eliminating the on-prem appliance. With this, we are providing the same flexibility to do that within Axcient D2C. It’s simple to deploy and simple to manage and you can still deploy it to our data centre if you choose to, but you can now also deploy it to your data centre.”
While the private cloud capability is just being announced now, it was part of the design from the outset.
“It was planned from the start,” Nowacky said. “Because of the MSPs in the x360Recover program, we wanted to continue this forward through Axcient D2C. Private cloud was one of the pieces we had to fulfil to be a full business continuity cloud.”
Compliance situations are the most compelling use case for this, but not the only one.
“There are MSPs who run their own data centres, and who don’t want to make investments in cloud storage anywhere,” Nowacky said. “It’s definitely not a common model today, but there are some MSPs who due to size and scale find that leveraging cloud vendors is cost prohibitive. Some of these are situations where they acquire another MSP, and the MSP has a data centre and contracts.”
Axcient made a design decision with Axcient D2C to get the core product out into the market before the end of 2020, and then fill in other things later, with the private cloud capability being one of these.
“We went into this launch last year with a minimum viable product, the smallest form factor to get out in 2020, knowing we had more core functionality, and bells and whistles to add,” said Adam Preeo, Director of Product Management at Axcient. “Every month, we add more partner value and new features. From a macro level, all of that has been validated.”
Local cache is the next new feature coming.
“It’s a pretty big feature,” Preeo said. “Some MSPs want to use a $50 USB dumb storage drive to recover a file if they don’t want to download from cloud. That’s our next big storage milestone, later in Q1 or Q2.”
The core message of Axcient D2C isn’t changed at all by the addition of private cloud capability, Nowacky stressed.
“We have codified on a message, and are trying to help MSPs simplify things,” he said. “With this crazy year in 2020, and 2021 being very uncertain, we want to eliminate the complexities of backup, with simple deployment and flexibility, simple pricing, and simple management, with one click.”
Nowacky said that just about everyone in backup preaches the simplicity message, but most aren’t able to practice what they preach.
“Everyone talks simplicity, but few in the backup space live it,” he commented. “It’s easy to say, its really hard to do. Things are still too complicated. MSPs still spend a lot of time managing backups and deploying appliances. That’s not the way it should be. It should be plug and play, set it and forget it, where you don’t have to think about the system once it’s deployed.”
