Datto has sold its on-prem SIRIS BCDR solution for years, but their new solution for Azure gives them their first such solution on a public cloud, along with measures to protect customers from public cloud pitfalls like egress charges and data cost fluctuations.

Today, Datto is announcing the commercial availability of Datto Continuity for Microsoft Azure, a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery [BCDR] solution based in the Azure cloud, which leverages the Datto Cloud for failover capability.

Datto has been covering the BCDR market with their SIRIS solution for many years, but the use case for Datto Continuity for Microsoft Azure is very different, and opens both new opportunities for existing Datto partners, and new opportunities with Datto for Azure-focused MSPs who have not been working with the company.

“The use case for SIRIS is servers running on-prem, with the protection being based locally, with redundancy in the Datto Cloud,” said Radhesh Menon, Chief Product Officer at Datto.

“The context of this new offering is the conflation of security with the cloud,” Menon said. “We are seeing a growing adoption of Azure, particularly in IaaS [Infrastructure as-a-Service] where the servers in the closet are being migrated over to the Azure cloud. 51% of our partners told us that they preferred Azure as their public cloud, and that it is the one that their customers will migrate to.” Public cloud services as a whole have been forecast by Gartner to grow 23.1% in 2021 to total $332.3 billion, up from $270 billion in 2020, providing a key growth area for MSPs.

“We need to extend the same experience to the public cloud, so we have architected Datto Continuity for Microsoft Azure from the ground up” Menon said. “Partners can use same familiar user interface. The exciting thing about the new architecture is it leverages the Datto Cloud, so if there is a failure on Azure, you can back up to the Datto Cloud.”

Menon stressed that Datto Continuity for Microsoft Azure is designed with a business model that mitigates some of the traditional issues involved in the use of the public cloud.

“In the public cloud, the monthly spend is not predictable and data has egress costs,” he said. “We have extended our same monthly subscription model onto protected workloads in Azure, in which we abstract egress charges and data rates. For Datto partners, it’s what they are used to.”

Datto expects to see an influx of new MSP partners, who are tightly connected to the Azure platform, but who have not been working with Datto before. They do, not expect to see a rapid migration from Datto SIRIS deployments to the cloud offering, however.

“MSPs understand motivators behind migration, and that the act of moving a workload from on-prem to cloud isn’t taken lightly,” Menon said. “This will help them standardize on tools and cloud but wont materially change the pace at which migrations happen. This will impact new deployments however, because the amount of effort to get up and running in public cloud compared to on-prem is night and day.”

Menon also said the new offering will present existing Datto partners with additional opportunities.

“It means they can expand what they offer into their client base and be a partner in cloud migration from an IaaS perspective,” he said. “It helps them build a predictable margin profile, and it is a truly differentiated technical offering. We want MSPs to give it a twirl and give us feedback.”

Canada is part of Datto Continuity for Microsoft Azure’s first wave of availability, which includes the United States, the U.K., Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. It is available now through an Early Access Program that includes introductory pricing until December. Global availability with additional integrations and feature enhancements is expected by the end of 2021.

Menon said that the focus is on making the Azure cloud offering a success, and that there are no immediate plans to launch versions for the other public clouds, at this point.

“Our job now is to begin to drive adoption of this in the market,” he said. “We will keep our ears to the ground for other opportunities, but the truth is that we have lots to do now with the hand that we have got.”