Axcient announced their extended offering for Azure at the IT Nation Connect Show in Orlando, where they saw significant interest from all types of MSPs, from mom and pops to larger ones.
Ben Nowacky, SVP of Product at Axcient
On Thursday, Axcient, which makes business availability software for MSPs, announced the release of x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud for Microsoft Azure, an expansion of their already existing support for Azure. It extends the Direct-to-Cloud support for Azure further, through the same product that supports on-prem as well.
“x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud has been able to back up to Azure since we launched it [in early 2021],” said Ben Nowacky, SVP of Product at Axcient. “What x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud for Microsoft Azure does is expand the recovery options. Until now, you have used our recovery centre to export an Azure virtual disk. With this, if Azure goes down, you will be able to fail over to our cloud, and fail back to Azure when it comes back up.”
x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud for Microsoft Azure fully virtualizes Azure backups, leveraging the automation of Axcient’s Virtual Office and customizable Runbooks. The solution unifies client protection across on-premises and Azure workloads, provides a flat per-device fee that includes unlimited storage and retention, and offers a third-party cloud where full Disaster Recovery [DR] testing and live VMs can be virtualized in minutes with near-instant RTO for DR.
“A lot of people do DR testing in Azure, but Azure doesn’t give you snapshot verification,” Nowacky said. “Now, if you back up back up to our cloud, our auto-verify capability will let you do your DR testing in an automated fashion.”
x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud for Microsoft Azure provides unified protection with a single platform for both on-premises and Azure workloads, including the same agent and deployment processes, to protect against ransomware, security breaches, accidental deletion, and cloud outages.
“This is a new capability within x360 Recover D2C, not a separate product,” Nowacky said. “We started with Azure as the first of these, and are now getting feedback from the community.”
Longer-term, it’s likely similar extensions will be put in place for both the AWS and GCP clouds as well, but for right now, partner demand was for Azure rather than the others.
“Today there isn’t demand for the others, but we know there will be at some point,” Nowacky indicated.
Axcient displayed x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud for Microsoft Azure at their booth at IT Nation Connect in Orlando, which began on Wednesday and concludes today. Nowacky said that MSP interest has been broad, which augurs well for increased adoption of Azure by their partners going forward. While the public cloud is attractive to many MSPs as a way of hosting their infrastructure in a way that reduces complexity and costs and complexity, most of Axcient’s MSPs are not yet using it today.
“Today, only about 15% of our MSPs are using Azure, but 60% of them estimate that they will be using it within the 18-24 month timeframe,” Nowacky indicated. “Interest at our booth here really did run the gamut, from very small MSPs to larger ones. Small mom and pops are particularly interested, because they want to use Azure to avoid having to manage scale-out themselves.”
