Asigra’s new SaaSBACKUP platform is designed to back up a virtually endless number of apps, with customer able to provide protection to the ones it wants, protection many still do not know is not provided by the software itself.
Data protection as-a-service provider Asigra has announced their entry into a new market for SaaS-based applications, where they back up many major apps like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Salesforce, as well as large numbers of smaller or more specialized ones. The objective of this new SaaSBACKUP platform is to provide support to basically the entire universe of SaaS applications.
“The next frontier for attacks is in the SaaS space,” said Eric Simmons, Asigra’s CEO. “Slack, GitHub and LastPass were recently attacked. It’s a pain point where the awareness of what needs to be done and what can be done to address the issue is just emerging.”
Simmons said that the average company uses 137 SaaS apps, with nine per individual user. Despite the industry’s efforts, he stressed that many customers have no idea about their responsibilities in protecting this data.
“People still aren’t aware that they can recover in a timely manner or at all,” he noted. “Under the AWS Shared Responsibility model, the end customer is responsible for user access and identity, and for data.” Because of this lack of awareness, Simmons said that 76% of responders had data loss through either accidental or malicious deletion.
Asigra SaaSBACKUP addresses this by providing protection for business users across all SaaS applications, including CRM, ERP, Content Management System Project Management, sales, marketing and eCommerce solutions.
“This is a new product with a completely different architecture, designed using the latest AWS infrastructure,” Simmons said. “Down the road, it will be combined into a single pane of glass with our backup, but right now it’s a separate product.”
The key to Asigra SaaSBACKUP’s capabilities is its strong integration capability.
Eric Simmons, CEO at Asigra
“We have built SaaS connectors with a fixed API set and workflow, rather than simply a module in a cloud development environment,” Simmons indicated. “We have also built an SDK to allow us to rapidly add SaaS applications – or have partners leverage the framework that we have created to create them themselves. This will back up all SaaS applications in a single platform. This can be a value-add to the end customer and a revenue stream for the MSP. Customers might want to back up 2, 3 or 20 apps.”
Simmons indicated that the platform was built from the ground up for MSPs, with simple pricing where payment is per user per app.
“We will also build a marketplace to help partners monetize the platform,” he said. “The marketplace itself is expected to be rolled out in 2024, but the ability for partners to build their own solutions will be well in advance of that.”
Asigra is not the first company to come up with this type of product. Backup vendor HYCU came up with their own version a month ago. Given the relative ease of articulating the value of this type of solution to customers, it is also likely that other companies will enter the market in the short to mid-term. Simmons said that he thinks Asigra will have some competitive advantages over other players in this space, however.
“Asigra has been placing a strong emphasis on security in recent years, and this platform provides an extra layer of security,” he stated.” “We complement this with two other security products that do bidirectional malware scanning. Then, in September 2022 we implemented CDR tech [Content Disarm and Reconstruction with our Tigris software. It provides a completely different bidirectional scan, which breaks up components of a file into its smallest pieces and scans by line, to provide another layer of protection.”
Simmons indicated that several partnerships also strengthen this offering.
“To streamline things for partners, we are working with Augmentt,” which provides cloud management software. “We also work with Wasabi and Backblaze for almost instant backup and storage. We don’t require people to use our own storage.”
The Beta program for the software will commence in May, 2023, with registration at http://www.asigra.com/SaaSBACKUP. It will be released to select customers in Q3 and to GA in Q4.
