Backup and recovery provider Asigra Inc. announced the latest version of its cloud backup solution last week, including backup for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets and a consumer offering to help its partners increase their overall market share.
The company claims the mobile backup is an industry first. “We take pride in being the most nimble offering out there,” said Ashar Baig, the company’s senior director of product marketing. Asigra Cloud Backup v11 (version 11) supports devices that run on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems, but support for others will be announced later this year, said Baig.
Right now, anything an employee is creating on their tablets won’t be backed up until it’s synced with their PC, Baig said, but this offering allows them to have whatever they generate backed up immediately.
“We’re the arms dealer of cloud backup,” Baig said. Customers can download a free app through the Apple App Store, Android Market or Amazon Appstore and have their data backed up by the provider of their choice. “The number one goal of any service provider is to be profitable,” he said. “We make features available to them that will help them be profitable.”
But while some enterprises might be excited about the offering, many will likely still prefer remote data deletion on their company mobile devices, according to Derek Silva, an analyst with London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group.
“I see a bigger demand for a product like Balance from RIM,” Silva said. There’s still a desire among employees and companies to separate work and life, he said.
“Overall, I’m sure that existing clients and existing partners are welcoming this with open arms,” but the mobile backup solution probably won’t be a major revenue generator for partners, he added.
Instead, it’s more of a differentiator for partners looking for a more comprehensive solution to offer, Baig said. “We only sell to service providers. We have no channel conflict with them. Our goal is to keep increasing the number of service providers all over the world.”
Rachel Dines, an analyst with Forrester Research, agreed that many companies still do want security wipes, but backing up the data is also important to them. In the longer term, cloud backup for these kinds of devices will be in high demand and other companies are already working on similar solutions, according to Dines.
Asigra also announced DS-Consumer, a consumer cloud backup solution. It provides users with a local and off-site copy of the data and allows the end user to rollback to any point in time. Many consumer offerings currently available back up the data but when it needs to be recovered, it’s often corrupted or unusable in some way, Baig said. “It’s not about backup, it’s about recovery. Don’t think that you don’t have a choice.”
While he said Asigra is entering a pretty crowded market, Silva also pointed out the importance of consumerization. “The trend around consumerization of IT is real,” Silva said. “It’s not hype that vendors are putting out there.”
Follow Harmeet Singh on Twitter: @hsingh88.
