Acronis Moves Backup to the Cloud
Acronis has long been in the backup and recovery game, happily selling packages and downloads to businesses and consumers. But it has not been standing on the cloud sidelines, instead quietly adopting its on-premises software to run as a service.
The service is called Acronis Backup and Recovery Platform with Cloud Storage and is a literal adaptation of the server-bound version.
Acronis as an IT company has made the self-same move, explains Alex Sukennik, Acronis Senior Director of Global Cloud Services. "We knew we needed to rethink our backup strategy when our large and growing maintenance window would no longer allow us to maintain a full backup. Initially we decided we would prioritize the data that we needed to back up, and while this created smaller jobs, we still had the issue of taking those individual jobs and making them work within the maintenance window."
The cloud offered a solution. "With Acronis Backup and Recovery Platform with Cloud Storage, we were able to eliminate the additional maintenance resources of having to back up to external local media and then physically ship it off-site. Instead, we could use staging and send the data to a secure off-site data center location using a dual destination job for all our backups. We were able to finish the backups within far more reasonable maintenance windows, as we backed up locally fast, and then sent the backups offsite overnight using our Internet line in conjunction with our regular Internet pipe," says Sukennik.
The Acronis strategy is to have cloud and on-premises products work together. "All Acronis products have access to both local backups and the Acronis Cloud off-site destination for backup and storage. In fact, from one central console, we can manage both local and off-site backups for our entire global hybrid environment, including VMware, Microsoft and Linux servers," says Sukennik.
The cloud tools are well received, he argues: "Customers see the value because they have tangible results: smaller maintenance windows and new server resources freed back to the users. They like the fact that, with the Acronis platform, they can simply enable all the agents they want a la carte, giving them a customizable and comprehensive backup and recovery solution, with the ability to do destination backups both locally and to the cloud."
The cloud changes the way storage is done and alters its fundamental economics. "With a cloud based backup solution, it is no longer necessary to have a long, drawn out process for sending disks/tapes off-site. A backup should be a commodity, and an activity which does not require a highly skilled or paid resource. Using a dual destination backup eliminates the traditional process involved in sending data offsite, and provides off-site backup reporting for disaster recovery and data protection. This lowers the cost of doing a backup, as there is no more need to buy hardware and physically manage backups outside the company," says Sukennik.
Expect more cloud from Acronis. "We are trying to eliminate as much hardware management as possible. Doing backup jobs in the middle of the night or weekend to tapes/disk drives, and managing a vendor to send off-site, does not seem to provide more productivity and is definitely not cost effective," says Sukennik.
Read my Q&A with the company here.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/13/2012 at 12:47 PM