Background Backup, a startup borne out of a Canadian MSP, is set to launch its first data backup and restore managed service, along with a channel program to boot.

The Ottawa-based company, spun out of IronGate Server Management & Consulting, has been developing the product for about two years.

The service, which sits on top of a legacy backup software solution or on top of its own, aims to provide increased protection for MSPs and their customers by analyzing backed up data, said Sean Costello, CEO of Background Backup.

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In essence, the service watches for trends in backed up data and is developed to sense any changes to the amount and kind of data normally backed up, and then it alerts the MSP regarding any changes. For example, if the person normally responsible for backing up QuickBooks data is on vacation and his or her temporary replacement does not do a backup, Background Backup will alert the MSP that part of its normal routine was not followed, Costello said.

"People generally don't spend time looking at the backup, and when they do, they're satisfied that their backup software says 100 percent that that's correct," Costello said. "From a forensics aspect, we don't just trust that the backup software backed up seven minutes ago. We push forward, gather statistics hourly on the state of the backup job and resultant archives. If someone didn't know to save that QuickBooks file into a folder, the backup software is not a lie when it's telling you it's 100 percent because it didn't know it was supposed to be in there."

That level of analysis can scale quickly to ensure that everything that is supposed to be backed up actually is, Costello said. "We can establish trends and behaviors of what your data normally looks like and [whether it deviates] from that norm."

The idea for Background Backup came after 20 years in the service provider channel, Costello said. He realized that businesses were overly reliant on a software product telling them a backup was successful. "Or they were optimistic of the intentions of a receptionist, or controller really, whose third priority in their work life was to preserve the integrity of their data," he said. "It's too easy for people to mean to backup but never exercise it. To have an untenable position in which companies face losses is predictably based on their behavior and the realities of computing.”

The cost of the managed service to service providers is $7.50 per machine per month, Costello said, which includes licensing, training and unlimited support.

In addition, MSPs can leverage Background Backup's cloud storage solution starting at 50 cents per gigabyte per month, which discounts down to 35 cents per gigabyte after 500 GB, Costello said.

PUBLISHED OCT. 23, 2012