A business cloud storage provider has unveiled the IT industry's biggest offer of free cloud backups to date: 100 GB to business users for as long as they need it.

Under the offer, which San Francisco-based EVault unveiled Friday via a blog post, businesses new to EVault that sign up with the company before Dec. 31 will receive 100 GB of free cloud backup that can be used to protect the files and folders for a single Windows-based server.

Those customers can retain up to three daily backups using the free service.

[Related: Free Cloud Storage: Customers Get What They Pay For]

The offer is a good chance for customers to try the service and for EVault channel partners to find new opportunities, said Karen Jaworski, senior director of product marketing for the company.

Except for a few legacy direct customers, EVault does all its business through channel partners, Jaworski said.

"With the free cloud backup service, we wanted to make it easy for our partners to demonstrate how easy backup to the cloud is," she said. "There's been a tipping point to the cloud as seen by the pricing wars between Amazon and Google this week. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when."

Customers can sign up for the free cloud backup service directly with EVault, Jaworski said.

"We give them the full service experience," she said. "When they sign up, one of our fulfillment engineers will call them up and get them started. We're aware of our partner relationships, so as customers' needs grow and they want to sign up for more services, we bring in the partner. This is a very easy way for people to get acquainted with the service."

The EVault offer of free backup is unique in an industry where offers of free cloud storage or free cloud backups are quite common.

Most cloud storage providers offer between 2 GB and 10 GB of capacity free. Both Amazon and Google, as well as a host of other cloud storage providers, offer 5 GB free. The offers are primarily targeted at consumer customers.

NEXT: EVault's Free Cloud Backup Differentiators

To date, one of the largest offers of free cloud storage comes from MediaFire, a Shenandoah, Texas-based provider of cloud storage. MediaFire offers up to 50 GB of free cloud storage, although data retention is limited and the free users are subjected to being bombarded by advertisers.

Before its new 100-GB free cloud backup offer, EVault partners had the ability to offer licenses or capacity to customers for demonstration purposes, EVault's Jaworski said.

She admitted that it would be possible for a small business to run its backup infrastructure using the free service. "But only if it were a super-small shop," she said. "We're ready to help them as they grow up."

For the typical small business, EVault charges about 75 cents to 85 cents per GB of backup capacity per month. That includes a number of features not available with the free offer, including bare metal recovery, heterogeneous storage, a full year of backup retention, and the backing up of as many servers as a customer requires, she said.

PUBLISHED NOV. 30, 2012