19 Software Solutions For Cloud-Based Data Protection

Cloud A Critical Component To Data Protection

A good data protection solution ensures that gets one or more copies of a business' precious data is stored off-premise in case of a disaster in the data center. This traditionally was done with tape or specialized appliances that protected the data but added to IT administrators' management load.

The cloud has provided the new alternative. Data protection applications now routinely include the cloud -- either a public cloud, a private cloud, or some hybrid combination -- as a backup target. This not only gets a copy or two or three to an off-premise location, but also makes it possible to access the data and even applications remotely over the Internet in case a disaster makes the local data center unavailable for a length of time.

A wide range of vendors, from legacy companies with decades of experience to nimble startups, have developed a variety of technologies for spanning data protection from the data center to the cloud. Here’s a look at 19 of those solutions.

For more on the cloud market, check out CRN's Cloud Storage Week project.

Acronis Backup Cloud

The Acronis Backup Cloud from Schaffhausen, Switzerland-based Acronis leverages the company's Acronis AnyData Engine to back up data from any source; store data locally, in a private cloud, in a third-party cloud, or in the Acronis Cloud; and recover to any destination and system.

The service supports up to three ’brandable’ channel levels with unlimited customers on every channel. It also fully automates the deployment and management of product features, and contains usage tracking and reports on all channel levels. Acronis Backup Cloud can be white-labeled or co-branded into a partner's existing SaaS offerings, and offers a scalable, per-use business model with zero entry costs. Customers can back up and recover data, files or an entire system; recover a system to bare metal; and encrypt data.

Arcserve Cloud

The Arcserve Cloud from Minneapolis-based Arcserve provides offsite backup, archiving, and disaster recovery, either stand-alone or integrated with the Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) appliance.

The Arcserve Cloud includes disaster recovery as a service, which allows valuable business data to be stored off-site without dedicated hardware, racking, power, and IT resources. If needed, users can spin up a virtual machine in the Arcserve Cloud for fast failover and failback. Also included is off-site data retention for long-term data storage to meet compliance requirements, and disaster recovery testing, which is an easy way to test application failover at any time without expensive infrastructure.

Asigra Cloud Backup V13

Asigra Cloud Backup v13 is Toronto-based Asigra's platform- and device-agnostic software solution that partners can deploy as a public, private or hybrid cloud. The solution, delivered as a service by IT service providers or as software for private cloud use, targets SMBs and enterprises looking to simplify their data protection capabilities. It includes NIST FIPS 140-2 certification for compliance purposes.

Highlights of version 13, introduced in February, include endpoint data loss prevention, open infrastructure support for FreeBSD on ZFS and CentOS, integration with Linear Tape File System (LTFS) for low-cost long-term retention of backup data, and disaster-recovery-as-a-service enablement featuring VMware vSphere replication.

Barracuda Backup Vx

Barracuda Backup Virtual Appliance (Vx) is a software solution from Campbell, Calif.-based Barracuda Networks that can be deployed in virtualized environments to leverage existing compute and storage infrastructures while also optimizing local storage and bandwidth requirements with deduplication and compression.

The scalable Barracuda Backup Vx is licensed as a per-TB capacity subscription allowing customers to pay only for what they back up. Replication is built into each Barracuda Backup Vx subscription, and lets customers choose whether to replicate to the Barracuda Cloud or to a virtual receiver for disaster recovery. Replication to the Barracuda Cloud includes extended retention through off-site vaulting.

Carbonite Server Advanced

Boston-based Carbonite targets SMBs with fewer than 500 employees with its Carbonite Server Advanced, a software-only solution that provides image backup that enables bare metal recovery even to dissimilar hardware, as well as granular database backup for live applications. Supported databases include SQL, MySQL, Exchange, Office 365 Exchange Online, SharePoint, Hyper-V virtual machines (at the hypervisor level), and Oracle.

The solution is cloud-based, but offers functionality to save backups to local direct-attached and networked storage as well. Advanced customization options allow users to optimize the solution for their environment, including retention policies, bandwidth throttling, backup scheduling, data compression, and the ability to choose full, differential, or incremental backups.

CloudBerry Managed Backup

CloudBerry Managed Backup from Newport Beach, Calif.-based CloudBerry Lab enables MSPs, solution providers or IT services companies to provide cloud backup services to clients using one of more than a dozen public storage clouds, including Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier and Microsoft Azure. Management controls are simple and comprehensive, enabling MSPs to remotely assist customers during setup, provide ongoing support, and give MSPs’ customers access to their backups for self-service. The design is fully customizable for white-labeling, and integrates with PSA and RMM systems such as ConnectWise and Autotask.

CloudVelox Pilot Light DR

The CloudVelox Pilot Light disaster recovery solution from Santa Clara, Calif.-based CloudVelox features hybrid cloud automation to easily discover, provision and deploy to the cloud. The customer’s application, stack, configurations, kernels and data, including networking and security services, are all replicated into the cloud. The company uses laaS storage volumes in AWS as a secondary data center that can be easily brought into production for disaster recovery or testing. CloudVelox promises to help customers reduce disaster recovery costs, increase agility, and extend their data protection.

CTERA Enterprise Data Services Platform 5.0

The CTERA Enterprise Data Services Platform 5.0 provides IT organizations with a single solution to help ensure complete privacy, governance and security of data. New York-based CTERA's solution allows distributed enterprises and service providers to address online and offline file storage as well as file sharing. In addition, the platform provides on-premise end-to-end security that incorporates data protection from a secure and centrally managed solution that includes built-in data-at-rest encryption, data-in-transit encryption, Active Directory or LDAP user authentication with single sign-on, and data integrity verification. It can be deployed entirely on the cloud infrastructure of choice.

Dell Data Protection | Rapid Recovery

Round Rock, Texas-based Dell last month used its Dell World 2015 conference to introduce Dell Data Protection | Rapid Recovery. This new application integrates technology from Dell's data protection technology, including AppAssure and vRanger, into a single offering aimed at unifying backup and recovery across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Rapid Recovery offers simple bare metal restore from cloud-based archives and supports all leading cloud providers, including Amazon, Microsoft Azure, RackSpace and OpenStack. Additional features include Rapid Snap for Applications technology that can capture an entire application and its relevant state for nearly instantaneous application and system recovery; a new Rapid Snap for Virtual capability for scalable protection of growing VMware environments without agents; and Rapid Recovery Repository (R3) with encryption and client-side deduplication.

eFolder BDR for Replibit

eFolder BDR for Replibit is Atlanta-based eFolder's image-based backup and disaster recovery service that captures server backups every few minutes and efficiently replicates those images to the eFolder Cloud for fast local or off-site recovery in the event of a server failure or sitewide disaster.

eFolder BDR for Replibit combines Replibit’s image-based backup software and eFolder’s cloud storage and recovery capabilities. It features chain-free technology to reduce the capacity requirements, costs and risks of dependent backup chains. It also offers deep data verification and file system integrity checking of every snapshot and automated screenshot verifications of backups. eFolder BDR for Replibit includes 2 TB of cloud storage per protected server in the eFolder cloud.

HPE Data Protector

The latest version of the HPE Data Protector software from Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett Packard Enterprise provides enterprise and midmarket customers a comprehensive solution with advanced backup and recovery for mission-critical applications along with integration with leading virtualization platforms and storage infrastructures.

Long-term retention and information management can be done across enterprise tape libraries, disk storage arrays, HPE StoreOnce deduplication appliances and object-based cloud storage. HPE Data Protector also provides investment protection for backup, enabling enterprise on-premise backup with access to cloud and integration with object-based cloud storage, such as OpenStack deployments and Amazon cloud services.

Open-E Cloud Data Protection Service by MSP

Cloud Data Protection Service by MSP from Marietta, Ga.-based Open-E lets small businesses without dedicated IT staff easily copy data to private clouds and retrieve it when required. The service is deployed on clustered servers powered by Open-E DSS V7. Servers installed on customers’ premises transmit data to the MSP server on a regular basis where it is continuously saved and backed up. Customers can configure more local backups for additional security and convenience.

There are several recovery options. If local backups have been configured then an MSP technician can assist in recovering files remotely. If needed, the MSP technician can restore lost files over the Internet or transport the data physically on a disk or on a replacement server to the customer’s location.

Quorum onQ 3.9 DRaaS

San Jose, Calif.-based Quorum's onQ DRaaS hybrid cloud solution combines familiar local backup and recovery tools with the reliability and cost efficiency of cloud-based disaster recovery. Using onQ DRaaS, customers can recover files, Windows Shares, applications, and servers typically within one to five minutes.

Instant recoveries are possible because onQ DRaaS creates virtual machine clones of customers’ protected servers in advance of a failure, and refreshes them with every incremental data backup. Automated, nonintrusive disaster recovery testing, as often as once per day, ensures the clones will be ready to run if failover is initiated. onQ DRaaS includes a sandbox for testing patches as well as new applications and configurations prior to pushing them into production. Data can be archived for years for purposes such as HIPAA compliance.

Unitrends Enterprise Backup 9

Unitrends Enterprise Backup (UEB) 9 from Burlington, Mass.-based Unitrends is an all-in-one backup and recovery software solution offering data protection and continuity for physical and virtual infrastructures for businesses with 10 to 10,000 employees. Tightly integrated cloud support provides cloud storage and disaster recovery services on the Unitrends Cloud or on third-party clouds including Google, Rackspace and AWS.

UEB includes a hybrid data reduction technology that combines global byte-level deduplication or inline deduplication with source-side deduplication to reduce storage capacity requirements by up to 95 percent. UEB also delivers recovery assurance for physical Windows backups that lets IT administrators validate the recovery of multi-tiered applications across virtual and physical environments.

Veeam Availability Suite v8, with Veeam Cloud Connect

Veeam Availability Suite v8 with Veeam Cloud Connect gives service providers a simple platform that enables them to leverage their own resources or a public cloud to store and manage backups for the Baar, Switzerland-based company's 157,000-plus global customers. End users can recover individual items directly from the cloud without having to download the entire backup file. Later this year, Veeam plans to release Veeam Availability Suite v9, which will include Veeam Cloud Connect Replication, giving service providers a platform for offering disaster recovery as a service.

Veritas NetBackup 7.7

NetBackup 7.7, the latest iteration of Mountain View, Calif.-based Veritas' enterprise-grade backup solution, this summer shipped with new functionality and increased performance to support large dynamic enterprise environments. Among its new capabilities is improved utilization of cloud storage services to expand the effectiveness of backup and recovery operations.

This latest release also adds support for Amazon Web Services, Google, Hitachi Data Systems, Verizon,and Cloudian, and introduces integration with VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes, Microsoft Hyper-V, NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP, and Microsoft SQL Server.

Zadara Storage Virtual Private Storage Array

The Zadara Storage Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) from Irvine, Calif.-based Zadara Storage is a software-defined storage solution in which customers pay based on actual usage. A pure opex solution with no capital costs, it is a true as-a-service solution that includes the storage management software, maintenance, and proactive support whether the data is stored in the cloud or on-premise.

A VPSA provides enterprise-class storage functionality including multiprotocol support, dual high-availability controllers, SSD cache, and such advanced management features as thin provisioning, snapshots, cloning and remote replication. It’s used by both SMBs and Fortune 100 enterprises. VPSAs can be configured combining a variety of engines, SSDs, and hard drives to meet cost, performance and capacity requirements, with the subscription cost changing automatically as the configuration changes.

Zerto Virtual Replication 4.0

Zerto Virtual Replication 4.0 enterprise-class business continuity and disaster recovery software from Boston-based Zerto protects, replicates and migrates data between VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors as well as across private, hybrid and public cloud environments including Amazon Web Services. With ZVR 4.0, channel partners and cloud service providers can build disaster recovery as a service as part of their IaaS offerings.

Zerto Virtual Replication 4.0 future-proofs data center IT strategies by ensuring customers are not locked into a specific hypervisor or storage vendor for business continuity and disaster recovery.

Zetta DataProtect 4.7

Zetta DataProtect 4.7 from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Zetta.net is a direct-to-cloud backup and disaster recovery solution for enterprises and managed service providers. It is a SaaS-based solution that is WAN-optimized to back up and recover up to 5 TB in 12 hours over the Internet with no appliance required.

The software is HIPAA-compliant, and features 99.99996 percent backup reliability and 100 percent recovery reliability. It offers SSL encryption of data in flight and AES encryption of data at rest, along with user and group level access control, two-factor authentication, and secure online storage in SSAE-16 audited data centers. Deployments can be managed through a single web-based console for an unlimited number of servers and endpoints.