The 10 Coolest SMB Cloud Data Protection Offerings In 2018 (So Far)

Cloud Data Protection With An SMB Twist

Protecting data is every bit as important for a small business as it is an enterprise. Maybe even more important, given that SMBs are less likely than larger companies to have dedicated IT resources making sure their data is backed up and their businesses are ready to recover in case of a disaster.

This idea has not gone unnoticed by cloud storage vendors. While some of those vendors started at the consumer backup level and moved up the chain to protect business data, others started protecting enterprise-level data and expanded into a wider SMB market. And all have offerings that help ensure the data is protected, can be restored, and is available to make sure a disaster doesn't really become a disaster.

CRN is presenting the latest offerings from 10 vendors that in the first half of 2018 represent how far advanced the data protection market for SMBs has changed.

Acronis Partners With Google Cloud

Acronis in March unveiled a strategic partnership with Google Cloud under which the company is integrating its backup solutions with Google Cloud Platform and significantly increase the number of cloud regions where Acronis’ partners and customers can store their data. The integration includes Acronis' backup, disaster recovery, and file sync and share offerings, making it easier for the company's channel partners to bring data protection services to customers using the Google Cloud Platform. Acronis, Burlington, Mass., said Google is also using the integration as a way to better improve its penetration into the midmarket channel.

Arcserve Near-Zero Recovery Point Disaster Recovery

Arcserve in January enhanced its Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct direct-to-cloud Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service and Backup-as-a-Service offerings with what it called the first offering to cost-effectively deliver near-zero cloud recovery points with consumer-grade simplicity. The Minneapolis-based company said the offering offers both RTO (recovery time objectives) and RPO (recovery point objectives) measured in minutes, filling a significant gap in midsize business requirements for recovering data, especially for customers with bandwidth restraints, large data sets, or limited resources for secure off-site backup and disaster recovery.

Backblaze B2 Fireball

Backblaze in March brought its B2 Fireball device out of public beta. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company's B2 Fireball is a rapid data ingest device on which business customers can copy up to 70 TB of data and then send to the cloud storage provider as a way to quickly migrate data to its B2 cloud storage offering.

The B2 Fireball is a NAS device. A business requiring migration can order the device, which is shipped from a Backblaze data center, and then transfer data to the device over its own internal network, and then send it back to the Backblaze data center where the data is then uploaded. Data remains encrypted throughout the process. Backblaze said a business uploading 50 TB of data directly to the cloud can take up to 50 days, while using the B2 Fireball accomplishes the task in a few days.

BackupAssist 10

BackupAssist, part of Australia-based Cortex I.T. Labs, has in the past couple of months updated its BackupAssist 10 data protection software with several key capabilities. New to BackupAssist 10 is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliance with new explicit opt-in for diagnostic submission when contacting support, requirement of a password before displaying restored data, and improved password storage. The company also introduced a new capability, WebDAV, which lets customers back up data to their own private cloud destination. WebDAV works with any cloud provider that supports the capability. WebDAV also allows cloud seeding via a removable drive.

Carbonite Expands With Mozy

Boston-based Carbonite in February expanded its SMB data protection capabilities with its $146 million acquisition of rival Mozy from Dell Technologies. Both Mozy and Carbonite started as consumer-focused cloud-based storage companies, but have since evolved to where the business segments and channel partnerships form the bulk of their businesses.

The acquisition of Mozy brought Carbonite about 35,000 business customers and over 2,000 channel partners. It also brought Carbonite, which had backup, disaster recovery, high availability, mail archiving, and workload migration capabilities, a solid SMB customer base to which it can take its wider portfolio.

CloudBerry Backup 5.9

CloudBerry Backup, from New York-based CloudBerry Lab, in June went through a major update that includes a new option to save deleted file information in the cloud. With the option turned on, deleted files are saved in the cloud separately from other data so that data restores do not also bring back those deleted files.

CloudBerry Backup 5.9 also includes Backup Storage Capacity Report, which lets customers easily analyze the contents of their backup storage by showing which backup folders occupy the most space as a way to control cloud costs. Also new is file-level and disk-level backups for VMware ESXi-based virtual machines, which offer more flexibility than previous versions that only did backups at the virtual machine level.

FileShadow File Archiving Protection Service On IBM Cloud

FileShadow, a Provo, Utah-based developer of a service that provides a single location for access to all files stored on multiple cloud storage vendors, in April came out of stealth mode at the IBM Think conference with the unveiling of its service being hosted on the IBM Cloud. The new FileShadow Cloud File Assurance Service provides 11 nines, or 99.999999999 percent, reliability to ensure files stored with such cloud providers as Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, and Adobe Creative Cloud can be instantly found regardless of location and available as needed. However, it does not replace those vendors as destinations for cloud storage.

R1Soft Archive

R1Soft, the Houston-based developer of the R1Soft Server Backup Manager (SBM) product line, in April introduced its new R1Soft Archive, which the company said provides a long-term, low-cost backup and archival option with secure, off-site storage for less-time-critical data. R1Soft Archive takes advantage of public cloud offerings including Amazon Glacier and Amazon S3 to provide a scalable and cost-effective data storage option that integrates with R1Soft SBM to provide off-site redundancy and manage recovery point snapshots. Existing R1Soft SBM customers can add Archive to any SBM license or license pool.

Unitrends VM Backup Essentials

Unitrends, a Burlington, Mass.-based developer of all-in-one backup and continuity offerings, in April released VM Backup Essentials, or vBE, which targets VMware administrators looking to converge virtual backup software, ransomware detection, and fully integrated cloud storage options into a single offering. Priced at $105 per socket, per year, Unitrends vBE helps businesses protect highly virtualized data centers against potential downtime threats including ransomware.

Wasabi Ball Data Transfer Appliance

Cloud data protection technology developer Wasabi in May introduced the Wasabi Ball transfer appliance. The Wasabi Ball is a portable plug-and-play data device that makes it easier for businesses to transfer large-scale data sets to and from Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. The Boston-based company said this helps cut network costs and the long transfer times that often come with moving large data amounts over the internet.

The Wasabi Ball is based on the ReadyNAS RN628X NAS appliance from San Jose, Calif.-based Netgear. Customers can transport up to 87 TB of data per appliance, while larger data sets can be done using multiple appliances in parallel. The appliance automatically encrypts the stored data with AES 256-bit volume-based encryption.