The 10 New Coolest Data Protection/Management Software Applications Of 2020 (So Far)

Businesses large and have one thing in common: They must make sure their data is protected and available. These 10 applications show how it can be done.

Taking Care Of Business Data

Data, whether it’s internal to the owner or external to customers and suppliers, is the lifeblood of business. As such, protecting that data, whether it‘s on-premises or in the cloud, requires technology that can back up the data, restore it, archive it, protect it against both willful attacks or accidents, and ensure anything done with or to the data is in compliance with a business’ regulatory requirements. And this has to be done whether that data is on-premises, in a cloud, or shuffling between the two.

Given those constraints, data protection is serious business for companies large and small. Fortunately, there are a lot of vendors providing technology to protect and manage data based on a business‘ own requirements. CRN rounds up the latest data protection technologies introduced in the first half of 2020.

Acronis Cyber Protect

​ Schaffhausen, Switzerland-based Acronis in May unveiled the availability of Acronis Cyber Protect, new cyberprotection software that integrates backup, disaster recovery, next-generation anti-malware, cybersecurity and endpoint management tools into a single service. It is aimed in large part at MSPs looking to make security a focal point of their portfolio and help meet customer expectations for data, applications, and systems security and protection.

Acronis said its Acronis Cyber Protect helps MSPs proactively avoid cyberattacks, minimize downtime, decrease recovery times and automate client configurations. It features one unified licensing model, one agent and back end, one management console, one user interface, and high integration between such services as sharing data and automating actions.

Asigra Unlimited Use Subscription License

Toronto-based Asigra in January unveiled an unlimited use subscription license for its Asigra Cloud Backup data protection software that changes how it charges MSPs, with an aim to help them better forecast backup software licensing costs while supporting customers with mixed environments. With the new model, pricing for MSPs is based on usage from the previous year plus a jointly agreed upon growth commitment. Once agreed, Asigra said the licensing costs will not increase regardless of how much usage based on capacity or number of virtual machines, physical machines, sockets or users rises during the term of the contract, which helps reduce the potential for license over-subscription.

Asigra Cloud Backup gives MSPs the ability to help customers back up and recover data from endpoint devices on the LAN as well as in SaaS, PaaS and IaaS environments, and provides bidirectional cybersecurity protection on backup and restore for data from Microsoft 365, G Suite and Salesforce.com, as well as data in Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure public, private and hybrid clouds.

Axcient

Axcient in June debuted its unified x360Recover platform which brings together the Boston-based company‘s Replibit, BRC and Fusion backup services into a single user experience. The x360Recover offering is the latest evolution of Axcient’s x360 converged backup platform, which was launched late last year and reduced the number of Axcient SKUs to 11, down from more than 1,000 previously.

x360Recover, which brings Axcient to just seven SKUs, unifies several key capabilities, including the Replibit backup technology for MSPs with AirGap, which prevents automated deletion of data if an MSP is hacked; BRC Runbooks, which maintains preconfigured virtual machine compute, storage and network requirements too do automated recovery; and upcoming direct-to-cloud backup technology via Axcient Fusion.

Clumio For Microsoft 365

Clumio in April added Microsoft 365 to its secure Backup as a Service as a way to provide Microsoft 365 users with a globally consolidated data protection service. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said its new Clumio for Microsoft 365 provides enterprises standardizing on Microsoft 365 with a robust backup strategy to protect and ensure the compliance of their email data.

Clumio for Microsoft 365 is part of a unified backup offering that protects public cloud, private cloud and SaaS with a single service for VMware, VMware Cloud on AWS, AWS EBS and Microsoft 365. It is priced on a per-user, per-month basis.

Commvault Metallic On Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Commvault in June unveiled a multiyear strategic agreement with Microsoft to integrate the marketing, engineering and sales of the Commvault Metallic SaaS data protection technology with the Microsoft Azure cloud. Under the agreement, Commvault Metallic will be available to provide multilayered protection of Microsoft 365, Microsoft SQL, VMware and other data, including endpoint data, with the Metallic technology available to businesses and their channel partners via the Azure Marketplace. The two will build a SaaS offering combining Commvault Metallic Cloud Storage with Azure Blob Storage and include deep integration with other native Azure services.

HYCU For Azure

HYCU for Azure, introduced in late March, is Boston-based HYCU‘s purpose-built data protection offering. HYCU for Azure builds on the company’s HYCU Protege application for intelligent one-click cross-cloud migration, disaster recovery and consolidated management. HYCU for Azure works with HYCU Protege to provide tightly integrated data protection, migratio, and disaster recovery for Azure users. It lets businesses migrate data from on-premises to the cloud, protect the data on Azure, make Azure a disaster recovery target for applications and virtual machines running on-premises, and helps simplify disaster recovery for applications running on Azure. MSPs can also run HYCU for Azure as a service with via subscription directly from Azure Marketplace and billed as part of the Azure bill.

Rubrik Cloud Data Management Andes 5.2 Release

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Rubrik in April unveiled the Andes 5.2 release of its Cloud Data Management offering for managing, governing and orchestrating data across data centers and clouds. Andes 5.2 provides improved VMware performance with the introduction of multinode data streaming for VMware vSphere to help boost backup speed by 500 percent and recovery speed by up to 300 percent. It also accelerates development time for Oracle database administrators by quickly creating test/dev clones of data. It includes enhanced role-based access to the administration console so that businesses can set permissions to fit their specific needs for compliance, and adds new retention capabilities including the ability to place snapshots on indefinite hold.

StorageCraft ShadowXafe 4.0

Draper, Utah-based StorageCraft in June unveiled ShadowXafe 4.0, a significant upgrade to its flagship data and system backup and recovery software for SMBs. ShadowXafe 4.0 now provides unified workflow and management between the software and the company‘s OneXafe Solo plug-and-protect backup and recovery appliance. It also now comes with Hyper-V, vCenter and ESXi support to let businesses protect large and midrange virtual machines with a single click. For remote sites, it allows instant data restores from and replication and recovery to a central on-premises infrastructure, a data center, or to the StorageCraft Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) Cloud. ShadowXafe 4.0 licensing and billing can also be consolidated through the ConnectWise Manage and Automate business management platforms.

Veritas Backup Exec 21

Veritas in April unveiled Veritas Backup Exec 21, the latest version of one of the IT storage industry‘s best-known data protection and management software. Veritas Backup Exec protects data in on-premises or cloud workloads, and is available in either perpetual or term subscription licensing. Veritas Backup Exec 21 brings five new key capabilities, including multifactor authentication to improve enterprise security; ransomware protection that prevents any non-Backup Exec process to modify backup data even via external code execution; an enhanced deduplication engine that uses a more secure SHA512 hash calculation algorithm compared to what was used in the previous deduplication engine; new subscription licensing based on instance count; and instant recovery for VMware and Hyper-V supported from deduplication storage.

Wasabi Reserved Capacity Pricing

Wasabi, the Boston-based developer of cloud storage and data protection technology it said is several times faster than AWS cloud storage for a fraction of the price, in February unveiled its Reserved Capacity Storage pricing model that lets businesses purchase a reserved amount of cloud storage for a fixed price for periods of one, thre, or five years. MSPs and other solution providers can also use Reserved Capacity Storage to sell capacity to their clients in much the same way they sell on-premises storage appliances for data protection, archiving or storage technology refreshes. There are no fees for egress or API requests, so the Reserved Capacity Storage pricing is what customers will pay regardless of how often they access the data.