Continuum has extended its managed backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution with a new capability called Archive. The new service for Continuity247 gives MSP partners greater flexibility in meeting clients' needs by providing a low-cost, less immediate data management services.
Continuum’s solution until this point, Continuity247, is a “hardware agnostic solution” that allows MSPs to perform backups of protected machines. MSPs can determine the frequency for both desktops and servers, creating backups locally on an appliance. That appliance can also virtualize an image in the event of equipment failure.
The company also offers a disaster recovery service as part of the Continuity247 solution by storing images to Continuum’s cloud (powered by IBM). “With that part of our solution we can perform a full site disaster recovery for our partners' clients in under an hour,” says Fielder Hiss, VP of Product, Continuum.
Outliers
Within the Continuum’s continuity business, Hiss says the company began to notice something interesting. There were a number of cases where the company’s high-availability cloud offering seemed to be too much. “(It) was overkill or not an applicable solution for some backup challenges,” says Hiss.
“What we saw was an option to have an add-on and apply a lower cost storage solution that didn’t have as high availability to two specific use cases that our MSPs were trying to serve in the market.”
The first are those customers with long-term data retention requirements like financial and healthcare firms. Due to regulatory requirements, they may be required to keep snapshots of several years of data in cold storage, but there’s no criticality to rapidly retrieving the data. “If you’re not going to access the data keeping it in a high availability cloud is, candidly, a little bit of overkill and it’s a little bit expensive,” Hiss asserts.
The second, according to Hiss, are customers who want a backup and recovery solution but don’t have a critical need to be up and running in a manner of hours. They can wait 24 or 48 hours to fully recover.
Adding Archive
With those needs in mind, Continuum’s Archive add-on allows partners to configure their appliances to push copies to either Amazon’s low-cost Glacier storage or an existing FTP target at any frequency. So, while that may result in a lower RPO, it also drastically reduces costs for customers that don’t need all the bells and whistles.
“With this offering, it really really extends the flexibility that we’re able to offer to our MSPs and let them be in the driver's seat as far as determining the best solution for each customer,” says Hiss.
It seems a smart move for Continuum, which has long specialized in automation for MSPs. No doubt, the company faces intense competition in the crowded BDR market for MSPs. But Continuum brings additional areas of expertise to the table -- including RMM (remote monitoring and management), BDR (backup and disaster recovery), NOC (network operations center), help desk and a forthcoming SOC (security operations center) service.
Earlier this month Thoma Bravo acquired Continuum for an undisclosed sum.
