An email Q&A with Concentric’s senior product manager Gary Ellis, who discusses the company’s new service Concentric Managed Backup, an affordable storage solution designed for small and medium sized businesses.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — With the increase in data usage from year to year, an affordable storage solution is essential for all small and medium businesses.
In recognizing this growing demand for data backup and recovery solutions, Concentric (www.concentric.com) has developed and released its new service, Concentric Managed Backup, which aims to provide SMBs with an affordable and reliable storage solution.
The new service expands on Concentric’s ongoing commitment to provide enterprise-class hosted services for SMBs by offering an affordable, scalable data backup and recovery solution.
Concentric Managed Backup lets SMBs resolve critical business challenges including regulatory compliance, disaster recovery, data protection for local and remote offices, and competitive business advantage.
In an email Q&A with the WHIR, Gary Ellis, senior product manager at Concentric highlights the many benefits and features of Concentric Managed Backup and why it might work for your business.
The WHIR: What does the new Managed Backup Service entail?
Gary Ellis: The service provides 24 x 7 backup and restore protection for data on customer servers, desktops and notebooks. It’s an online, managed service intended to be “set and forget” – once the service is activated and configured, it will run automatically without intervention – or the need to swap tapes, etc. It will protect data at multiple locations – including workers on the go – wherever there is an Internet connection.
It’s compatible with Windows, Linux, Sun, IBM, HP and VMware systems and offers advanced application support for Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint and Oracle databases. To prevent unauthorized access, data is encrypted – from the moment data leaves the customer system to its at rest state in our backup vaults – using 128- or 256-bit AES encryption. Scheduling backup jobs and restoring data are handled via a point-and-click web-based control center. In a nutshell, a flexible, reliable, secure and easy-to-use solution for protecting business data.
Was this something customers were specifically asking for, or did Concentric take it on its own to develop this new service?
GE: Concentric’s customers – SMBs and larger companies for that matter – are increasingly concerned about business continuity (e.g., in the event of computer failure or data loss), reducing IT costs and, for regulated industries like finance and healthcare, compliance considerations – including the need to retain data for prescribed periods of time and controlling access to the data.
The online backup service addresses this issues and, frankly, it’s a lot more convenient than traditional tape backup; – and it can help free up frequently meager IT resources to focus on other priorities. Finally, when it comes to data backup and restoration, reliability is key – many customers report problems when trying to restore from tape – 60 percent to 70 percent of SMB companies surveyed by IDC experienced restore failures.
How does the Managed Backup Service compare to other comparable cloud storage services on the market?
GE: Concentric is offering a business-grade managed service with advanced capabilities: compatibility with a broad range of platforms; advanced support for enterprise applications like SQL Server, Oracle and Exchange; easy, web-based administration; highly secure data transmission and storage; and data compression/deduplication and “delta” technology that minimizes the backup footprint (saving backup time and costs).
The service also offers a US-based customer care and professional services team to support our customers 24 x 7 and provide custom services as needed. Managed Backup is priced aggressively compared to other business-grade services with similar capabilities.
What is the pricing structure for this service?
GE: Pricing is based on the customer’s footprint on our backup vaults – the amount of data that Concentric is managing on the customer’s behalf. This data is compressed, de-duplicated, and optimized to minimize the size of the footprint. Unlike other services that lock customers into a pre-defined/limited data retention time frames and/or number of copies retained online, we give our customers complete flexibility to create retention policies that meet their specific business needs.
Concentric therefore charges by compressed gigabyte – the footprint on its backup vault. Services with fixed retention policies typically quote prices based on “natural” GB, or the amount of data on the customer system – prior to compression and optimization. Pricing starts at $115/month for the 25GB (compressed) plan – with a $4.50 per GB charge for overages. Per GB (compressed) prices drop to $2.05 at the 1TB level.
How does this service fall in line with Concentric’s overall cloud strategy?
GE: Concentric’s strategy is to leverage cloud and related technologies to provide a full range of IT solutions to SMBs – and to become a single source for easy-to-buy, easy-to-use hosted IT solutions that are delivered reliably, securely and cost-effectively. The company’s focus is on understanding and solving real-world problems for SMBs – the cloud is one of the means to that end.
