Gabsten Technologies has launched their managed backup-as-a-service offering — CloudProtect — to the South African market. CloudProtect provides businesses with access to a hosted backup solution that is powered by CommVault’s leading Simpana software. Importantly, the launch of CloudProtect delivers enterprise-class backup and restore capabilities to smaller businesses on a hosted platform, making it affordable for this market.
Cloud and hosted platforms are gaining traction in the local market with more confidence instilled with the uptake of these offerings. CloudProtect leverages the benefits associated with cloud and hosted platforms, enabling businesses of any size to take advantage of an affordable ‘pay-as-you-consume’ model. The end user customer pays per Gigabyte of data that is backed up without having to invest in infrastructure and software. Furthermore, they do not have to maintain the solution.
Says Iniel Dreyer, MD at Gabsten Technologies, “CommVault’s Simpana software is at the core of our CloudProtect solution, providing robust, scalable backup technology to protect critical data. As data protection becomes a propriety for many businesses, large and small, the service will provide companies with best-of-breed technology in an affordable model to protect their data and ensure they are able to restore information in the event of a data loss.”
Says Sumash Singh, Country Manager at CommVault in South Africa, “Gabsten Technologies is well positioned to make use of our technology with their CloudProtect solution as they feature the skills, expertise and experience to support our Simpana Software. This is also a great opportunity to make our technology available to a wider market.”
As compliance becomes a priority for businesses with various legislation including the Protection of Personal Information (PoPI), it is important for companies to ensure their data is stored in country. CloudProtect is hosted from a local data centre, providing this necessary component of compliance as well as peace of mind. Redundancy is also built into the solution with two copies of data stored for 30 days.
Furthermore, CloudProtect delivers simplified administration, secure access, automated alerts, secure file sharing, privacy of data and source-side deduplication when means that only new and changed data is backed up, reducing bandwidth requirements. A mobile app is also available on Android, Apple and Windows platforms that allows users to securely access their data from these devices and upload data from the mobile device to CloudProtect.
Additional services are available including extended data retention if more than 30 days is required, data seeding if the initial size of the data is too big to transfer to the cloud and remote appliances that are based on-premise as an additional backup.
The solution will be sold via resellers and is structured in a variety of cloud packages, creating an opportunity for these resellers to create new revenue streams and generate annuity revenue. Gabsten will provide the support, maintenance and skills for the solution.
Adds Dreyer, “We are making it easy for resellers to do business with our model as they do not have to invest in the technology and the licensing model is based on usage or consumption. Furthermore, they have access to a reporting solution that facilitate ease of monitoring of usage as well as billing.”