Gabsten Technologies and Kibo Connect have formalised an new partnership whereby the companies are delivering a managed backup-as-a-service solution to the South African market, making this service more accessible to the SME.
Gabsten is a data management company with a focused channel model specialising in backup, disaster recovery, archiving and discovery, file analysis, and replication solutions.  Kibo Connect is a converged services provider offering voice, video, data, cloud, and managed services to the SME sector with focus on future-proof technologies and solutions.
CloudProtect provides businesses with access to an online backup solution that delivers business-class backup and restore capabilities to the SME, giving them all the benefits of offsite, managed, enterprise quality technology at affordable prices.
Iniel Dreyer, MD at Gabsten Technologies, says: “Although Kibo Connect is a reseller of our CloudProtect solution, the relationship is much more than that. Gabsten uses hosting and Internet connectivity provided by Kibo Connect and together both companies can now provide end-to-end connectivity and data protection services to customers. At Gabsten we believe in partnerships and provide all the support necessary to enable our partners.
“We do this by offering sales and technical training and a support desk that is available 24/7.  We rely on our partners to expand our reach to new customers and Kibo Connect will play an important role in expanding the CloudProtect customer base.”
Says Derryn Askham, Kibo Connect MD: “For us, it’s a good match. With this partnership, we can offer our customers an end-to-end data management solution that includes backup and disaster recovery.”
Askham strongly believes that the time has come for the SME market to move to backup and disaster-recovery-as-a-service and that CloudProtect is the solution for this because of the robust technology, superior software offering which is internationally recognised through Gartner and quality support.
“CloudProtect enables businesses of any size to take advantage of an affordable ‘pay-as-you-consume’ model,” she says.  “Customers pay per Gigabyte (GB) of data that is backed-up without having to invest in infrastructure and software or have the burden of maintaining a backup solution.
“CloudProtect guarantees us everything we need from a data management solution.  It’s an easy to use, reliable, GUI based, enterprise-grade solution for our clients, offered at really competitive rates.”
The solution offers companies: simplified administration; autonomy for managing their backup environment; secure access; file sharing; and data privacy. It also offers deduplication, and incremental/ bit-based backups whereby only new and changed data is backed-up thereby reducing bandwidth requirements.
Askham notes that while Kibo Connect has a nationwide network with data centres hosted at Teraco within each of the major metropolitan areas, the company has an aggressive growth trajectory for 2016.
“Our clients have historically relied on physical backup solutions like tape drives and hard drives. Although there is a place in the market for these technologies, we believe that online backups are the solution of the future,” she adds.
Both companies are committed to the SME market, which has historically been under-serviced due to greater emphasis placed on the enterprise market and limited access to next-generation technologies with barriers to entry historically being high costs. Askham says: “South Africa currently has around 600 000 SMEs and the size of the sector, together with the historical bias offers lot of opportunity for us. We feel that we can assist to level the playing field and assist them to compete with their larger counterparts in terms of technology.”