When it comes to backup and recovery, complex environments, rampant data growth and demanding user expectations are just some of the challenges solution providers and their IT customers must tackle. Quest Software’s (NASDAQ: QSFT) services-centric data protection solution, NetVault Extended Architecture (XA), may be some help: It lets IT admins organize, schedule, view and manage backups based on specific business and technology services.

NetVault XA gives IT administrators access to customized views and workflows that map to the specific service level agreements (SLAs) associated with each role, and can perform platform-specific backup and recovery tasks from one console.

Features include unified management of on-premise and cloud assets, with the ability to act as a gateway to multivendor clouds, remote, cloud-based operating capabilities (including support for Apple’s iPad tablet) and role-based reporting capabilities.

The release is a central component of Quest’s push to integrate all of the company’s current data protection products, as well as future releases, into the NetVault XA management console, providing better scalability and flexibility.

Quest’s backup and recovery technologies — including the NetVault, vRanger, LiteSpeed and Recovery Manager product families — all can be managed from the single console and will leverage shared services including deduplication, cloud gateways and a reporting engine.

NetVault XA will be available to customers as a downloadable thin client at no additional charge, with the first iteration of the service available in the second half of 2012. It will be incorporated into the planned releases of NetVault Backup, NetVault SmartDisk and vRanger, the company noted.