Acronis Ports Cloud Backup Technology to SOHO Market
Acronis is rolling out a new cloud backup service for the very small business. Aimed at the small office/home office (SOHO) organization, Acronis Small Office: Server Cloud Backup is being positioned as a hybrid cloud backup solution that combines the benefits of both on-premise and cloud backup.
The company provides backup, recovery and data protection products and services for pretty much every size of company—from the large enterprise right on down to the home office. Although Acronis has backup and recovery products for home consumers, as well as for SMBs and enterprises, this looks to be a new category entry for its product catalog. It hasn't really focused too much on the SOHO business, although it's likely some SOHOs could make use of Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5, which is available in flavors for the small, medium and large business.
The goal of Acronis Small Office is help SOHO businesses set up a backup and recovery strategy so if ever there was a problem, they could be back on their feet and doing business as quickly as possible. Based on existing Acronis backup technology, the product is designed to be simple to use. Acronis noted that it takes only three clicks to set up a backup schedule—perfect for the very small business,which typically needs IT to be easy to configure and manage.
Because it's a hybrid cloud service, it backs up data both locally and in the cloud. Also included is Acronis Universal Restore, which performs server restores on any hardware. According to Acronis, the restore process takes only a few minutes, but that might be somewhat longer if the restore is being done from data in the cloud.
"Our solution is enterprise-grade, yet extremely easy to use, and is based on proven technology that millions of customers trust," said Dmitri Joukovski, senior vice president, Product Management at Acronis, in a prepared statement.
Pricing starts at $499 per year for 350GB of cloud storage, but a three-year subscription plan will provide customers with 1TB of cloud storage. It may not be as lucrative for Acronis' channel partners (or maybe it will be; who knows?) as some of the products and services aimed at larger businesses, but it's tapping into what sometimes feels like an underserved market that frequenly either has to work with consumer cloud services or look to pricier services for larger businesses.
