Continuing to expand a product portfolio as an independent company that sells data protection offerings only through the channel, Arcserve this week unfurled Arcserve Cloud.

Arcserve CEO Mike Crest said Arcserve Cloud is designed to be a natural extension to the company’s backup and recovery appliances that were unveiled earlier this year. Since spinning out of CA Technologies, Arcserve has been building out a set of data protection products that can run on servers and appliances. Now Arcserve partners and their customers can take advantage of an encrypted cloud service that they can either choose to replicate data into or take advantage of an Arcserve Jumpstart Courier Service through which they mail a portable USB drive to Arcserve.

Crest said the Jumpstart Courier service is designed to provide a way to overcome having to initially replicate a massive amount of data over a network. Subsequently, customers than replicate delta changes to those data sets, which have already been deduplicated, into the cloud.

Primarily aimed at providing disaster recovery and archiving capabilities, the Arcserve Cloud is designed to be consumed in three, six and nine TB increments that align with the usable amount of storage that Arcserve makes available on its appliances.

After parting ways with CA Technologies, Arcserve revamped its channel program around a three-tier model that in North America can only be joined by solution providers that have partnered with Ingram Micro. While there is no shortage of competitors in the data protection space providing cloud services, Crest said Arcserve is focused on providing enterprise class services at price points that the average midmarket customer can afford. As such, the primary goal for Arcserve is to provide those customers with a better user experience.

As a practical matter it’s almost impossible to sell backup and recovery software on an appliance or server that doesn’t have some extension to the cloud. IT organizations want to have access to data that was most recently used on premise because 90 percent of the time an end user is looking to recover a file or an image that was used in the last hour. Everything else can essentially be archived in the cloud because the odds that it will ever need to be actually used are relatively slim. Of course, that doesn’t mean that solution providers don’t need to regularly prove they can recover that data. But it does mean that selling data protection services in cloud in isolation from a local appliance is a very hard thing to do indeed.