Nakivo has unveiled the next major release of its Backup & Replication software. The feature update to the v3.0 release includes support for file recovery from local and cloud-based virtual machine (VM) backups, single-click integration with the Amazon cloud and advanced reporting.

Integration with public cloud platforms and services isn't exactly new to Nakivo Backup & Replication. Quite the opposite, in fact. The company has supported manual integration with Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Web Services, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Windows Azure, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Cloud and Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) Cloud for some time. At least with Amazon, businesses and channel partners have a certain degree of automation. According to Nakivo, the one-click integration with Amazon takes less than 10 minutes and can enable a five-minute 2GB VM backup to Amazon.

Whether this means Nakivo will roll out additional single-click automatic integration with other major public cloud platforms is currently unknown.

According to the company, Nakivo Backup & Replication v3.0 "offers a complete data protection feature set for virtualized environments." That includes Web 2.0 UI, local and offsite VM backup and replication, support for live applications and databases (Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL, Oracle, etc.), deduplication, compression and encryption.

"Nakivo is addressing the growing trend and challenges facing IT professionals to protect their virtualized data locally while also leveraging public clouds for offsite disaster recovery," said Bruce Talley, CEO and co-founder of Nakivo, in a prepared statement.

Nakivo is going head-to-head with other backup and replication software and services on two fronts—pricing and speed. Nakivo claims its software is priced at half of what its competitors charge, with pricing starting at $199 per socket. The company also inferred that competing solutions require a lengthy recovery time—essentially, an entire backup—to get access to a few critical files. Nakivo stated it has solved that problem, making recovery much quicker.

"Backup speed is important, but recovery speed is even more important. With Nakivo Backup & Replication, VM and file recovery is 60X faster than our previous backup solution," said Milko Mihov, IT manager of GRW Engineering, in a prepared statement. "Nakivo enables us to now have greater overall uptime while also protecting our VMs more frequently to meet shorter recovery point objectives."