Asigra, a Talkin’ Cloud top 100 cloud services provider (CSP), is now making its Asigra Cloud Backup Connector Appliance available for customers with geographically dispersed environments, while also looking to save money on bandwidth.

Asigra Executive Vice President Eran Farajuna told Talkin’ Cloud in an interview last week that Cisco first reached out to the company about nine months ago, asking if Asigra would be one of two companies to first participate in the Cisco Cloud Connector Program. (The other company asked to participate was Amazon (AMZN)).

Farajuna explained that Cisco developed the program to solve a bandwidth problem for customers connecting to public cloud service with geographically dispersed environments. As these remote sites purchase more and more cloud services, it creates undue pressure on network traffic, requiring customers to increase bandwidth.

“It’s not very good for the continued adoption of cloud services,” he said.

To get around this challenge, the Cisco Cloud Connect Program allows remote sites to directly connect cloud services, instead of going through a central site, which is where Asigra steps into the game.

The Cisco Integrated Service Router Generation 2 comes with Asigra Cloud Backup software preinstalled, enabling organizations to maximize their technology investments, protecting data locally on the LAN or backup securely a service provider’s offsite data center. (The Cisco 3900 and 2900 family of routers are pre-installed with Asigra Cloud Backup.)

The Cloud Backup Connector Appliance includes the following features:

•    Asigra Cloud Backup v12.2 pre-installed for plug-and-play mass deployment and agentless protection of all computing environments.
•    The ability to perform standalone local backup and/or connect to the service provider of choice for offsite recovery.
•    End-to-end data protection of storage, servers, desktops, laptops and mobile devices (tablets and smartphones).
•    High-performance data recovery across physical, virtual and cloud operating environments
•    Autonomic healing to ensure data integrity/recoverability.
•    Enterprise-class security for regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services and government with FIPS 140-2 certification.
•    2TB internal storage standard which scales to 10TB per appliance to store compressed, de-duplicated data for local recovery.
•    Capability to leverage external cloud service providers for offsite data recovery.
•    Connectivity: Three integrated 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports with 1 port capable of RJ-45 or SFP connectivity, one service module slot, three onboard digital signal processor slots and one internal service module for application services.

Asigra recently made enhancements to its single-pass backup and recovery software for Microsoft (MSFT) Exchange users to assist with various levels of recovery, from single emails to complete databases.