Asigra Inc., a maker of cloud backup software, today announced the release of a new, free software tool that gives managed service providers (MSPs) and their customers automated configuration and management of snapshots for Amazon cloud environments.

The Asigra AWS Snapshot Manager automates creation and handling of Elastic Block Store (EBS) images of virtual machine volumes in Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The tool is the first enterprise data protection software that provides native support for management of AWS snapshots, Asigra officials said.

MSPs also can publish co-branded snapshot management services in the AWS marketplace, allowing them to use the product to market complementary add-on offerings.

“With support for AWS Snapshots on EC2 instances, Asigra helps AWS users automate an extremely manual time-consuming process today while providing our partners with an opportunity to engage with a rapidly growing community to expand their total addressable market,” said Eran Farajun, executive vice president at Asigra. “Leveraging Asigra AWS Snapshot Manager as a freemium service provides MSPs a ‘foot in the door’ with potential buyers and the opportunity to offer other, higher-margin services, including their cloud backup service powered by Asigra for other data sources beyond AWS.”

EBS snapshots are needed for storing data in virtual machines on AWS.

Asigra’s snapshot manager allows users to quickly and easily create, restore, copy, delete, start, stop, launch, delete or migrate snapshots in AWS.

Users can schedule creation of snapshots for specific days and times, and manage all processes from a single, user-friendly interface.

Automating snapshots eliminates the need for manually creating scripts for data backup.

The tool is agentless, which makes it easier to use by minimizing occurrences of software conflicts and agent bugs, and using less processing power, according to the vendor.

“Enterprise customers running multiple servers on AWS go through a lot of manual, unproductive effort to manage hardware-based backups such as data snapshots,” said Prateek Garg, founder and CEO of Progressive Infotech LLC, a provider of IT solutions and managed services.

“Asigra AWS Snapshot Manager solves all these challenges by integrating AWS snapshots into enterprise-class data protection strategies,” he said. “Now customers have a single interface to automate, manage, control, and govern policies for AWS snapshots.”

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