StorageCraft Unveils Cloud-To-Cloud Data Protection Solution

Data protection technology developer StorageCraft Technology this week expanded its capabilities with the introduction of a new solution that allows data to be backed up from one cloud to another.

The new StorageCraft cloud-to-cloud solution, which was unveiled at this week's Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, initially supports backup and recovery of data from such applications as Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, Salesforce.com and Box.

It represents an expansion of StorageCraft's Shadow Protect, an on-premises solution that protects data on servers, and the StorageCraft Recovery Solution, which sends data to a cloud for recovery, said Scott Barnes, chief technology officer of the Draper, Utah-based vendor.

[Related: Q&A: StorageCraft's New CEO Matt Medeiros Discusses Plans After $187M Equity Investment]

"But customers are more and more migrating to cloud applications like Office 365," Barnes told CRN. "They are less and less looking at how to protect Microsoft Exchange, and more at Microsoft Office, Google, Box and other applications. And while those applications have their own good backup technology, they all have occasional issues, and none of them do versioning of their backups."

The new cloud-to-cloud solution is also an opportunity for StorageCraft and its partners to shift from an SMB-only focus toward enterprises that are adopting hosted applications, said Curt James, the vendor's vice president of marketing and business development.

However, StorageCraft, which provides its data protection solution to several storage vendors as an OEM, does not plan to offer the new cloud-to-cloud solution to its OEM partners, James told CRN.

"Our OEM partners are not a key market for this technology," he said. "And some of our partners, like [Norwalk, Conn.-based] Datto, with its Backupify solution, have their own offerings which already compete with it."

The new StorageCraft cloud-to-cloud solution seems to be a mature disaster recovery solution with a good price point, said Dave Patel, chief technology officer at CompuTech City, a Lake Mary, Fla.-based solution provider and StorageCraft partner with a strong focus on the health care market.

CompuTech City has already tested the solution against several vendors' offerings, and is in the process of deploying it with a health care customer to protect 3 TBs of data and 10 virtual machines, Patel told CRN.

Setting up disaster recovery for any other application is easy when compared to what's needed in the health care market, he said. "Calling a disaster recovery situation is probably the toughest call anyone can make," he said. "Everyone is impacted. And in health care, there are so many more variables to consider. A 10-user accounting or legal customer is ridiculously easier than a 10-user health care practice. Health care is always complicated."