Asigra made waves earlier this year when it moved away from usage or TB-based backup pricing, setting off a flurry of competitive pricing activity. Now all cloud backup providers are getting aggressive, fighting over how little they can charge. But MSPs care about a lot more than pricing. Vendor relationships and ease of configuring and managing clients can be just as important.
Asigra is making the latter pitch with its new Asigra Installation and Configuration Services (ICS) team that is there to help MSPs, er, install and con
figure services. Don’t you love a good old fashioned name with actual meaning? The team is there specifically to assist with Asigra Cloud Backup.
“The Asigra Installation and Configuration Services (ICS) team complements partner/user IT resources with highly trained professionals who are available to help enterprises and service providers increase the efficiency and optimization of their backup environments,” the company said. “With experienced engineering and development service professionals focused on helping organizations overcome hardware/software installation and configuration complexities, Asigra ICS customers are able to more quickly realize their backup infrastructure objectives.”A related resource is the Asigra Professional Services Suite, and here customers can avail themselves of a number of standard and custom services.
“The professional services suite allows us to better support our customers and partners by providing engineer- and developer-driven guidance to ensure that new or enhanced installations are calibrated to their specific needs,” said Stephen Lee, Vice President, Technical Services, Asigra. “Asigra Professional Services speeds time-to-revenue for service providers while expediting business continuity for the enterprise customers they serve, expediting the financial and operational advantages of cloud-based data recovery.” The services include design, migration and upgrades, backup health checks, architecture, and RFP support.
Daymark Solutions is already taking advantage. “The IT landscape and organizational requirements differ substantially from one enterprise to the next as does the complexity of certain environments,” said Bruce Hall, Director of Managed Services for Daymark. “Asigra Professional Services provides assurance in knowing that regardless of the deployment scenario, they can configure or customize the environment for ease of management, proving rapid return on investment and validating Asigra’s value beyond software.”
Asigra Picks Hot Mart
Asigra, in business since the 1980’s, now finds itself in a hot, relatively new market. And fortunately for the company and its partners, customers more and more trust the cloud for storage. In a recent survey by Asigra rival TwinStrata, 84 percent said they use or plan to use cloud storage. This was more than any other cloud technology asked. TwinStrata pointed out that its survey base was generally inclined towards the cloud.
“Enterprises with more than 1000 employees (60 percent) have already implemented cloud storage at far greater rates than small businesses and mid-market companies (38 percent) that have fewer than 1000 employees. However, as the “plan to implement” numbers show, both groups seek to make cloud storage a major part of their future strategy,” the report found.
Cloud storage is growing in part because of its scalability. Estimates have it have that storage densities are growing some 20 percent a year. Meanwhile, Gartner estimates that demand for capacity is growing more like 40-60 percent. The cloud is the answer to that disparity.
And in the company’s recent Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2017, 1Q13 Update report, it found that “worldwide Cloud System Infrastructure Services (IaaS) Storage for end-user spending to grow at a 31 percent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), from an estimated $1.7B in 2013 to a forecast $4.9B in 2017.”
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
