Continuum has added an archiving solution to its family of software and services for MSPs.
Called Archive for Continuity247, the new offering is an add-on for the Continuity247 BDR solution that Boston-based Continuum introduced some two years ago. Unlike that older product, which provides high-availability disaster recovery storage to companies with a low tolerance for downtime, Archive stores snapshots on lower-availability resources at a significantly lower price. That should make it an economical option for companies in healthcare, financial services, and other industries that must retain data over long periods for regulatory compliance purposes but don’t need immediate access to that information.
Archive should also hold strong appeal for organizations with limited budgets that don’t require the roughly one-hour recovery times the base Continuity247 product promises, according to Fielder Hiss, vice president of product for Continuum.
“They’re OK with maybe one or two days before they can have their business systems up and running,” he says.
Both use cases offer MSPs a way to sell BDR services to customers unable or unwilling to buy them at present.
“It makes the addressable market for them bigger, and obviously for Continuum as well,” Hiss says.
Archive helps MSPs improve operational efficiency too, he adds, by enabling them to acquire both short-term and long-term backup services from a single vendor, and manage it all through a single administrative interface.
“Today, MSPs are using probably several different tools to cover the spectrum of backup needs,” Hiss notes.
Archive is optimized for use with Amazon Glacier, a cloud storage offering from Amazon Web Services that sells disk capacity for as little as $0.0025 per GB. The system also works with any other cloud-based or on-premises storage target that supports the FTP protocol.
“Many of our partners actually have some investments in their own data centers to host things for their clients,” Hiss says. “If they have an FTP environment set up there, they can use that as a target as well.”
Archive subscriptions, which require a subscription to Continuity247 as well, cost $10 a month per server. Buyers must also pay for capacity in Amazon Glacier or another cold storage repository.
Prior to today, Continuum was in the news most recently in connection with its acquisition by private equity firm Thoma Bravo LLC two weeks ago. The company plans to add security services, backed by its own security operations center, by the end of the year. Those new offerings will join existing RMM, BDR, and mobile device management products, as well as an outsourced network operations center offering.
