Datto has rolled out major updates and additions to its business continuity and disaster recovery portfolio, including a new business continuity solution for PCs, the addition of integrated email security and per-user pricing to its cloud-to-cloud SaaS Protection service, and a new edition of the company’s flagship SIRIS BDR solution.
The MSP platform vendor announced those and a wide range of other product launches and enhancements today at its 2019 DattoCon event in San Diego.
The new PC continuity solution, which is called Datto Cloud Continuity for PCs and available immediately in the U.S., is designed to provide an all-in-one answer to PC data protection. Unlike Datto’s File Protection solution, which can restore files and folders, Cloud Continuity for PCs recovers entire PC images as well. It also virtualizes PC images in Datto’s cloud, allowing users with lost or damaged workstations to remain productive until a replacement device is available.
Significantly, the new solution protects endpoints without assistance from a backup appliance, making it the first endpoint BDR offering from Datto that does not require locally-installed hardware.†The monthly subscription fee covers up to a terabyte of data and includes one year of retention in Datto’s cloud. There are no overage charges or extra charges for virtualization or recovery.
“We want to leave you plenty of margin,” said Datto CEO Tim Weller this morning in a DattoCon keynote.
Datto competitor Kaseya introduced an appliance-free backup solution via its Unitrends business unit last month. That product protects files only, however, and doesn’t virtualize endpoints in the cloud.
Enhancements to Datto’s cloud-to-cloud SaaS Protection product announced today include the addition of integrated email security for Office 365 users. Developed and delivered in partnership with Vade Secure, the new functionality automatically filters infected messages from Outlook Online inboxes, drawing on built-in machine learning technology.
Datto opted to partner with Vade on the new feature based on the depth of that company’s experience in email security, as well as the massive scale of its threat intelligence database. Vade’s software, which is used by giant telecommunication providers like Comcast, Vodafone, and Telstra, currently protects some 600 million mailboxes globally.
“The biggest data set is the best data set,” said Weller in his keynote.
The Vade platform is highly automated as well, adds Adrien Gendre, the company’s chief solution architect, making it more profitable for MSPs. “It’s very low maintenance, so they can increase their margin,” he says.
Datto Chief Product Officer Emily Glass points to the system’s low administrative overhead as one of several reasons the product is a strong fit with Datto’s own solutions. “The MSP doesn’t have any labor involved,” she says. “They just kind of set it up and then it runs, and the software does the work for them. That’s really the type of solutions that we’re interested in developing for [MSPs], because time is money.”
Beginning August 1st, Datto partners will be able to provision and manage Vade Secure licenses through the same portal they use to administer their Datto BDR and other offerings.
Email filtering joins Datto’s portfolio at a time of exploding Office 365 adoption. According to Datto, in fact, there are currently about 155 million Office 365 seats worldwide, a figure that’s growing 50% annually. “It’ll be 500 million seats before we can blink an eye,” Weller predicted this morning. That makes Office 365 security a “massive target” for incremental revenue, he continued.
Datto announced plans to add per-user pricing to SaaS Protection today as well. Set to arrive later in the year, the new licensing scheme will feature two volume-based options: an “infinite cloud retention” model and a time-based retention model that provides one year of protection.
“This is the most partner-friendly pricing in the industry, and it’s a tremendous margin opportunity for you,” said Daniel Flanigan, vice president of product marketing for Datto’s unified continuity and networking product lines, this morning.
Flanigan outlined a new “pooled pricing” model for SaaS Protection, which allows partners to build an inventory of licenses and deploy or re-deploy, them as needed, during his presentation as well. “[If] you lose a customer, you can reclaim those licenses. When you bring on a new customer, you can re-allocate them,” Flanigan said, adding that partners can buy additional licenses in quantities beginning as low as one seat.
“If you have that 25-employee company that adds one more employee, you don’t have to worry about jumping tiers,” Flanigan said. “You can just go get one more seat and add it to their account.”
Other SaaS Protection enhancements showcased this morning include a new backup status page that provides aggregated data on licenses bought versus licenses used, protected versus unprotected end user seats, backup success rates over the last 24 hours, and more.
“In short, what we’ve done is we have made it easier to buy, easier to manage, and easier to onboard, making this the most partner-friendly SaaS Protection version we’ve ever released,” Flanigan said.
SIRIS 4, the appliance-based BDR solution Datto introduced today, is the first major upgrade of the SIRIS platform in three years. Equipped with Intel Xeon Skylake and 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Cascade Lake processors, the new offering comes with a dedicated write cache that allows it to virtualize systems 50% faster than its predecessor.
“It is better, faster, and stronger in every way,” said Senior Director of Product Management Russ Morton of SIRIS 4 in a keynote presentation.
According to Datto, SIRIS 4 units are smaller than SIRIS 3 equivalents, as well as cooler, quieter, and more durable, thanks to the replacement of failure-prone plastic components with new metal ones. Self-healing ECC memory reduces memory failure and corrupted backup rates as well.
There are four SIRIS Professional SKUs, four Enterprise models, and eight SIRIS 4X units. All are priced about the same as their SIRIS 3 counterparts except the highest-capacity units in the product line, according to Morton. “All models above 20TB have actually had a pretty dramatic price cut,” he said, noting that those reductions average 15 to 20%.
According to Weller, sales of SIRIS products continue to grow despite the industry’s ongoing transition from on-premises to cloud-based infrastructure. Indeed, the volume of endpoints protected by the platform has increased in the last 12 months by 100,000.
“Cloud can wait another couple more years, because SIRIS is cranking and we’re investing more here than ever before,” said Weller in his keynote.
New additions to Datto’s networking portfolio debuted at DattoCon today as well. The event runs through Thursday.
