Asigra's Google Apps backup calms paranoid CIOs
We always thought the cloud meant you didn't need to back up...
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Backup specialist Asigra has added support for Google Apps so it can provide detailed backup and recovery services for cloudy, risk-averse organizations.
The upgrade was announced at the Asigra Summit in Toronto on Tuesday as a key component of Asigra Cloud Backup 12.2.
We always thought the point of outsourcing services such as mail to cloud providers was to save money, rather than having to spend on additional solutions. But it turns out that although clouds promise to save companies from spending on IT infrastructure, they also introduce new costs in the form of measures needed to be taken to maintain compliance.
For example, if an organization has recently Gone Google [Drunk the chocolate?—Ed.] a user deleting an important email could cause an IT bod a headache. It's unlikely that Google will be able to help you, and the same goes for Amazon and Microsoft, because these companies state in many of their cloud contracts that their job is to provide a service, not to clean up after the mistakes made by the techno-illiterate types that permeate any organization.
For this reason, companies such as Asigra, SysCloudSoft, Backupify, and others are developing tools that let you back up data from Google Apps and even restore back into the products, in case of problems introduced by users.
Asigra's tech is agentless, and also incorporates deduplication prior to backup and continuous data protection, though this comes at a price that some attendees of the company's partner summit in Toronto described to us as "very expensive".
The tool lets companies back up and restore data from Google Apps email, calendars, contracts, documents, and sites, and Asigra has made it possible to schedule and automate the backup activities, along with defining retention rules and backup frequencies. It allows for backup within the domain level, account level, and down to specific files and emails.
The Google backup technology is available within Asigra 12.2, which became generally available on Tuesday. ®
