The difference, Vembu maintains, is its free tool is more secure than free consumer-grade equivalents.
“Many IT Managers and CTOs mentioned to us that they personally use consumer grade file sharing tool for themselves but don’t want their employees to use it, fearing data security. This lead us to design a business grade and highly secure file sharing and collaboration platform which is extremely simple to use,” said Larissa Simone, Director of Marketing at Vembu.
But the deal isn’t so simple. Sure, the FileShare tool is free, and comes with 2GB of free storage (and 10GB for businesses). After that you pay 10 cents a gig per month.
Compliance is one selling point. “Vembu FileShare application stores all the customer data in Amazon AWS infrastructure, which is in compliance with HIPAA, HITECH and SAS 170. Users can now stay assured of data integrity and security. A recent research indicates that 67% of Small Businesses now view mobile solutions and services as “critical” to their businesses. 83% have already deployed mobile apps to help improve employee productivity,” Vembu said.
Vembu Moves into DRaaS
Increasingly the cloud is used for true backup and disaster recovery. One issue this solves is tape. Tape has been a useful technology, but is fraught with peril. Not only is it difficult to manage, but it fails far too often due to corruption, lack of testing or the fragile nature of the media.
Vembu is one of many companies that think they have a better way. The company focuses on disaster recovery, a form of backup and recovery that is secure and fast enough to help get companies back on their feet. A step up the ladder is business continuity where there is little to no downtime in the event of a failure. And then there is plain old backup which makes fewer promises.
An increasing number of each of three types of services is based on AWS, as is the case with Vembu Technologies.
Vembu’s new DRaaS takes a hybrid approach where there is a layer of backup on-premises and another tier in the cloud. “With this launch, customers can now replicate their on-premises backup data to Vembu’s Cloud platform. In the event of disaster, failed system or VM can be booted directly on the cloud or a USB disk with restored data can be shipped,” the company said.
There are two measures storage managers care about –Restore Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) which is how the old files are that need to be recovered in order to get back to business. Vembu claims its DR service can maximize both metrics. “A mission critical failed server can be turned on using Vembu’s BDR product in less than 5 minutes. In the event of complete on-premises site loss, customer’s now have an option to instantly boot a virtual server on our cloud platform and it typically takes about 15 – 20 mins for the VM to completely boot and ready for production use,” Vembu said.
The DRaaS and BaaS Markets
Various forms of cloud storage and backup are growing like weeds. Part of this is taking the storage/backup/recovery onus off of IT. Another element is scalability. For the past several years storage densities have grown about 20 percent a year. Unfortunately Gartner see storage volumes growing more like 40-60 percent annually.
The cloud can fill that gap, which is one why MarketsandMarkets predicts the total cloud storage market will hit $46.8 billion by 2018 with a CAGR of 40.2 percent.
Meanwhile, the same research house sees DRaaS growing at a CAGR of 55.2% and hitting $5.7 billion by 2018.
CompTIA research shows that backup is one of the most common uses for the cloud. “As cloud components are becoming more prevalent in IT architectures, more companies are relying on cloud computing for business processes such as storage (59 percent), business continuity/disaster recovery (48 percent), and security (44 percent),” the channel focused organization said.
Price War
A price war has been raging in the cloud storage market for well over a year, and Vembu plans to be as feisty as anyone. “Achieving a HIPAA / HITECH compliant cloud disaster recovery solution with instant recovery capabilities need not be expensive anymore. We plan to disrupt the DRaaS market by making our pricing highly affordable and simple so other vendors cannot even come close,” commented Larissa Simone-Director of Marketing for Vembu. In fact, some vendors have abandoned per GB pricing replacing them with approaches such as only charging for data that is recovered.
