Asigra Simplifies AWS Data Management for MSPs

Although there are undoubtedly massive amounts of interest in using the public cloud for backup and recovery, the providers of these services don’t always make it as simple as it is on-premise to back up and then recover data.

With that in mind, Asigra this week announced the Asigra AWS Snapshot Manager, a tool that automates the management of Elastic Block Store (EBS) images of virtual machine volumes in Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environments running on Amazon Web Services. The tool is designed for managed services providers (MSPs) that have partnered with AWS.

Asigra is giving its MSP partners access to Asigra AWS Snapshot Manager for free. They can opt to either give their customers access to the tool for free or provide it as a value-added service that they deliver, said Asigra Executive Vice President Eran Farajun.

For all the hype surrounding AWS, the tools it provides are often limited to exposing raw APIs, Farajun said. Asigra is creating a series of tools that make it simpler for the average IT administrator to invoke various AWS APIs.

Alternatively, an MSP can develop its own scripts, Farajun said. But as is often the case with scripts, it’s left up to the MSP to document and maintain those scripts.

Obviously, Asigra is trying to increase MSP use of its back-up and recovery software in Amazon Web Services environments by making it less painful to protect data in the AWS cloud. While AWS may be the most popular public cloud platform, Farajun notes that there is a lot of griping about the number of low-level tasks that need to be manually performed by an IT administrator to manage data in the AWS cloud. In most on-premise IT environments, the ability to take snapshots of data to simplify the recovery process is now almost taken for granted.

For MSPs, that level of complexity cuts two ways. On one hand, it makes AWS more expensive to manage from a cost of labor perspective. On the other, it tends to make internal IT organizations more inclined to want to outsource the management of AWS.

Regardless of whether an internal IT organization likes it or not, massive amounts of data are moving into the AWS cloud. The opportunity for MSPs now is to help those internal IT organizations come to terms with that new reality.

Michael Vizard has been covering IT issues in the enterprise for more than 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWEEK, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review.