AVG has updated its CloudCare platform with additional online backup, recovery and bare-metal restore capability licensed from Storagecraft.
The firm has also announced that around 2000 partners have signed up for and are deploying its cloud-based administration platform with “more partners joining CloudCare that are completely new to AVG,” says Mike Foreman, general manager for SMB at AVG Technologies.
The backup capability is based on a pay-as-you-use billing model charged in 25Gb ’units’ per customer and avoids any additional per-device licence fees. Critically, the solution also allows for local backups to USB or NAS devices as well as backups into a partner data centre. This sensible move negates recovery issues faced when sending complete server images over slow broadband in the event of a full site disaster like fire or theft.
The launch of the new functionality has been supported by additional research which questioned more than 500 small businesses in the UK. The study showed that while many (68 percent) do rely on automated backup systems, a significant number, one in four, do not insist that employees back up at least once a week. This in spite of the fact that around one in five believe that more than half of their data is sensitive.
The firm has also updated its AVG Managed Workplace, a product resulting from its June acquisition of Level Platforms, a remote monitoring and management (RMM) software provider. The software is places AVG as a direct competitor to GFI, Kaseya and N-Able, which was recently bought by SolarWinds. However according to Foreman, AVG sees Professional Services Automation (PSA) firms like AutoTask as “complementary”.
The Managed Workplace software has the ability to manage around 200 common applications through plug-in connectors and AVG has now added support for CloudCare making it easier for partners to manage its cloud stack alongside other software from vendors such as Microsoft and Symantec.
