The latest update aims to deliver on the company’s promise of ‘cloud-first data protection as-a-service combined with business-class disaster recovery’, enabling easier creation, management and reporting of virtual server images in the partner’s location of choice. This enables fast and flexible disaster recovery without an expensive proprietary appliance, the solutions provider said in a statement announcing the launch.
According to The Verizon 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report, ransomware increased by 13 per cent in 2021, representing a jump greater than the past five years combined. Bad actors have expanded the scope of their attacks, N-able said, including introduction of new variants designed specifically to encrypt or delete backup data stored on the local network, destroying organisations’ last line of defence and further incentivising payment.
Cloud-first backup can help minimise risk by eliminating the attack vectors at the local level. Additionally, in the event of a ransomware attack, instant recovery can potentially re-introduce malware onto the network. Through Standby Image, Cove aims to equip users for either scenario by creating a safe replica of each backup, ready for fast on-demand recovery in a secondary location.
N-able described the introduction of Standby Image as a new approach combining a cost-effective, cloud-first architecture with comprehensive disaster recovery-as-a-service (DraaS). The update complements the existing fully automated and hosted Recovery Testing feature.
“The introduction of Standby Image is the latest example of Cove’s strategy to deliver meaningful business outcomes while delighting our partners with unexpected simplicity,” said Chris Groot, general manager, Cove Data Protection, N-able. “The ability to provide robust, business-class disaster recovery without the administrative and cost burdens of traditional image backup products will make a meaningful difference to our partners and their customers.”
In a recent roundtable, N-able’s MSP partners SysGroup and Dufeu IT Solutions discussed the benefits of the Cove solution and the importance of providing backup services that are extensive and user-friendly.
“To run a lot of the backup programmes and backup solutions that are out there on the market, you need a certain skillset to be able to do it, and a lot of small businesses don’t always have those skills within their IT team,” said Shaun Whitehead, head of technical operations at SysGroup.
Darius Sebastian, head of security at Dufeu IT Solutions agreed that a backup and disaster recovery system needs to be structured in a way that is easy to manage and to ‘do what it says on the tin’, something Cove can fulfil particularly for companies that are trying to win new business and therefore need to be doing the upmost to secure their systems, such as keeping on track with penetration testing and vulnerability scanning, he said.
“We’re still seeing customers using tapes and external hard drives, but when you’ve got Cove in place and you’re able to automate your backup, you don’t have to waste time on engineers switching tapes around,” Sebastian pointed out.
“You need the computers to do the work, and you don’t want the human error… the human error can be that they drop an external drive, they lose a tape, they got distracted at that point, or they’re taking drives home. You want everything across to the cloud, you know it’s nice and secure, and you can sleep at night peacefully.”