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Data resilience for companies of all sizes

Data protection and the ability to recover data in an emergency, be it a natural disaster, technology failure or cybercrime, is critical to modern business. Far from the days when a cloud service or a semi-regular backup of your data to an external device was sufficient, today, companies need to be able to literally replace their operational data in minutes to ensure continued business operations.

Many companies offer backup and recovery services, but their primary focus is the enterprise market, with solutions too expensive and complex for smaller to mid-range companies. Nakivo is a company offering affordable backup and recovery services to and from almost any platform, and has customers and partners in over 180 countries.

Its solutions can be applied to the largest enterprises, but are also tailored to the small and mid-sized markets in terms of ease of use. Its pricing is also designed for the SMB market, being much lower than the market averages.

SMART Security Solutions spoke to Nakivo’s Tony Smagliy about the company. Smagliy explains that Nakivo has been operating for over a decade and around 50% of its customers are in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region. It partners with companies to install and support its systems, while more technical support is also available direct from the company.

Nakivo integrates its systems with a broad range of IT vendors to ensure it can seamlessly backup and restore from almost any system customers use. Smagliy says this allows it to back up faster than other solutions (due to the direct integration), with double the performance on NAS (network-attached storage) products.

Physical and virtual

The Nakivo solution caters for backups of all types, from workstations to servers (onsite, cloud-based, virtual machine, virtual appliance etc.), as well as data from SaaS services like 365, offering an all-in-one solution companies require, including:

- Backup.

- Replication.

- Near-instant recovery.

- Ransomware protection (immutable backups).

- Disaster recovery.

- Site recovery.

- Technology monitoring: This service monitors VMWare solutions, optimising performance and reporting on CPU, RAM and disk usage of VMware vSphere hosts, VMs and datastores.

Depending on the customer's needs, data can be backed up or replicated (making an identical copy of a server or workstation) continuously, or regular ‘moment in time’ backups can be made. Streaming in real time to data recovery sites is also possible.

One of the benefits Nakivo provides is that not only can it backup almost any platform, but it can also restore to any platform. For example, if a physical onsite server fails, the restoration can be made to another physical server, or a virtual machine in the cloud, such as on Amazon EC2. Virtual machines Nakivo integrates with for backups include VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, and Proxmox, while Windows and Linux servers and workstations are supported.

It provides full system recovery as well as granular recovery, such as a particular file or directory, with a fast search function available in the dashboard. The company can also perform malware scans, supporting solutions from various antivirus vendors, before restoration to ensure the restored data is free from surprises. This is a critical feature for companies hit by ransomware – you must ensure the same malware has not been backed up before restoring.

The company includes a solution designed for managed service providers. These companies can provide backup and restoration services from Nakivo to provide additional services to multiple clients from a single dashboard.

Data being transferred over the internet or local network can be deduplicated and compressed as it is sent to its backup location, and customers can encrypt all data in motion and at rest. Once again, immutable backups are available in case of ransomware attacks.

Building the channel

While Nakivo supports direct sales via its website (www.nakivo.com), Smagliy says it mostly relies on its channel partners in its various regions. CSSI is the local distributor supporting various Nakivo resellers, and the company is set on expanding its channel in southern Africa. He says most SMBs prefer to have partners to support them in setting up and maintaining their infrastructure components.

A list of resellers can be found at www.nakivo.com/how-to-buy/resellers/, and more product information is available at www.nakivo.com.

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