Public cloud platforms like Amazon and Microsoft do not offer enough guarantees against data loss and downtime, virtualised backup firm Veeam has warned.
The eight-year-old company wants to see cloud providers offer tiers of service with progressively better service level agreements (SLAs) so that SMBs can access some of the same benefits as large enterprises.
CEO Ratmir Timashev told CBR that providers’ current refusal to guarantee 99% uptime and their limited data recovery and backup is limiting the potential use of the cloud to SMBs, as well as discouraging further adoption among enterprises.
Instead, he argued, there should be more choice available for firms, so that they can hold multiple SLAs utilising different levels of service from a cloud provider.
"The reliability of public clouds is the number one concern," Timashev said. "Today’s basic business requirements include access to data from anywhere from any device 24/7. The requirements are such that there is little tolerance for data loss and little tolerance for downtime.
"[But] public service providers like Google, Amazon, Microsoft they cannot guarantee a high service level agreement to every customer."
This has resulted in SMBs using the cloud as a test and development platform, or for running non-business critical applications, but has put them off the idea of shifting more services to the cloud, he contended.
Veeam, a startup in 2007, is now working with 21,000 resellers to provide virtualised backup solutions for virtual machines.
And the company hopes these solutions will become the "key component" of Timashev’s vision of a tiered cloud service model by increased adoption in data centres.
Its solutions sit underneath the virtual machines in a data centre, and Timashev claimed that they improve backup, disaster recovery and cloud archive services to the point where data recovery time is cut from five to eight hours to three to five minutes.
"For starters we can instantly recover any VM on the application stored in our backup without any additional hardware or software," added Ian Wells, Veeam’s EMEA VP.
Rather than this approach proving too expensive for SMBs, he added, it gives them the option of storing sensitive data in the cloud on an expensive tier, and other services such as customer relationship management (CRM) on a less expensive tier, paying on a per user basis.
Timashev believes this approach could turn Veeam into a billion-dollar company in five years time, predicting a turnover of $380m to $400m for 2014.
This, he contended, will represent a 20% stake in the overall backup market at the expense of rivals such as Symantec, IBM and HP, while Veeam is set to sign up its 100,000th customer in the next fortnight or so.
Cloud service providers already signed up include SaaSplaza and Iceland’s Advania, while Veeam is working on adding to its customer base in the UK.
Wells told CBR: "Most major service providers in the UK we’re talking to in some shape or form. Be that a CSC, be it a Fujitsu, be it an MDNX. These kind of people were once partners who sold our products, now they use our products as much if not more to provide a service."
