The backup and recovery industry is evolving rapidly to meet the challenges of increasing data volumes, sophisticated cyber threats, and the need for regulatory compliance. Innovation in cloud-based solutions, automation, and AI are driving the market, while the demand for simplicity and efficiency remains a top priority for businesses. Companies that stay ahead of these trends will be better positioned to protect their data and ensure business continuity in an increasingly digital world.
Asigra has been a pioneer and thought leader in the backup and recovery space for the past 37 years, setting itself apart with industry-leading data and ransomware protection capabilities. “Building on our long history of innovation, we have launched our latest backup platform, SaaSAssure, designed to provide comprehensive backup, recovery and for a variety of SaaS applications. Our mission statement is “Recovery is Everything.” Our core value is “inspiration,” says Eric Simmons, CEO, Asigra.
The Inception Story
Asigra was founded more than 37 years ago by David Farajun, a visionary computer programmer who could not find an adequate solution to back up the code he was developing. That frustration inspired him not only to build a product that met his needs but also to create a company that would evolve alongside changes in cybersecurity. Ultimately, this led to the industry’s first agentless enterprise cloud-based backup and recovery software that also addresses today’s cyber threats.
“Today, David continues to guide our direction, along with a leadership team packed with industry heavy-hitters. Our software has developed to include features like bi-directional malware scanning, CDR, MPA, SaaS Protection, and Validation Restore to verify the integrity of backups, and we are frequently first to market with new advances a product of our perennial commitment to our original vision of technology that constantly iterates to get ahead of new threats.”
Constantly Evolving to Provide Industry-leading Protection
Headquartered in Toronto, Asigra has expanded to include a wider range of tools for data protection through our MSP and VAR partners.
We are constantly and proactively pursuing ways to protect against ransomware attacks and other threats to the backup and recovery of servers, virtual machines, endpoint devices, databases, and SaaS/IaaS-based applications.
Through our Secure Backup Platform and other solutions, we provide ransomware protection, cloud SaaS backup, compliance management, and business continuity support that can prevent catastrophic business impacts.
The differentiating factor
“We are an organization driven by inspiration. In every interaction, we ask ourselves if we are approaching initiatives to inspire. This powerful motivator influences our colleagues in both their contributions to Asigra and in their personal lives. It also pushes us to seek innovations that extend beyond technology and emphasize the value we deliver to our partners and customers. Inspiration is not always easy, but it elevates our understanding of what truly matters beyond technology, allowing us to connect on a deeper level.”
Staying ahead of the competition
With the rapid adoption of SaaS applications creating today’s SaaS-powered workplace, it is imperative to ensure a company’s entire SaaS footprint is protected. Most SaaS providers follow the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Shared Responsibility Model, which states that businesses are responsible for their data. Businesses need to understand that SaaS providers do not offer backup and recovery services, nor do they guarantee data protection they focus on application availability and data redundancy. The crucial difference is that if a business’s SaaS data is deleted or compromised through accidental deletion, ransomware, or other cyber-attacks, the data is often non-recoverable. To address this gap, Asigra offers SaaSAssure, a cloud-native solution designed to provide backup and recovery services for high-value, business-critical SaaS applications.
Adapting to the changing landscape
Most CIOs prioritize data protection and business resiliency as their top concerns. In response, “we have developed a solution to safeguard the vast amount of critical business data residing in vulnerable SaaS applications. Our platform enables businesses to achieve full protection of sensitive data generated and stored in a multitude of clouds in under 10 minutes.”
Strategies for the future challenge
Asigra is among the few organizations that have developed a multi-tenant platform designed with a partner-first approach. “We currently support over 300 managed service providers globally and are committed to expanding our partner community. Our focus also includes systems integrators who implement and customize SaaS applications for companies, as well as strategic partnerships with SaaS providers and other entities not currently targeted by our competitors, offering significant growth opportunities.”
The initial challenge
“The key challenge is leveraging our time and resources to effectively remain ahead of the competition in this market as the largest players in the business begin to extend their offerings. We will continue to differentiate through our focus on inspiration and bring that level of value and attention to what matters most to the customers we serve. Knowing that a backup admin can sometimes take three weeks to remediate a backup failure simply because they changed the backup location by accident and both proactively addressing this and offering automated or immediate remediation is a massive time saver and risk eliminator. We also continue to expand our strategic partnerships to further differentiate faster. As an example, partnering with an organization that has a solution to identify all the SaaS apps within a business. This helps to prioritize their backup needs and budget. Lastly, our unique integration of backup with cyber security protection continues to evolve alongside the threat landscape.”
Products and services influencing the global scale
“We serve a global market today and one critical element we focus on is working with analysts and industry influencers to help educate the market on the importance of protecting their SaaS data with 3rd party solutions. A second key message is to have SaaS providers extend their APIs to make it possible and easier to back up and restore all the data stored within their applications. Many do not do this effectively today and if they require the end customer to be responsible for the data, they need to enable them to protect all of it effectively.”
International stories success & partnership
“We are partnering with Auvik which is a cloud-based network monitoring tool that offers the ability to discover, monitor, manage and secure SaaS to eliminate shadow IT. Adding backup and recovery is a perfect complement to this offering and vice-versa. Others are in various stages of completion.”
Awards and Recognition
“Throughout our history, Asigra’s technological innovation has been motivated by our experiences with customers. The most impactful have been the stories we have heard from those who come to us when their former backup solution could not restore a clean copy of their data. Those experiences, plus our drive to anticipate and protect against new threats, have led to unique security technology that far surpasses our competitors’ security strategies. And while our customers’ and partners’ feedback is the only validation we need, it does not hurt that we are consistently recognized as an industry-leading platform,” added Simmons.
The future roadmap
The company is evolving into a comprehensive data protection and analysis platform, harnessing the power of AI and machine learning for key use cases. “Initially, we will predict, remediate, and eventually eliminate backup and recovery errors, often caused by human error. Another critical use case for the injection of AI and ML involves identifying ransomware and other cyber-attacks. Additionally, we will focus heavily on advanced data analytics, enabling organizations to derive valuable insights from aggregated backup data. This approach is simpler and more cost-effective than moving everything into a data lake. Furthermore, we will implement our unique bi-directional antimalware and Content Disarm and Reconstruction (CDR) technologies to enhance protection against ransomware attacks,” concluded Eric Simmons.
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