Over the last several years, the cloud has brought a host of functionality to small and medium businesses that did not exist before. The ability to host and store data at the fraction of the cost than what was available before may prove to be a seminal shift in the history of how industries conduct digital business.
A company called Axcient wants to take it a step further. Axcient, which specializes in data backup and infrastructure for SMBs, is releasing a product today that it calls Cloud Continuity and its makes a big, bold claim: the end to business downtown, period. Axcient’s approach to data backup and business computing certainly is unique in the industry, but can it really put an end to downtime?
Axcient CEO Justin Moore is certain that his company has figured out the answer. The Cloud Continuity product is a mixture of several different aspects of the data backup industry tied in to Axcient’s existing infrastructure.
Imagine the ability to save every single thing that happens in your business in the cloud. Not just the files and the data, but the actual infrastructure of your business, from desktops to applications to system administration files. Cloud Continuity claims to be able to save the entire business from the driver image level, file level and application level and to restore them to their entirety with the click of a button exactly as they were left.
Axcient uses what it describes as a kind of box that is placed in every office that reads the state of the business computing and saves it in its entirety. Moore describes it as easy as having the cable man come in and set up your cable box. What Axcient does well is serve SMBs with a single solution for virtualized and read-state storage on one platform. It is not what Axcient is trying to do is completely unique in the data storage business but rather that it brings in the approaches of several different vendors into one easy solution.
“We have been working for 14 months to develop a 20 second function,” Moore said.
Moore believes that in the realm of data backup and infrastructure, the small to medium business vertical is not well represented and hence is a market that Axcient can be come ubiquitous in. The Cloud Continuity products starts as low as $100 and the user interface and administration controls are designed to be simple for even the most computer illiterate of businesses. Moore’s argument and vision is compelling and the technology may be able to pull it off.
In terms of redundancy, Axcient has data centers on both the east and west coast and it is growing quickly, adding infrastructure and employees day-to-day. The model is built on Hewlett-Packard hardware and will be available in November. Axcient’s last funding round was in the realm of $15 million.
