News

Datto's Disaster Recovery Product for Azure MSPs Hits the Market

• By Gladys Rama
• September 15, 2021

Cloud-based disaster recovery specialist Datto has launched a new dashboard product to help Microsoft Azure MSPs protect their customers' data against threats like security breaches, ransomware and cloud outages.

Datto Continuity for Microsoft Azure, announced this week, is a business continuity/disaster recovery solution designed primarily for managed service providers serving SMB customers "in the early stages of Azure adoption," explained Radhesh Menon, Datto's chief product officer, in a recent interview with RCP. It promises to provide SMBs comprehensive data protection and MSPs with a product that's predictable to price and margin.

"Comprehensive" is the key word that differentiates Datto's BC/DR product from others on the market, according to Menon.

"If you look at the space today, if you're an MSP, you'll have to piece together a solution that is a combination of a core Azure solution, as well as other third-party backup solution...and later on a full dashboard on top of it," he said. "What we've done is to provide that comprehensive protection from the get-go [so] that the MSP is having to worry less about piecing together a solution."

A second hallmark of Datto's product is its consistent, per-month pricing model. Cloud costs are notoriously unpredictable, which can make it difficult for MSPs to maintain stable profit margins on their cloud offerings. Datto Continuity for Microsoft Azure is billed at a flat rate and does not charge MSPs for data egress -- "the most critical element," Menon said.

Datto Continuity for Microsoft Azure includes several key perks at the technical level, as well. In the event of a cloud outage, the product uses "multi-cloud replication" to allow customers to recover data from either Microsoft Azure or Datto's own private cloud, depending on which vendor is down.

"If we're talking about a workload running in Azure, and if Azure itself were to fail -- for the sake of argument, it does happen once in a while -- since we have the ability to recover from our Datto cloud, it gives us an added level of protection," Menon said.

Additionally, the product promises very rapid data recovery, to the tune of a few minutes. "Datto Continuity for Microsoft Azure performs more frequent backups than other solutions, reducing the risk of data loss or prolonged system downtime," the company said in its announcement. Or, as Manon put it: "The fastest recovery on planet Earth."

Datto Continuity for Microsoft Azure is now available in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, with global availability expected by the end of this year. Datto is currently offering promotional pricing for early-access subscribers; more details are available via an on-demand webinar (sign-up here).