A couple of weeks ago Acronis announce their acquisition of BackupAgent and signaled their intention to offer it as a value-add tool to their service provider customers. Today they’re announcing a follow-on acquisition and has snapped up nScaled. nScaled is a logical target for Acronis, the company provides disaster recovery, data retention and backup services. Primarily thy do so to large organizations – law firms, banks, universities etc. nSCaled works via a global network of data centers along with an on-premises appliance. Founded in 2009, nScaled was funded by Almaz Capital and Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures
It’s a logical move for Acronis who is running hard to build a coherent backup and storage business. Acronis was founded back in 2002 and has grown to 650 employees across 18 countries. The company claims some five million individual users across 300,00 paying organizations. Over the time that Acronis has been in business, there has been a massive move to the cloud. The company therefore needs to rethink its approach to provide relevance to its customers in a cloud and hybrid context.
With nScaled, Acronis can offer a service that allows customers to restore their entire operations to a cloud environment as opposed to on-premises. This is highly valuable for a number of reasons. Obviously it obviates the need to keep a full set of backup hardware ready on-premises, but it also means that in the event of a catastrophic failure affecting a broad area, that customers can recovery anywhere in the cloud – it removes the geographic constraints to DR. Cloud is, after all, oftenheld up as the best solution for DR, nScaled within the Acronis family gives organizations easy cloud DR.
nScaled helps Acronis both build out its own cloud storage platform, but also offer a standalone DR product that will have its own customers and revenue streams. Acronis already does the system backup stuff, their backup-as-a-service solution delivers cloud storage for backup data and nScaled solves the “restore to the cloud” problem.
Acronis is a vendor that doesn’t get much attention – it’s kind of one of those “unsexy infrastructure” plays. Maybe the nScaled and BackupAgent deals will start to change that.
