Top 15 Cloud Collaboration Apps

Telecommunications vendor NTT America recently partnered with Asigra, storage newcomer Coldstor Data and VMware to provide a cloud-based data protection recovery and business continuity services to SMBs and enterprise data center customers.

The services include cloud backup, archiving, and compliance and are based on a relationship with Asigra, which provides the cloud-based backup and data protection, Coldstor Data, which provides archiving services, and VMware vSphere, which allows NTT to create virtual machines across VMware vCloud Powered cloud services.

Each of the components of NTT America's data protection services suite let customers adopt both private and hybrid cloud environments and turn their capital expenditure dollars into operational expenditures.

The Data and Application Continuity--Powered by Asigra service uses an agentless software architecture to back up customer data to a NTT America data center. With Asigra Cloud Backup, data is deduplicated before transfer and continuously backed up. Asigra is a long-time provider of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery products, which it sells through managed service providers and other service providers.

The Long-Term Data Archiving service uses Coldstor Data's Archive Platform to archive any type of data into the cloud, and maintain a chain of custody so customers always know where their data is and who has access to it. The Coldstor Data Archive Platform is comprised of a local appliance that resides at the customer location, which communicates with a metadata server and storage in NTT America's data center. Coldstor's Archive is archive software agnostic and its appliance simply serves as a storage target for software such as Symantec's Enterprise Vault. Data is replicated over IP between the customer's premises and the NTT cloud.

The Secure Hybrid Cloud for Business Continuity service allows IT administrators to deploy virtual machines using VMware vCloud Powered cloud services.

Disaster recovery and business continuity services are one of the first things to fall out of an IT budget when times are tough. With business continuity and disaster recovery as a service offering, the need to fund build-outs of storage infrastructures and adapt as the amount of data grows is no longer a factor. With NTT's data protection and storage services, which are charged monthly based on storage consumption, IT is easily able to adopt the technology and do so from their operational budget.

Deni Connor is founding analyst for Storage Strategies NOW, an industry analyst firm that focuses on storage, virtualization, and servers.

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