NTT America adds business continuity to the cloud

NTT America has expanded its cloud offerings with suite of data protection and business continuity services ranging from cloud backup to archiving to compliance. The company’s aim is to give smaller enterprises the same kind of protection larger companies can better afford.

“The cloud is making it more affordable for the mid market and many small and mid-sized businesses to subscribe to solutions that address the needs of their data,” said Craig Hurley, senior product manager for data center services at NTT America. “Prior to the cloud, only the larger enterprises were able to afford the solutions that addressed their long term data protection and archiving needs. The cloud breaks down these cost barriers and in many instances provide better solutions that existed just a few years ago.”

The company’s new Cloud Backup and Cloud Archiving applications are billed based on the customer's usage, thus minimizing upfront expenditures. Cloud Backup is an agentless architecture that continuously backs up a business’ data to the NTT America data center. Cloud Archiving addresses regulations that mandate the long-term storage of a company’s data, files and applications and monitors and tracks who has access to certain types of information, and when.

“Every business would look at their data as one of their most valuable assets,” Hurley said. “Certainly the more applications that a customer, has the more complex their data protection needs are. Our new offerings are priced on a consumption model, thus providing a predictable monthly cost.”

Hurley added that cloud represents an ongoing education process, particularly for smaller enterprise IT pros. “Business continuity and disaster recovery typically are among the top five things that a CIO wants to address each year—however, it is one of the quickest to fall off the list as budgets are finalized and other projects with more immediate priorities emerge,” he said. “The positive trend that we are seeing within the industry is that the costs of these solutions are decreasing, and therefore the ability of companies to institute a solution is becoming more of a possibility.”