Previously, we discussed eFolder’s philosophy of being an open platform that fosters partner choice and maximizes a partner’s ability to capture market opportunities. eFolder’s solution ecosystem allows partners to deliver over 20 distinct backup and disaster recovery solutions to meet the needs of their customers in their own verticals and markets. Here are some examples of the wide diversity of customer scenarios and market segments that you can serve with eFolder:
- SOHO or Virtual Office: These customers may be operating without a server or active directory, may have some or most of their IT services run in the cloud (e.g., email), and have file data spread out over desktops and laptops. eFolder’s file-level cloud backup is a good fit here, or if they’re not ready for the cloud, our file-level D2D backup is cost effective and practical. Both solutions are software only and cost less than a handful of dollars per month for a partner to deliver.
- Small business with an SBS Server: These customers are large enough to have an SBS server, but don’t have many other servers. Some of these customers may not be able to afford a dedicated local backup appliance or don’t require immediate onsite virtualization of down servers. Here ShadowProtect + eFolder can be combined for a cost-effective and comprehensive on-site and/or off-site data protection solution, without requiring any additional hardware.
- Mobile workforce: Customers may have a fleet of mobile employees that carry of significant amount of business critical data on mobile laptops. Traditional BDR-style backups are not suitable when data is always on the go. eFolder provides solutions to get data backed up to the cloud or back to the central office no matter where they are. Mobile customers also get instant access to any of their backed up data via a branded web portal, so their documents are only ever a few clicks away.
- Small businesses that are sensitive to downtime: Many small businesses will stop functioning if their servers go down. CPA firms are one good example. The amount of data may not be that large (relatively speaking), but the data is critical to the operations of the business. An eFolder BDR appliance is a good fit here, as it provides instant on-site virtualization of down servers and fast bare-metal recovery of servers and VMs.
- Businesses with multiple geographic locations: Some larger, cost sensitive SMB customers may have multiple offices but do not yet understand the value of backing up to the cloud (including the ability to virtualize backups in the cloud). eFolder’s site-to-site backup or replication solutions are effective here, enabling highly cost-effective, automatic data protection between sites. Partners can replace legacy, manual tape backup processes with fully automated D2D backup and replication, and also reduce customer costs by offering a pure SaaS solution. Existing storage hardware can be leveraged, or eFolder BDRs can be deployed at each site for turn-key protection. This solution can be complemented by sending some of the most critical data to our cloud for safe-keeping.
- Businesses with server sprawl, large existing virtualization infrastructures, or large data sets: The eFolder AppAssure Cloud solution is a strong fit for these customers. AppAssure’s global deduplication minimizes storage implications of server sprawl and large data sets. LiveRecovery offers near-instant restores of even multi-terabyte volumes. AppAssure also integrates tightly with VMware and Hyper-V, allowing point and click restores of individual VMs from any point-in-time snapshot, and can even keep “cold standby” VMs up to date and ready to spin up. Near real time replication enables the tightest RPOs, and the option of instant off-site virtualization in the eFolder Continuity Cloud can satisfy even the tightest RTOs. AppAssure’s application-aware automatic data integrity checks ensure that production critical SQL and Exchange workloads are completely intact.
These are just a handful of the 20+ solution scenarios described in our partner provisioning guide.
Each of these solutions meet different business needs and should be priced and sold as distinct services. All of these solutions integrate tightly together into the eFolder partner web portal, allowing partners to deploy a variety of solutions without significantly increasing operational complexities. We believe that because we are open, we can build a better solution ecosystem, and our partners and their customers win. We’d love to hear how you think we’re doing.
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