Acronis buys back up firm to bolster cloud offering

Acronis has acquired cloud backup company BackupAgent in a move to strengthen its cloud backup offering for service providers.

Acronis says the acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, helps in its cloud strategy goal of enabling service providers, hosting companies and telcos to deliver complete data protection services to customers, storing data in providers; or customers' data centers, or in a public cloud.

The deal will see BackupAgent's solution transitioned to the Acronis AnyData Engine technology 'over time', Acronis says.

The backup and disaster recovery vendor says that move will allow service providers to deliver 'new generation data protection technologies' via a cloud backup solution to their customers.

Among those solutions are file-level and full-system backup for desktops and servers; backup of physical and virtual servers, supporting all popular hypervisors; context-aware backup for business applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Active Directory; and support of multiple-destinations (on-premise, service provider cloud, public cloud etc) for data storage.

Acronis claims the acquisition means existing Acronis and BackupAgent partners 'will receive the most complete data protection solution to offer to their customers'.

The company says service providers will also benefit from the long-standing partnership between Acronis and Parallels, leveraging full integration of BackupAgent solutions with Parallels Automation, enabling Parallels-enabled service providers to quickly deploy a cloud backup offering to customers at 'a very low cost of entry'.

BackupAgent has 50,000 customers worldwide, and 'hundreds' of active partners.