Aparavi Unfurls SaaS Application to Modernize Data Protection

The rise of ransomware coupled along with a variety of new compliance regulations is forcing IT organizations to rethink how they store and manage data. There’s clearly still a lot of interest in employing public cloud to store large amounts of data cost effectively. But many of the data protection and management tools that IT organizations have in place today were not designed from the ground up to efficiently manage large amounts of distributed data in the cloud era.

Aparavi this week announced a namesake software-as-a-service (SaaS) application based on a three-tier architecture that leverages REST application programming interfaces (APIs) to employ multiple clouds to store data based on policies defined by an internal IT organization.

Available on both Windows and Linux platforms, Aparavi employs the Amazon Simple storage application programming interface (API). But Jonathan Calmes, vice president of business development for Aparavi, notes that the API is already widely supported, and that Aparavi has also been certified on the Google Cloud Platform, Wasabi, IBM Bluemix, Scality and Cloudian platforms.

Rather than being locked into one platform, Calmes says, the cloud service is designed to make it simpler for organizations to manage recovery time and point objectives using a service that can detect, for example, the amount of network bandwidth available at any given time within a branch office. That approach makes it possible for organizations to substantially reduce the egress fees that they might encounter when trying to recover data from a public cloud. In effect, Calmes says, Aparavi is designed to minimize the amount of data archived in a public cloud by giving organizations a simpler way to define and implement retention policies.

Calmes notes that all the data moved by Aparavi into and out of a public cloud is also encrypted by default, thereby reducing any security concerns organizations may have about relying on an external service.

“We built Aparavi for a multi-cloud environment,” says Calmes. “Legacy data protection applications were built for tape drives.”

No doubt there is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to managing and protecting data within most organizations. The challenge now is simply overcoming much of the inertia that exists around a process that many IT people simply take for granted without thinking about how to reinvent for the cloud era.