VARs: How Arcserve UDP and Tape Backup Can Optimize Your Clients' Backup Strategy

One of the fundamental reasons that value-added resellers (VARs) exist is to help end customers streamline their operations and achieve their business goals using software and technology. But that takes more than just off-the-shelf software solutions.

According to TechTarget, the benefits of working with a VAR don’t stop with software customization. VARs help with projects that are too demanding or time-consuming for in-house resources, provide industry-specific expertise (healthcare or financial services, for example), and serve as a single point of contact between IT vendors. 

If you’re a VAR and doing your job well, you have likely become a trusted advisor for your customers. That leads to long-term customer relationships. With ransomware rampant and hackers constantly looking for new ways to attack, talking to your customers about their backup and disaster recovery strategy can result in a win-win—more protection for your customer’s data and more revenues for your company. 

That starts by letting your customers know that the 2022 IBM Cost of a Data Breach report found that 83 percent of companies will experience a data breach, and the average cost of a data breach is a whopping $9.44 million in the US. And a Statista survey found that 71 percent of companies worldwide were affected by ransomware. So helping your customers make the investments necessary to protect their data is common sense. And it extends their trust in your capabilities and value as a VAR.

Employ the 3-2-1-1 Strategy

We often write about the importance of using the 3-2-1-1 backup strategy to ensure your customers’ data is protected and can always be recovered. It’s simple: Your customers should keep three copies of their data (one primary and two backups), with two copies stored locally on two formats (network-attached storage, tape, or local drive) and one copy stored offsite in the cloud or secure storage. 

The last “1” stands for immutable storage, where your customers’ backups are saved in a write-once-read-many-times format that can’t be altered or deleted. Another layer of security, especially for cost-effective data archiving, is using air-gapped tape storage. More on that later.

Start With Stronger Defenses

One way you can simplify bolstering your customers’ defenses is with Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP). Arcserve UDP software delivers all-in-one data and ransomware protection to neutralize ransomware attacks, restore data, and perform effective disaster recovery across on- and off-premises workloads.

Arcserve UDP is safeguarded by Sophos Intercept X Advanced cybersecurity. By uniquely combining deep-learning server protection, immutable storage, and scalable onsite and offsite business continuity, it gives your customers multilayered data protection with complete IT resiliency for their virtual, physical, and cloud infrastructures. 

Arcserve UDP also protects hyperconverged and SaaS workloads. That’s especially important because most businesses rely on SaaS applications, like Microsoft 365, and virtual machines (VMs) like VMware, to keep their businesses moving today.

Ensure Faster Recovery

With Arcserve UDP, your customers can reduce their downtime from days to minutes and validate recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs) and service-level agreements (SLAs) with automated testing and granular reporting.

As a VAR, you can take advantage of Arcserve UDP’s management flexibility with either a multi-tenant, cloud-based management console or offer a private management console, depending on the customers’ needs.

Your customers can restore their data faster with instant VM and bare metal recovery (BMR), local and remote virtual standby, application-consistent backup and granular restore, hardware snapshot support, and extensions that deliver high availability and tape support. 

Tape Backup for Cost-Effective High-Capacity Storage

That brings us to Arcserve Tape Backup. While it’s been around for decades, tape is still a growing choice for data archiving and backup. Trendfocus projects that tape capacity will grow by 13 percent in 2023 and will continue to expand by an impressive 21 percent CAGR from 2022 through 2027. 

There’s a good reason for that, and it comes down to cost and capabilities. Tape is a great media choice for air-gapped data backups because it’s an affordable way to store massive amounts of data. Combined with immutable storage, tape backup gives your customers another level of protection against data loss, plus cost-effective archiving.

Arcserve Tape Backup modernizes data protection with centralized management and storage resource manager reporting. The software incorporates sophisticated functionality into your customers’ VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer platforms. It also simplifies management by giving your customers a view of their entire environment to mitigate the risk of data loss on virtualized servers. 

The smart restore feature lets Arcserve Tape Backup redirect restore jobs to other media containing the same data without any manual intervention. And your customers can quickly restore individual application objects from Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft SharePoint. Arcserve Tape Backup also delivers faster, more efficient backups and restores with UNIX and Linux data movers for storage-area network (SAN)-based backups. 

Deliver An Optimized Backup Strategy

Demonstrating to your customers how combining Arcserve UDP and Arcserve Tape Backup can deliver unbeatable data protection and an optimized backup strategy is a surefire way to show that you’re looking out for their best interests. And it further builds that bond of trust.

If you’re not already an Arcserve technology partner, find out how we can help you meet your customers' data protection needs and grow your business. Learn more about becoming a partner here.  

To learn more about Arcserve UDP, request a demo.