Asigra, the software that powers echopath’s backup solution was featured for the 4th consecutive year in the 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup Software and Integrated Appliances. The Gartner Magic Quadrant is known as one of the leading research tools used to evaluate market maturity and vendor differentiation. As an Asigra partner, we are proud to be part of the short list of backup providers to be included in this report.
Strengths
Gartner had a lot of good things to say about Asigra. They commented that Asigra’s “low-touch, agentless architecture is available for physical and virtual environments.” It’s hard to miss how easy it can be to implement Asigra because of the agentless architecture, even in complex IT organizations. Our solution is designed to easily and successfully backup both physical and virtual machines. In a time when solutions are trying to specifically address either physical or virtual machines, why not do both simply and effectively without having to bring in a variety of solutions.
Gartner also brought up another strength of Asigra, “The Backup Lifecycle Management concept provides four tiers of backup as data ages over time, with optional deletion and data destruction certificates.” We’re glad they picked up on this feature; this allows organizations to organize how new data and older data are stored in unprecedented ways. You can think about how this would be important by answering some simple questions. Do you want to pay the same price to backup older data that is never touched vs. new active data? How fast should new data be recovered vs. old data? How do you want to verify that your critical and confidential data has been deleted after it’s no longer needed?
Room for improvement
It would not be fair to leave out mentioning the critiques that Gartner had as well; they list critiques for every backup vendor they review. “The administrative interface remains outdated and can be complex to manage” is one thing Gartner had to say about Asigra. This critique makes sense to us at echopath as we work with the interface every day. It has been described by our engineering team as “not the prettiest thing in the world, but it works!” The team followed up by telling me that they like Asigra because of what it does under the hood. They can rest comfortably knowing that the product is built on a powerful foundation ready to recover data when needed. On a side note, Asigra is planning a new build with a redesigned interface to be released early 2015.