SOS Online Backup Secures $3 Million Series A Round

Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... ? Learn More

SOS Online Backup, a company that markets cloud-based data backup and protection solutions, has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Splashfond Investors. The financing round brings the total of capital raised by the company, which is obviously operating in a saturated market of online backup solutions, to $10 million since its inception in 2006.

SOS Online Backup, which competes with the likes of Carbonite, Mozy and Nomadesk, says it currently boasts more than 500,000 users.

The capital injection will serve to support the roll-out of several new products and cloud-based data backup solutions for a wide range of devices and platforms, the company says.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Spanning Adds Gmail Backup To Its Google Apps Backup Service

Austin, Texas-based startup Spanning launched a new version of its Google Apps backup service today, which now includes business-grade backup for Gmail. Previously, the company provided backup for other Google Apps products, including Google Calendar, Docs, and Contacts, but, says, Spanning Cloud Apps founder and CEO Charlie Wood, “Gmail backup has been, by far, the most requested capability from our existing customer base.”

But Google Apps is already in the cloud – why do you need to back it up?

According to the company, even a company of Google’s size can have issues leading to data deletions. And not all data deletions are Google’s fault – sometimes, the end users themselves are to blame. Then what do you do? User-deleted data isn’t Google’s problem, so it can’t (and won’t) help you recover.

Businesses, particularly the small-to-medium sized companies which currently comprise the majority of Spanning’s target market, still need to be assured that their mission-critical data is securely backed up, whether it’s in the cloud or not.

What’s interesting about Spanning’s backup product is that it doesn’t require businesses to maintain their own servers, nor does it utilize its own servers for data storage. Given that the company is still a startup, and could be prone to its own issues and failures, that latter item is a much-needed assurance.

Instead, Spanning stores data on Amazon’s Web Services, using a combination of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3 and Elastic Block Store (EBS), which provide 99.999999999% durability.

Spanning backs up data incrementally, and doesn’t overwrite the old backups with new ones. Restorations are made possible from a simple-to-use interface. And it respects user permissions so that I.T. can’t view the file’s contents, they can only restore files when deleted.

In addition, the Spanning Backup site, application, and Google Apps Marketplace listings are certified for privacy and security by TRUSTe, the leading online privacy solutions provider. It’s  also certified under the US-EU and US-Swiss SafeHarbor Frameworks.

Wary consumers can also use Spanning to backup their own Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Contacts, too, if so inclined. It’s only $3/month for an individual account vs. $2.50/per user/per month for businesses. But consumers are not Spanning’s main focus. It’s more interested in providing businesses (SMB up to Enterprise) with a cloud backup solution.

Spanning had previously raised $2 million in funding from the Foundry Group back in April. It competes with a very similar service from Backupify, but slightly undercuts them on pricing – $2.50/per user/per month vs. Backupify’s $3/per user/per month. It also hopes to capitalize on Backupify’s growing pains, we imagine.

Spanning Cloud Apps, based in Austin, Texas, was spun out of Spanning Sync, Inc. by its founder Charlie Wood in 2010. Spanning delivers business class data management for popular...

Learn more

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Sequoia And Nexus Invest $12 Million In Laptop Backup Startup Druva

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

Druva, the creator of data protection solutions for SMEs, announced this morning that it has raised $12 million in series B funding. The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from existing investor, Sequoia Capital. Jishnu Bhattacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners will be joining Druva’s board of directors as a result of this investment, joining Sequoia Capital Managing Director Shailendra Singh, Ramani Kothandaraman, Co-founder and COO of Druva, and and Yoram Novick, CEO and founder of Topio.

The series B round adds to the $5 million Druva raised in April of 2010, bringing total investment to just north of $17 million. The startup’s new infusion of capital will be used to expand sales across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Founded in 2007, the Mountain View-based enterprise company now has more than 800 customers, protecting more than 300,000 laptops and devices across the globe, and is beginning to thrive in a market in which it faces competition from the likes of EMC Avamar, Symantec, and Autonomy.

Druva’s inSync software (its flagship product) allows companies to take advantage of automated backups of laptops, smartphones, and tablets, protecting corporate data for both in-office and remote users. The software also allows enterprises to retrieve data and make one-click restores of any file or “backup volume from a browser or iOS and Android devices”, according to the Druva team.

The startup’s value proposition is that it offers backups over LAN, WAN, and VPN networks and makes backups more efficient by de-duplicating data — in other words, storing only a single copy of files and data uploaded by a network’s users. This de-duplication allows Druva’s backups to rank at speeds ten times those of its competitors, and enables companies to save 90 percent on bandwidth and storage, while maintaining high rates of accuracy for both Outlook and Office applications. Druva’s software also gives enterprises the option to store their data on location, in the cloud, or via web-connected data centers.

According to Sheila Childs, Vice President of Research at Gartner, enterprise organizations are beginning to become aware of the inadequate protection of important data on corporate laptops and mobile devices. As mobile workers are integral to the success of many businesses and carry data that would be nearly impossible to reconstruct if their corporate device were damaged or stolen, she said, solutions like that offered by Druva are becoming essential to SMEs looking to secure their sensitive data.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.