Tuesday had an update for the Austin, TX-based startup, Spanning that it had started rolling out a new backup service for Google Apps which includes Gmail too. This calls for Spanning becoming a business class Google Apps backup service and looks out for mainly the entrepreneurs for the grab.
Spanning for the background has been a backup service which has always been highly rated on the Google Apps Marketplace, but Gmail was missing on the list. Charlie Wood, CEO of Spanning said that Gmail backup was on the customer want list which was finally fulfilled by the company.
Competition here has been quite stiff for sometime as Spanning had competitors like Backupify in a few areas. But Spanning has been concentrating on being more of a business-class backup service while the competitors have more plans to move the horizontal way. Wood confirmed that the company’s target was to get businesses involved in. He continued saying, “The larger the company the more sophisticated they are. They recognize the need for backups.” Basically, the lookout is for those companies who have 1,000 to 4,000-seat Google Apps accounts.
To be on track with their business focus, the company is on to offer a 99.9 percent up-time service level agreement. This agreement would be for Spanning Backup’s second version pertaining to Google Apps. A few enterprises have even contacted Spanning with their requirements which calls for a pick-and-choose backup approach to Gmail, as Wood said. An example for this requirement would be like a company prefers to have a backup email from executives and the legal team, but would not want to file and rank workers.
The charge set by Spanning is on a yearly basis for backup which is $30 per user.
The main points of this backup pack would be:
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The backup for Google Apps includes unlimited storage.
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Historical logs of each backup so customers can choose what snapshot to restore.
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Privacy certifications with U.S., E.U. and Swiss safe harbor frameworks.
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Discounts for non-profits and educational institutions.
One in the most interesting features in the new version is Spanning’s SLA. The only obligation her is that the company needs to be running on Amazon Web Services. But outages have been a part of Amazon Web Services in the last few months. The problem was even faced by Wood during an AWS outage, but they were able to keep running because of the use of multiple availability zones, auto-scaling and fail over procedures.
The current backed up list of Spanning Backup has over 7 billion contacts, events, calendar and documents for Google Apps users and with the update Wood was confident of helping business in having better protection to their data as he said, “After a successful private beta period, we’re excited to make it generally available and start helping businesses better protect their data. Data is the lifeblood of any business, and we’ve built Spanning Backup with a clear understanding of how important it is to protect our customer’s data.”
Spanning Backup for Google Apps has its certification from TRUSTe and is all the way in compliance with the US-EU and US-Swiss Safe Harbor Frameworks for privacy.
So one can just log in with their Spanning Backup account here and have access to backup for their Gmail accounts.