Double-Take beats Symantec and CA to punch with direct-touch DR cloud

In terms of cost, Masters estimates that its Cloud will sit somewhere between a completely unmanaged and a fully managed services. Although masters suspects that for complex environments, channel partners would still be required to provide the value added and complimentary services for a full disaster recovery platform, even if the storage location was within a cloud.

Although the firm has yet to sign up any UK customers, several US customers have already onboard through the referral programme.

Rivals

Masters acknowledges that the firm will be promoting its service to partners of vendors who have yet to provide a comparable cloud offering, namely Symantec and CA. “We beat them to it, we are the first to market with an incredible strong product for the SMB,” he says.

Masters hints that some of its larger service provider partners such as Rackspace (RAX) and SunGard may well be evaluating building comparable licensed services or being used as Cloud targets alongside Amazon later in the year. The advantage, he claims, is that it allows end users to avoid lock-in by effectively allowing cloud to cloud migration, a benefit few other vendors in the data storage space are prepared to even consider.

Another major benefit of multiple clouds is to assuage fears of having data sitting outside of country boundaries which may cause legal or security issues.