Cloud computing has enabled SMBs to take advantage of myriad enterprise-class solutions and applications that were previously not available to them. Just seven years ago when Axcient first launched, backup and disaster recovery wasn’t even on the radar for many small and medium-sized companies.

The cloud has changed all that in the interim, and companies of all sizes typically understand how important a solid backup and disaster recovery solution is. And Axcient, which developed the first business recovery cloud solution, can deliver those assurances to them along with enterprise-class resiliency.

“We really took an approach of building the platform from the ground up,” said Todd Scallan, VP of product and engineering at Axcient. He spoke exclusively to TMCnet Group Editorial Director Erik Linask (News - Alert) at the recent Editors Day Santa Clara 2015 event.

“We took a step back and said let’s look at it from the perspective of not backup but recovery, build a platform that enables very rapid replication of your environment to the cloud and then provide a variety of recovery methods from the cloud,” said Scallan. That methodology resulted in the company’s DRaaS offering for both local and offsite backup and protection.

The solution is available in both appliance-based and appliance-less (application-specific) configurations and may be expanded to cover testing and development and business analytics. Designed specifically to meet the needs of SMBs, Axcient’s offering can scale from handling a handful of physical servers to dozens of hosts running on dozens of machines.

“We really try to make it as simple as possible to deploy our service,“ added Scallan. The offering is sold primarily through MSPs, VARs and other partners. It is also extremely flexible regardless of whether it is backing up physical servers, VMware or a combination. The goal, according to Scallan, is to offer customers the ability to recover from any scenario and any environment.

Axcient plans to announce some major updates to its platform shortly, which will apply to both the appliance-based and appliance-less versions. The company’s main goal is to speed up the entire process and improve recovery point objectives. Customers will then be able to take snapshots of their business operations from backup and rapidly recover from snapshots from any point in time.