… Backup Technology (iomart) …

Backup Technology Limited (iomart Group) is offering a lifeline to Symantec customers affected by the company’s decision to close down its Backup Exec.cloud service.

The offer of a free migration to all customers comes after BTL moved Datek Solutions Home to its Asigra-based backup solution platform just days after the UK IT consultancy received an email from Symantec saying it would end its service and stop selling subscriptions or renewals in Jan 2014. Datek is now managing its customers from BTL’s web-based monitoring portal.

Dave Twilley, technical services maanger, Datek Solutions, said: “A lot of our customers rely totally on cloud backup for things like exchange data and sensitive documentation so as soon as we got the end of life email from Symantec we knew we needed to act quickly. We spoke to BTL on the Friday and by the Monday morning all of our customer’s data was fully backed up. They did a great job.”

BTL is offering a free migration service to all Backup Exec.cloud customers. This will allow them to run BTL’s stable enterprise backup solution alongside the Symantec solution free of charge until the drop dead date of their contract.

Rob Mackle, sales manager and channel sales manager EMEA, BTL, said: “Symantec’s announcement has left a lot of customers in limbo. We moved Datek onto our enterprise backup solution quickly and smoothly to ensure their customers were not left exposed from the EOL announcement and we’re now offering free migration to anyone else affected by Symantec’s decision. Once migrated, they can run our Asigra solution in tandem with Backup Exec.cloud to see if it’s the right fit for them and to build up their data history.”

Asigra is an online backup software developer and BTL is its largest global partner. The offering provides an enterprise and WAN optimised solution, allowing large amounts of data to be protected over small bandwidth connections. BTL’s proprietary portal enables centralised web-based monitoring and consolidated daily emails giving customers transparency of backups on a real time basis.

BTL, which is part of UK cloud company iomart Group, currently protects over 15PB of data in the public and private cloud for customers including Siemens, British Red Cross, WPP, Pernod Ricard and Liverpool and Everton football clubs.