Spanning adds Gmail to its Google Apps backup service; Courts businesses
Spanning on Tuesday will roll out its latest backup service for Google Apps and add Gmail to the mix. With the move, Spanning is positioning itself as a business class Google Apps backup service aimed at enterprises.
The Austin, TX-based startup has a highly rated backup service on the Google Apps Marketplace, but CEO Charlie Wood said customers were frequently requesting Gmail backup. While Wood's company competes with Backupify in areas, Spanning is going deep with its business focus while its rival is more horizontal.
"We are targeting businesses," said Wood. "The larger the company the more sophisticated they are. They recognize the need for backups." Specifically, Spanning is eyeing companies with 1,000 to 4,000-seat Google Apps accounts.
To bolster that business focus, Spanning is offering a 99.9 percent up-time service level agreement for the second version of Spanning Backup for Google Apps. Wood said that enterprises have contacted Spanning about a pick-and-choose backup approach to Gmail. For instance, companies may want to back up email from executives and the legal team, but not rank and file workers. Spanning charges $30 a year per user for backup.
Among the key points:
- The backup for Google Apps includes unlimited storage.
- Historical logs of each backup so customers can choose what snapshot to restore.
- Privacy certifications with U.S., E.U. and Swiss safe harbor frameworks.
- Discounts for non-profits and educational institutions.
Of these new features, the most notable is Spanning's SLA given that the company runs on Amazon Web Services, which has had outages in recent months. Wood said that Spanning suffered some degradation during AWS outages, but was able to keep running due to the use of multiple availability zones, fail over procedures and auto-scaling.
