Verio Adds Data Backup

The massive wholly owned subsidiary of NTT adds a service to its already large portfolio.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [January 31, 2007]

ISP-Planet has been advising ISPs for some time now to deliver services to businesses, for many reasons. One reason is that the phone companies are not setting loss leader price points in business service, but do so in residential service. BellSouth, for example, sells small business online backup service starting at $19.95 per month.

In comparison, residential users can buy online storage from Amazon's S3 at $0.15 per gigabit-month plus $0.20 per GB of data transfer. AT&T's Online Vault service is $5.95 per month for 2 GB, plus $2 per month per additional GB.

Craig Vosburgh, senior product manager for Verio, says he's not the cheapest and not trying to be the cheapest, but Verio's new data backup service starts at $7.95 per month. Verizon's Online Backup service is comparatively priced.

"We had previously launched higher end data backup plans. This announcement is for very small businesses. [It starts at 1 GB, which] is good for financial backup. Our customer surveys and analysis of actual use show that small businesses backup financial records first and also customer data," says Vosburgh.

Of course, such backups need to be secure. "Many people are tempted to use online storage services like Amazon S3, but it may or may not be encrypted, and certainly not in 128 K AES. Online storage services certainly don't sync every night."

"Iron Mountain Digital is our partner," explains Vosburgh. "We've licensed their software, which highlights, down to the block level, every change. This avoids the inefficiency of uploading an entire .doc file if you've only changed one word. It has many other features too, including saving the last 10 versions of any document."

The product runs as client side software (5 MB in size), and is available in multiple languages.

Vosburgh says that although many small businesses don't have a data backup plan, they quickly understand the value of one. "Typically, the top vehicle for securing data is simply an external hard drive. We've also found that 45 percent of small businesses do not have a data recovery plan in place. So when we ask, 'what would happen in you lost all your data,' they see the value in what we're offering. We also find that natural disasters highlight the risks SMBs face."

So is this available to Verio resellers? "Of course, ISPs do compete with Verio, but may want to broaden the range of services offered."

So what's the price? "We would be open to a revenue share or a per-customer fee."

Additional new service
Also, on Monday, Verio announced a new Linux Virtual Private Server (VPS) offering (based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES version 4), the latest addition to its virtual server offerings. The new VPS is available to resellers. Pricing starts at $55 per month for a 10 GB server (20 GB and 40 GB servers are also available).

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