Fujitsu has announced its new Rapid Recovery Appliance, which it claimed will make it easier to install a cloud backup as a service (BaaS) offering. The new appliance will make Fujitsu’s globally available Fujitsu Cloud BaaS more resilient and secure, it claimed.

The pre-configured system is designed to be installed on the customer’s premises in order to give users of hybrid IT systems greater control over their data protection processes. The new system will solve the logistical problems created by the mixture of internal IT and external cloud services that many companies now have, according to Fujitsu.

The system should combine the benefits of a backup and recovery appliance with the convenience of cloud-computing’s ‘pay-as-you-grow’ pricing policies and data security. According to Fujitsu, it makes an enterprise’s data both secure and readily recoverable, wherever it resides.

The new Fujitsu BaaS automatically replicates data to the secure cloud for offsite data protection. It facilitates the rapid recovery of recent local backup data through the use of Fujitsu’s cloud-based backup data and retrieval services. The system uses deduplication technology from Seagate and compression techniques to minimise the cost of transferring large volumes of data across the cloud.

Fujitsu Cloud BaaS will use 256-bit AES encryption to convert data both in-flight and at-rest in both the onsite appliance backup vault and the cloud backup vault. The BaaS Rapid Recovery Appliance also provides automated, continuous cloud replication, helping to cut the costs and resources needed to maintain system integrity.

The pre-configured system will cut the storage footprint and minimise the bandwidth costs associated with cloud backup, said Fujitsu’s Global Offering Manager James Jefferd. The main business benefit, he said, is that it simplifies and speeds up a process that hybrid clouds could make more complicated for end users.

“With the trend toward a cloud service delivery model, IT buyers want easy-to-integrate cloud offerings that combine the benefits of cloud with existing assets,” said Jefferd. The BaaS Rapid Recovery Appliance can replace traditional on-site, tape-based backup with an easy to use flexible system, he said.

Gartner analyst Dave Russell predicted it would be good for remote-office and departmental computing environments. “Most organisations cite concerns over security as their top cloud issue. The greater issue is often latency, so a disk-to-disk-to-cloud model is emerging,” said Russell.