Justin Moore, CEO In October 2016, “The State of IT Resilience,” study by Axcient brought to light perturbing results. It was found that out of the 500 IT professionals surveyed, nearly 80 percent believed that it would take them anywhere from more than an hour to several days in getting their systems fully up and running after a catastrophic event or a disaster. Also, a vast majority indicated that they used three or more solutions for data protection and disaster recovery which bogged them down with redundant infrastructure and multiple copies of data to manage. The result is an inability to recover fast enough from an IT outage.
Think about it: How many servers, laptops, phones, storage arrays, and software disks or subscription services does an organization use and how much does it incur in maintenance expenses? Axcient’s idea is to connect the dots in the data center—including old dots that still work (such as legacy arrays) and new-gen, hybrid-cloud dots that bring new efficiencies. “Eight years ago, everyone told us it would be impossible to combine backup, business continuity, and disaster recovery into a unified service for our customers, but we did it,” Justin Moore, CEO, Axcient states. “We pioneered what is now being called the disaster recovery as a service market. Now we’re serving up enterprise-class resiliency to more than 5,000 businesses worldwide.”
Under the leadership of Moore, Axcient empowers businesses to have complete IT resilience with a unified, cloud-based service—protecting over 10 billion files and applications. Backed by its Fusion DR Cloud Service, the firm has customers that range from small family offices or sole practitioner healthcare providers to law and accounting firms, all the way up to large enterprises.
The Efficient Fusion
Axcient’s Fusion Cloud Platform has been designed to bring together the data from all of customer’s non-productive workloads into a single easily managed platform. An organization’s hardware-less disaster recovery and archiving technology is combined by Fusion with a public cloud infrastructure on the back-end which allows users to manage the multiple workload-data more efficiently through a single cloud-converged platform.
Axcient Fusion replaces all non-production IT infrastructure with one elastic, cloud-converged platform
“This includes data that typically exists in their own silos and needs to be managed separately, including data from non-productive workloads such as backup and recovery, business continuity, archiving, and analytics,” elaborates Moore. Their customers’ existing on-premise primary data infrastructures are tied by Axcient to public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services which minimizes the complexity of using public cloud. For quick recovery to production, during the event of a disaster, Fusion allows customers to automatically restore their data and application in the cloud. Furthermore, clients have the option to search and recover data, and also make use of a sandbox environment to test their disaster recovery plans.
What makes the deal even sweeter is the fact that Axcient’s platform that is designed to consolidate data can be deployed in 10 minutes. The platform delivers data efficiently with global deduplication and in-line WAN optimization. The platform also proffers firms with the capability of replicating snapshots to the cloud in less than 90 seconds.
Over the years, Axcient has been assisting many prestigious firms to build IT resilience with Ford, Bacon, and Davis—a full service engineering organization—being one of them. The client’s previous DRaaS provider lacked a true disaster recovery capability. Without being able to quickly recover data, nor pull it from offsite locations, the firm left itself exposed to risk of losing their valuable data. With a powerful, yet simple DRaaS solution, Axcient helped Ford, Bacon, and Davis improve its IT resiliency through continuous, reliable data and application protection. Dean Butler, Director of Information Technology, Ford, Bacon, and Davis informs, “We now have a true disaster recovery solution, and our data resides in the Axcient cloud. This is exactly what we were looking for—a secure, holistic, cloud-based solution that protects our main office, remote offices, and basically our entire IT environment.”
Step toward the Bigger Picture
“Over the years, we had more enterprises come to us to leverage our services to simplify their IT infrastructures or reduce costs,” adds Moore. Concentrating on providing Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to SMBs, the company took the next big step with its Fusion cloud platform.
Axcient is scaling its DRaaS technology to the midmarket enterprise needs with Fusion’s latest version being released at VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas. The firm has also extended its product’s plethora of features even further. The latest version features new cloud orchestration and workflow automation capabilities that are aimed at simplifying and automating continuity and availability for critical services. These features will enable businesses to recover rapidly from disasters or outages through pre-written workflows which cover all aspects from network settings to the order in which applications are recovered in the cloud.
"We pioneered what is now being called the disaster recovery as a service market. Now we're serving up enterprise-class resiliency to more than 5,000 businesses worldwide"
“Axcient Fusion replaces all non-production IT infrastructure with one elastic, cloud-converged platform. We enable every business to run with the resilience and agility of the world’s largest enterprises at one-tenth the cost,” states Moore. To further complement Fusion, the firm has released Axcient Certified Expert (ACE) curriculum to educate users on how to protect their businesses in the cloud with Fusion. The Fusion ACE training offers a detailed walkthrough of the Fusion service and is available in the Axcient Portal. “The ultimate goal of the Fusion ACE training is to get new users up and running with their Fusion service as quickly as possible while learning the Axcient recommended practices,” adds Moore.
The Serial Entrepreneur
Axcient is not the first company to have incepted out of Moore’s radical thought-process. His entrepreneurial journey began when he saw the need to assist students in finding jobs. “They had all these binders, and you had to look through them and find the job opportunities,” explains Moore. He thought, “why isn’t this online?” And so Moore established an online job board for college students.
Many years have passed, and the serial entrepreneur has been passionately solving new predicaments since then and starting new firms, Axcient being the latest. As IT organizations face increasing pressure to deliver higher levels of services at lower cost and with fewer resources, Axcient Fusion provides a powerful way to rapidly respond to outages, incidents, and security breaches— to the point of making resilience a proactive, rather than a reactive pursuit. With many success stories and increasing prominence in the market, a question arises: How far is the company from an IPO? Moore informs, “Any capital we raise at this point is for go-to market and expanding internationally. We’ve been concentrating in North America. We will make a decision probably in the next six months to raise more capital to dramatically expand our sales and marketing or go for IPO. We’re at that crossroad.”
