Arcserve Unified Data Resilience

Short Summary

Digital transformation increases organizational dependence on IT services, raising the business impact of accidental errors, natural disasters, and cyber incidents. As a result, business continuity planning has become essential, with data resilience and disaster recovery (DR) needing to work across today’s hybrid, multi-cloud environments. Data is framed as the modern enterprise’s most important asset, now under heightened threat from ransomware and from expanded remote work patterns after COVID-19, where unmanaged home equipment often lacks adequate protection.

Legacy on-premises backup practices relied on tape/disk copies stored offsite, but physical transfers introduced delays and additional risk. Hybrid IT introduces both new complexity and new options: while cloud datacenters can provide resilient, geographically distributed storage for backups, customers cannot assume cloud services eliminate their responsibility. Data resilience in the cloud is a shared responsibility, and tenants frequently remain accountable for protecting and recovering their data. The use of multiple tools across hybrid estates can also increase management burden, creating pressure for unified solutions.

Arcserve is presented as a long-established vendor offering a broad portfolio of software, appliances, and cloud services for backup, replication, and DR, spanning SMB to enterprise needs. Key offerings include Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) 8.1 with global source-side deduplication and Sophos Intercept X integration, Arcserve Backup for heterogeneous environments, and Arcserve Continuous Availability for byte-level replication across Windows and Linux. StorageCraft’s OneXafe adds scale-out, object-based NAS with immutable snapshots, inline deduplication, encryption at rest, and 90-second snapshot-based continuous data protection.

Across protected workloads, Arcserve covers major virtualization platforms, diverse operating systems, databases, Microsoft 365 and other SaaS, and multi-cloud targets. Security features include role-based administration, TLS 1.2 in-flight encryption, AES-256 at-rest encryption, immutability (including AWS S3 Object Lock), and ransomware resilience via immutable storage. Strengths emphasize breadth, immutability, provider choice, and deduplication; challenges include backup-to-cloud requiring an on-premises server, limited cloud snapshot integration, and gaps around sensitive-data detection, eDiscovery, and tiered long-term retention.

Interesting Facts

• Arcserve is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
• The company was founded in 1983 as Cheyenne Software Inc.
• Cheyenne NetBack was launched in 1988.
• The original Arcserve product was released in 1990.
• Arcserve was acquired by CA Technologies in 1996.
• In 2014, Arcserve became a private company under the ownership of Marlin Equity Partners.
• In March 2021, Arcserve announced the completion of its merger with StorageCraft.
• Arcserve UDP provides encryption in transit using TLS 1.2 and encryption at rest using AES-256.
• OneXafe continuous data protection takes snapshots every 90 seconds.
• Arcserve SaaS Backup protects data stored in Microsoft 365, Azure AD, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, and Google Workspace.

Notable Quotes

• “Data is the most important business asset of the modern enterprise and needs to be protected against unwanted events such as malware as well as physical or logical damage to the storage devices or the IT installation.”
• “The responsibility for data held in cloud services is shared between the tenant and the service provider and there are many situations where the tenant is responsible for the resilience of their data.”
• “Therefore, it is especially important to implement a single solution that covers all the different use cases.”
• “The time criticality of digitized business services has increased the need for an always on architecture.”
• “Today’s e-commerce, financial services, and critical infrastructure demand continuous availability where even seconds of downtime could lead to severe damage.”
• “This always on architecture depends upon continuous data replication to ensure business continuity when individual elements fail.”
• “OneXafe’s file system provides an immutable object store, with every object written only once and never modified.”
• “Any modification made to the file system always results in the creation of new objects.”
• “Arcserve Cloud Hybrid DRaaS provides failover capabilities for on-premises servers by transferring images to the Arcserve Cloud Hybrid datacentres.”
• “Arcserve Live Migration orchestrates the cutover to the target destination to take the complexity out of the migration.”