Cloud Storage Provider Upgrades Backup Capabilities

Cloud storage provider SOS Online Backup announced enhancements to SOS Universal Backup with LiveProtect, which helps enable small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to back up data across multiple destinations at multiple times.

By backing up data to six global data centres, SOS enables SMBs to backup their entire network from their Microsoft Outlook to their financial documents. SOS Universal Backup with LiveProtect also enables SMBs to monitor their files, and take advantage of continuous real-time data protection. The SOS cloud stores customer data in six different data centres around the world, in locations including Europe, the US, India and Australia.

SOS backs up the data offsite automatically, keeping an unlimited version history and the company’s online backup solution is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) billed at a monthly subscription. Some of the enhanced features to Universal Backup include free integrated local backup, which enables a complete local backup suite, where businesses can securely back up any file to any local medium, whether it’s an external hard drive, a local network connection, a flash memory stick or an iPod. And unlimited versioning and archiving assures businesses that every version of every file is kept forever, unlike other online backup systems that delete files from a backup when they are deleted from the computer.

“SOS understands that when it comes to the needs of small businesses, online backup is invaluable, and we’ve taken steps to deliver a solution that offers SMBs more features designed to improve accessibility, flexibility and security of their data,” said Ken Shaw, chief executive of SOS Online Backup.  “Our latest multi-destination, multi-schedule enhancements assure SMBs that all of the data their business depends on is completely protected and readily accessible.”

SOS also offers a Physical Media Upload (PMU) service for SMBs that have large amounts of data and an unpredictable internet connection, which could take weeks to complete the initial backup of data. The PMU enhancement provides businesses with an external drive in which to copy data. SOS also helps ensure businesses will always be able to retrieve critical files by backing up data regularly to the SOS Backup Server Grid, providing global roaming access. This allows businesses to access data from any computer with a web browser, unlike other backup systems that will only restore to the same computer that created the backup.

Addressing the increasing use of mobile devices, SOS enables users of an iPhone or other WAP-enabled mobile phone (including the BlackBerry) to access their data. With SOS for iPhone, digital content such as photos, presentations, documents and music, which has been protected with SOS can be accessed, streamed and shared. SOS for iPhone is currently available on the Apple App Store as a free download.