Microsoft modified the below announcement and details were confirmed to me. Read here<\/a> to learn more.<\/em><\/p>\n We all know what on-premises backup is:<\/p>\n An old saying in IT goes: you don\u2019t have a backup if you don\u2019t have 3 copies. In IT we know that we should keep off-site copies of data. In the old days, Iron Mountain would pick up a bag of tapes and courier them off to some place. If we needed to go back more than a week, then we\u2019d have to call those tapes in (cost + delay) and that sucked. Plus tapes are fragile.<\/p>\n Some folks implemented site-to-site replication of backup (DPM, Veeam, etc) to counter this. Data is sent off to another location so the data is available no matter what happens to the primary site. But \u2026 there\u2019s a cost to keeping an archive.<\/p>\n This is where online backup is meant to come into play. A hosting company can offer huge amounts of cheap storage. An agent is deployed to required machines (roaming user devices, servers, hosts, VMs) and does an online backup. Data might be proxied\/stored locally with a short retention period, and stored in the cloud with a long retention period. There\u2019s lots of variations in the offerings so don\u2019t get caught up in the details here.<\/p>\n It\u2019s simple: Price. The dominant service in Ireland (based on reseller-friendly Ahsay<\/a>) costs anywhere from \u20ac0.30 to \u20ac1.00 per GB stored per month. So when Microsoft came along with Azure and offered a cheaper alternative you\u2019d think that they\u2019d wipe the floor with the competition, right?<\/p>\n I break up AB into three offerings, to try clarify the mess that Azure Marketing\/Branding has created:<\/p>\n The market for Azure Backup is not the large enterprise. It\u2019s SMEs \u2026 as I said it was quite some time ago with Azure Site Recovery (the ASR team has since acknowledged that I was correct). When Azure first went on sale via Open licensing (SMEs) I talked to Microsoft partners about this. The price then was around \u20ac0.25 per GB, which then dropped to \u20ac0.149\/GB and now sits at as little as \u20ac0.0.17\/GB (approx \u2013 I\u2019m too lazy to Google it) plus \u201cinstance\u201d charge. So Azure Backup completely took over the Irish market, right? Uh, not so fast, my friend! Anyone selling the incumbent is still selling the incumbent, and that\u2019s because the AB leadership continues to ignore overwhelming feedback. Instead, they focus on scenarios for System Center customers, and although \u201csales\u201d of System Center to SMEs might be green on the scorecard, that\u2019s because of some \u201cclever tricks\u201d that various news sites have alluded to and the occasional large customer that refuses to buy Select\/EA. In the real world, SMEs do not use System Center, so focusing on System Center customers is ignoring the huge breadth market that currently uses online backup solutions that cost much more than AB.<\/p>\n Note: Any Redmond-ites that think SMEs are\u00a0 just single-server companies are free to step off of their ivory tower and visit the real world outside of insulated and misinformed bubble.<\/em><\/p>\n What feature blockers are there to using AB?<\/p>\n We kept hearing that the AB team was going to fix all of this. And then yesterday, I read a post about Operations Management Suite (OMS) Add-On for System Center<\/a>. There you will find this piece of text:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Here\u2019s what you need to know first: The OMS Add-On can only be bought by System Center customers: 1 Std Add-On for 1 Std SML, 1 DC Add-On for 1 DC SML. And the new features of AB are only available to OMS Add-On customers:<\/p>\n It’s quite clear that the AB group either doesn’t understand the feedback and\/or refuses to listen.<\/p>\n Scott, I know you\u2019re a smart man. Why do you and how can you tolerate this continued failure? I know you could sell a lot more Azure storage if you opened up Azure Backup to the SME market with improved backup support and centralised management. I could probably have half of the Irish market switched over by now if someone in Microsoft was actually acting on the feedback that they\u2019ve been getting since last summer. Ireland is a tiny market in the grand scheme of things, but the nature of our market is the same across the entire EU and I doubt the USA is much different. That’s a lot of money you’re leaving on the table for competition to take.<\/p>\n I know that someone in Microsoft (probably Dublin) will complain about \u201cthat loud MVP\u201d again, and I\u2019ll have the usual conversations. But I know I\u2019m right and I’ve repeatedly given the feedback via forum, direct emails to relevant PMs, and Lync conversations. Give us the product we need, and we\u2019ll sell the heck out of it to people that will use <\/em>it. So, Scott, I\u2019m imploring you to make the necessary changes. Stop focusing Azure Backup on System Center customers; it\u2019s a waste of dev\/test time. Focus on SMEs and resellers and you will take over the online backup market in a year with customers that are actually adopting or using Azure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Oh baby, it\u2019s one of those posts where Aidan Smash! I think Azure Backup has amazing potential to OWN the online backup market, but thanks to the leadership of that group, Azure Backup is irrelevant. Read on to find out why. [Update] Microsoft modified the below announcement and details were confirmed to me. Read here … Continue reading “An Open Letter To Scott Guthrie About Azure Backup”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18555,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[170,55],"class_list":["post-18552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-azure","tag-azure","tag-backup"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\tWhat\u2019s Online Backup and What is the Market?<\/h2>\n
\n
The Challenge with Online Backup<\/h2>\n
What\u2019s Wrong with Azure Online Backup?<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/image_thumb.png\" "\\"image\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n\n
A Request for Scott Guthrie<\/h2>\n