UCG Grows BaaS Biz with VAULT400

July 8, 2014 Dan Burger

Cloud-based backup and recovery services and remote hardware for disaster recovery and high availability continues to attract IBM midrange shops and United Computer Group has become a trusted partner with many of them. Last week, the Cleveland, Ohio-based company announced two more companies that have decided to contract with UCG for what is being referred to as backup as a service, or BaaS.

Carswell, a provider of information services for legal, tax, finance, and human resource professionals based in Canada, and the city of San Ramon, California, are the latest in a string of organizations choosing to work with UCG. IT Jungle has been keeping an eye on the new business wins for the vaulting champion. The “Related Stories” links at the bottom of this article will lead you to other UCG business wins.

Before coming to a conclusion on its backup and recovery strategy, Carswell investigated its options placing an emphasis on ensuring its data could be safely backed up in the cloud. Among the requirements were yearly Auditors Letter for SSAE 16 SOC II Type II and full compliance with HIPAA/HITECH regulations.

The UCG service, referred to as VAULT400, met that criteria and is now deployed to provide daily automated backups to the cloud via encrypted data sent nightly to two UCG data centers, one in Cleveland and the other in Atlanta, Georgia.

San Ramon, a growing municipality of 90,000 residents located 25 miles from Oakland, considers itself a technologically progressive city. It has an electronic customer service program in place and also a mobile app as a way for residents to submit requests to the city. An IBM 9407-515 server is trusted to store and process sensitive employee and resident information.

IT manager Rick Maria reviewed several data backup options before choosing UCG to protect the system’s mission-critical DB2 and IFS files with VAULT400 with backup to the above-mentioned data centers.

San Ramon is also making use of VAULT400 Reports, a Web-enabled interface for reporting the details of its cloud-based data protection plan that includes encrypted nightly backups and immediate access to its data.

When it comes to hosted services, backup and recovery is the most popular choice for IBM i shops. Managed service providers are filling the demand.

“We see a revenue shift from the traditional buy/sell business to ‘the cloud’ and managed services,” says UCG president Jim Kandrac. From June 2013 to June 2014, Kandrac says UCG net monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from backup as a service and remote hardware recovery has increased more than 33 percent. He says UCG is on track to double MRR every three years.