This article is more than 1 year old

Dell EMC's 'Spanning' SaaS backup outfit expands into Australia

Fat-fingered fumblers of Australia, untie! Your Office 365 errors are now recoverable

Dell EMC's software-as-a-service backup outfit, “Spanning”, has expanded into Australia.

If the very premise of SaaS backup sounds a bit odd, given the universal promise that SaaS runs from super-redundant bit barns so you don't have to worry about things like backup, know that Spanning's schtick is not primary backup.

Instead the company thinks it is worth protecting against fat-fingered fumbling by fully authenticated users who inadvertently delete files. Or bad eggs who decide to trash some data.

To protect organisations against that sort of thing, Spanning makes incremental backups of data and sends them to another cloud. The internal startup can do this for SaaS services including Salesforce, Google Apps and Office 365. That cloudy backup is now supported in Australia and New Zealand.

Spanning has a Sydney data centre if you want to backup to a nearby location, but this bit barn only supports Office 365. The Dell-EMC biz reckons two million Australians use Microsoft's suite at work so it thinks this feature has plenty of antipodean upside. It also stresses that the facility “fully complies with Australian Privacy Policies.”

We think that means the Australian Privacy Principles - maybe that was lost in translation? Also a bit forlorn is the company's insistence that the service will benefit New Zealanders too, on grounds that latency is less on a trans-Tasman hop than a journey to the service's United States or Ireland bit barns. Kiwis of Vulture South's acquaintance grate at that kind of tokenism.

Australians have a bit to chew on, too, because there's no sign Spanning has altered its pricing – US$48 per user per year – into local currency. Australian Reg readers can therefore expect currency exchange charges on top of their fees. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like