Jason Buffington .com

video transcript

Object First recently announced the upcoming availability of its Ootbi Mini. There’s a good number of small and midsized businesses that would benefit from a small form factor appliance that’s purpose-built for cyber preparedness, so this is cool to see being introduced.

There are a few types of folks that I can imagine being excited about the mini.

• The midsized business or remote office IT manager. They might be an IT generalist, but they know that their organization is just as susceptible to ransomware as any enterprise. Frankly, an SMB has few options other than to either pay the ransom or go out of business. And with 96% of attacks now targeting the backup repository, an immutable storage device that is designed for midsized seems timely.  Frankly, Ootbi’s Honeypot could be the enterprise feature that SMBs didn’t even realize that they needed or wanted. 
• There are a bunch of channel partners who resell Veeam, some of whom provide outsourced management of on-prem backups and/or backup as a service (BaaS) to cloud-based repositories. Since you’ll always get your fastest operational recoveries from on-premises backups, having purpose-built storage in the building is still a no-brainer. I can see some of those partners thinking about deploying and remotely managing tens or hundreds of Ootbi mini’s for their outsourced customers, especially with the pre-announcement of the Object First Fleet Manager dashboard.

DPM hasn’t gotten our hands on an appliance yet, but you’ll hear about it if we do.

In the meantime, if you’re a smaller organization … run remote offices with local data … or just have senior leaders working at home … then having purpose-built cyber-prepared storage on site might not just fit the bill … but soon, might fit under your desk or at home.