N-able, Inc. announced Cove Data Protection? has expanded its disaster recovery flexibility by introducing Standby Image to VMware ESXi. The Standby Image recovery feature also includes support for Hyper-V and Microsoft Azure, providing MSPs and IT professionals with smarter, more cost-effective, and profitable Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) for their end users.

This update continues to deliver on the N-able Ecoverse vision, letting users drive forward with N-able solutions alongside the ecosystem they currently use. Cove?s approach to cyber resilience and ransomware readiness includes several levels of innovation, from isolating backup storage by default, offering automated recovery testing, and storing immutable copies in the N-able private cloud, to now expanding customers? options for disaster recovery.

Standby Image is Cove?s virtualized backup and disaster recovery (BDR) capability. It works by automatically creating, storing, and maintaining an up-to-date copy of protected data and system state in a bootable virtual machine format with each backup. These images can be stored in Hyper-V, Microsoft Azure, and now also in VMware ESXi.

Standby Image provides the business continuity capabilities of image and appliance-based BDR products without the administrative and cost burdens typically associated with those tools. In today?s IT environment, not all disaster recovery scenarios are the same. Cyberattacks call for a different approach than traditional natural and physical disaster recovery.

Cove is a highly effective tool in the fight against both types of disaster, but its architecture is especially well-suited for ransomware resilience. In the event of an attack, both the Cove application and primary backup storage are off the local network, out of the reach of malware that may be there. With Cove, business operations can be quickly restarted in a recovery location, while the proper steps are taken to contain the ransomware.

This is important for two reasons?it allows normal business operations to continue while primary systems are down while also allowing businesses to ?preserve the crime scene? for forensic and cyber-insurance purposes.