“If there’s one constant in our industry, it’s change.”
Eric Antmann, Senior Solution Specialist, Kaseya
Behind every great solution is an even greater team of experts.
In our new Insider Insights series, we catch up with some of the brilliant minds working behind the scenes at Kaseya.
To kick off the series, we’re thrilled to feature a true superhero in the world of backup and continuity — Eric Antmann, our in-house Unitrends Solution Specialist. In keeping with his Marvel counterpart, Eric also brings superpowers to the table. He plays a critical role in enabling our customers and partners to integrate backup and disaster recovery alongside the broader Kaseya platform, ensuring they stay resilient and ready for anything.
From navigating day-to-day challenges to shaping reliable, future-ready strategies, we sat down with Eric to explore his practical, behind-the-scenes work as well as what the future holds for recovery and business continuity. Let’s dive in.
Adam: Thank you for joining us, Eric. To get started, can you tell us a little more about your role here at Kaseya and what exactly your work entails?
Eric: Thank you so much for having me! I work primarily with our Account Management teams, focusing on two key missions. I help our existing Kaseya customers explore and adopt Unitrends backup and disaster recovery solutions within their environments, and I also work with current Unitrends users to expand their disaster recovery capabilities by adding Unitrends Cloud, Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) or public cloud backup to their existing deployments. What excites me most about my role is helping customers evolve their backup and disaster recovery strategies as their business needs change and grow. It’s incredibly rewarding to see them gain more confidence and experience due to the simplicity and effectiveness our solutions bring to the table.
Adam: That’s awesome! Sounds like you hear a lot of different perspectives and deal with various challenges in your work. So, from experience, what are some of the biggest backup and disaster recovery challenges you see IT professionals facing today?
Eric: There’s really an elephant in the room here: organizations have more mission-critical assets in more different places than ever before. Keeping an organization’s line of business running normally is no longer limited to the core infrastructure and edge infrastructure. As organizations continue to diversify their mission-critical systems to include SaaS and the public cloud, it is critical to take a holistic look at all of the systems in all of the different environments to maintain the level of resilience expected by businesses.
Adam: What are some common mistakes IT teams make when setting up or managing backup and recovery?
Eric: Treating recovery like an afterthought. Ultimately, the reason why organizations invest in backup and recovery is to keep the line of business up and running when bad things happen. That means having options for how our users interact with systems while running in a disaster recovery environment. It also means that having a detailed, validated and regularly tested plan for all those options is indispensable. To give you an example – how would an organization operate if the on-premises assets were running in a DR environment but their servers in the public cloud were not? What about the reverse? Without addressing all those details, and testing them on a frequent basis, a DR plan does not provide the level of confidence that business demands.
Adam: In relation to that, what’s a misconception about backup and disaster recovery that needs to be debunked?
Eric: Well, in my day-to-day, the most common misconception I see is that having assets in the public cloud be out of sight means that they are also out of mind. What we need to bear in mind is that a server is a server, whether it is in core infrastructure, at the edge or in the public cloud. If an organization is going to rely on assets hosted in the public cloud for mission-critical roles, those assets need the same level of securing, off-siting and business continuity measures that any other mission-critical asset would need. For a lot of our user base, that has meant implementing a multicloud strategy.
Adam: What do IT leaders need to be thinking about today to prepare for tomorrow’s threats?
Eric: If there’s one constant in our industry, it’s change. IT leaders need to come to terms with the fact that the future will bring more complexity and rapid changes than ever before. It is important that decisions made today focus on the preservation of future flexibility. That is an inherently broad mission and requires more than just a toolkit. It requires a platform that gives IT leaders the flexibility to scale assets as needed, supported by a backup and disaster recovery solution that keeps pace.
Adam: What’s your philosophy on how to approach data protection and business continuity?
Eric: The industry has been using the phrase “single pane of glass” for years, and it still rings true, now more than ever before. As organizations continue to diversify where mission-critical assets are, it is important for that single pane of glass to remain and not become a kaleidoscope of different data protection and business continuity solutions for different environments. Our main philosophy is to leverage the strength of the Kaseya platform to cover all the different places where an organization may have mission-critical assets. This gives our customers the flexibility to have a data protection and business continuity platform that follows where mission-critical assets may reside.
Adam: In line with the previous questions, how does Unitrends differentiate itself in a crowded backup and recovery space?
Eric: The answer is simple: Unitrends is an all-in-one solution, combining local backup, cloud replication and DRaaS into a single, unified platform. This allows users to gain efficiency, reliability and cost savings. They also avoid the hassles and costs of integrating, maintaining and testing separate tools from separate vendors for on-premise backup, cloud storage and cloud DR.
Adam: What’s one problem Unitrends is solving that most IT leaders might not even realize they have?
Eric: We have spent a lot of time today talking about disaster recovery — and that’s exactly it. Many organizations don’t realize how disjointed or under-tested their current disaster recovery strategies are until it’s too late. We help identify and solve those gaps before they become real problems.
Adam: That’s interesting. What’s a feature or capability of Unitrends that doesn’t get enough attention but is a game changer for IT teams?
Eric: That’s a good question and I think it’s less about a particular feature that goes under the radar but rather the versatility of how our customers can leverage certain capabilities. At Unitrends, we talk a lot about our ability to automate recovery testing with our Recovery Assurance feature. This certifies backups at the application level and is great for testing tiered recovery for situations where there are dependencies between machines and we need to apply a level of orchestration to that workflow. For example, we had a customer, a large manufacturing organization, that had 100s of VMs crippled by ransomware. They used Unitrends Recovery Assurance to spin up isolated labs in batches to test their VMs, installing VMware Carbon Black into the labs to run the necessary testing. They were able to spin up and audit more than 700 virtual machines in less than 48 hours — all with two admins. That’s the kind of real-world value it delivers.
Adam: Wow! That’s certainly a situation we hope to never find ourselves in, but we need to be prepared for it nonetheless. Eric, thanks for stopping by to share your insights with us!
Eric: Absolutely. Adam, it was my pleasure, thanks for having me!
Eric shared powerful insights that resonated throughout our conversation. Future flexibility is essential, and IT leaders must make decisions today that account for tomorrow’s rapid changes. It’s equally important to recognize that true resilience begins with visibility across all environments — whether on-prem, in the cloud or within SaaS applications.
Unitrends stands out as more than just a backup solution — it’s an all-in-one resilience platform. Whether you’re navigating a ransomware crisis, facing a cloud outage or managing an increasingly complex tech stack, Unitrends is there to help you save the day. It ensures your critical assets always remain protected, thoroughly tested — and always recovery-ready.
Want to learn more about Unitrends and how it can strengthen your recovery strategy?
Book a call with our team today.
Have questions or want to hear directly from our experts?
Connect with Adam or Eric on LinkedIn!