The year 2024 has been nothing short of extraordinary for Unitrends. Continuing its tradition of winning industry accolades, such as the 2024 Stevie Award for Customer Service Department of the Year – Computer Hardware, Unitrends achieved top ranks in prestigious industry reports like the G2 Fall 2024 Reports and reinforced its position as a leader in the backup and recovery space. The year also saw Unitrends doubling down on innovation, rolling out major product updates and features to make backup and recovery more streamlined and seamless for businesses.
In this blog, we’ll discuss the key highlights of 2024 — from milestone achievements and award recognitions to groundbreaking product launches and feature updates. We’ll also reflect on how Unitrends continues to drive innovation in the backup and recovery domain to ensure businesses remain resilient and prepared for 2025 and beyond. Let’s see why Unitrends remains the ideal partner for your data protection needs.
Shaping the future: Top trends and events that defined 2024
In 2024, the backup and recovery industry witnessed transformative shifts as businesses prioritized resilience and automation. Unitrends remained at the forefront of this paradigm shift, aligning its innovations with evolving IT needs and making a strong impact at key industry events and conferences.
Major trends transforming the backup and disaster recovery landscape
As cyberthreats evolve in scale and sophistication, businesses are increasingly adopting holistic and proactive data protection strategies to stay resilient. Let’s look at some key data protection trends of 2024.
1. The growing sophistication of cyberthreats
Threats like ransomware and phishing have surged in frequency and complexity this year, with industries like healthcare and education being prime targets. A devastating ransomware attack on Change Healthcare earlier in the year showcased how destructive these attacks can be, disrupting critical healthcare operations across the U.S.
Phishing tactics have also evolved rapidly, with voice phishing (vishing) emerging as a powerful social engineering method to breach corporate networks. Cybercriminals are now exploiting popular remote connection tools like Microsoft’s Quick Assist to deceive employees and gain unauthorized access.
2. The need for holistic data protection
These escalating threats underscore the urgent need for comprehensive data protection strategies. Businesses must ensure that all their assets, including endpoints, cloud-native applications and SaaS platforms, are fully secured to prevent data loss and downtime.
3. Increasing focus on effective ransomware recovery strategies
With ransomware attacks becoming inevitable, the focus is now being shifted to robust backup and recovery strategies. This year, the global average cost of a data breach soared to $4.88 million, marking a 10% increase over last year. In this scenario, a reliable backup can mean the difference between costly downtime and seamless business continuity.
Key approaches to effective ransomware recovery include:
- Rapid restoration: Ensures systems are quickly brought back online to minimize downtime.
- Testing and sandboxing: Validates backups for integrity and prevents reinfection during recovery.
- Data immutability: Protects backups from unauthorized changes or deletion, ensuring data remains secure and recoverable.
4. Data lifecycle management and compliance
Amid rising threats, businesses are also prioritizing data lifecycle policies to efficiently manage data retention and archiving. By aligning with compliance requirements, organizations can ensure long-term data integrity while reducing storage overhead.
Key events and conferences that made an impact
In 2024, Unitrends continued to strengthen its industry leadership by actively participating in some of the most influential events and conferences.
Kaseya Connect Global 2024: A game-changing reveal
Kaseya Connect Global 2024 was a landmark event for the industry. One of the most significant announcements came from Kaseya’s CEO, Fred Voccola, who introduced Kaseya 365 Endpoint, a groundbreaking subscription offering designed to substantially boost efficiencies and reduce the cost of the critical components required to manage, secure and back up endpoints, whether PC devices, servers or virtual machines. Endpoint Backup, Unitrends’ direct-to-cloud data protection solution, forms a core part of this offering.
Kaseya 365 Endpoint enables IT professionals to manage and secure their environments at a lower cost, easing the strain on internal IT budgets and significantly boosting the profitability of Managed Service Providers (MSPs), making advanced cybersecurity and IT management solutions more accessible than ever.
Presence at other major events
Unitrends also made its mark at other prestigious events like the California IT in Education (CITE) 2024 Annual Conference and TechCon 365. With its innovative solutions and expert insights, Unitrends was a standout, engaging IT professionals and showcasing continued leadership in the backup and recovery space.
Setting the standard: Unitrends recognized as a leader in backup and recovery
In 2024, Unitrends continued to set the standard in backup and disaster recovery, earning top rankings across multiple categories in the prestigious G2 Reports. Unitrends claimed the top spot in Backup and DRaaS in the G2 Summer 2024 Mid-Market Grid® Report. Building on this momentum, Unitrends further secured top rankings across multiple categories in the G2 Fall 2024 Reports, reaffirming its leadership in the backup and recovery space.
What makes Unitrends truly exceptional is its ability to deliver unmatched performance and value. The standout highlights from the G2 Reports include:
- Rapid implementation: Unitrends achieved an average time of just 0.57 months to go live, far outperforming the category average of 1.44 months. This ensures businesses can deploy solutions quickly and efficiently.
- Ease of use: With an impressive score of 89% for ease of use, Unitrends provides a simple and intuitive user experience, enabling IT teams to streamline operations effortlessly.
- Exceptional support: A stellar 90% rating for quality of support underscores the unwavering commitment of Unitrends to deliver superior customer care and ensure client success.
Driving innovation forward: New product launches, features and integrations
Unitrends continued to push the boundaries of innovation in 2024, delivering new products, powerful feature updates and seamless integrations that simplify backup and recovery for businesses.
New product launches
- The next-generation Unitrends Endpoint Backup: In 2024, Unitrends significantly revamped its Unitrends Endpoint Backup to launch the next-generation Unitrends Endpoint Backup. This powerful solution is tailored to meet the challenges of modern IT environments while offering superior endpoint protection, enhanced control, improved restore capabilities and seamless integrations.
- Core integration with Kaseya 365 Endpoint: Unitrends Endpoint Backup plays a pivotal role in the Kaseya 365 Endpoint subscription, a comprehensive and cost-effective solution that provides IT and security teams with everything they need to manage, secure, back up and automate endpoint environments.
- Expanding beyond endpoint protection with Kaseya 365 User: Unitrends SaaS Backup solutions are a key component of the Kaseya 365 User subscription, a holistic solution designed to protect and preserve critical user data and identities. This innovative offering enables organizations to proactively defend against user-based attacks, detect anomalies and safeguard critical user data in the cloud.
Key feature releases
Continuing its tradition of relentless innovation, Unitrends introduced several significant updates to its solutions this year. Here are some of the standout features that make managing and protecting your IT environment smarter and more efficient:
- Asset and policy management: Managing assets has never been easier with UniView. The intuitive platform now allows administrators to effortlessly view, monitor, set up and remove assets, such as physical servers and virtual machines. Additionally, IT teams can manage backup and replication policies for these assets directly from UniView, streamlining workflows and saving valuable time.
- Asset hierarchy visualization: Backup administrators often work with interconnected assets across virtual hosts, applications and file-level objects, which can be complex to manage. The new asset hierarchy visualization feature in UniView eliminates the guesswork by providing a clear, actionable view of asset relationships. This clarity ensures administrators can implement effective backup strategies with confidence and ease.
- Backup profile management: The new backup profile management feature gives IT professionals intuitive and granular control over their backups. Admins can selectively include or exclude data when creating or modifying file-level backup policies. By building and applying backup profiles seamlessly within UniView, teams achieve greater customization and control over both new and existing backup policies.
Integration milestones
Unitrends has strengthened its offerings with new integrations that enhance functionality, simplify workflows and extend the benefits of Kaseya’s IT Complete ecosystem. These integrations empower IT teams to work smarter, save time and improve operational efficiency.
Unitrends Endpoint Backup now integrates seamlessly with remote monitoring and management (RMM), professional services automation (PSA), IT documentation and security tools to streamline IT operations and enable more efficient management.
For example:
- RMM tools: Streamline installation of agents at scale with the use of deployment tokens.
- PSA tools: Automate ticketing workflows with tools like Kaseya BMS, Autotask and ConnectWise PSA, allowing tickets to be automatically opened and closed based on backup events.
- IT documentation: Sync backup information with IT Glue, a leading IT documentation platform, ensuring IT teams have real-time visibility into their backup environments.
Notably, UniView is also now integrated with KaseyaOne, the comprehensive hub for all Kaseya IT solutions. KaseyaOne serves as the central customer portal, bringing together every module within the Kaseya IT Complete suite. This integration simplifies IT management by providing a unified, streamlined experience that allows IT administrators to access tools, automate workflows and leverage cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities — all from a single platform.
Voices of trust: What customers love about Unitrends
Let’s see what customers have to say about their success with the platform and what they love the most.
“10 years of using Unitrends” – Jay Scott, G2 user
“It works! Very simply put, it works. The restore process is not overly difficult, and backup times are not bad. We back up 5 physical and 4 virtual servers using both file and image-level backups. We have had to make recoveries many times due to human error. When you need it, the product is there and works. I also very much enjoy the ability to spin up restores in the cloud in the event that we have a catastrophic event in the office.”
“Great product with lots of features to make backup and recovery a breeze” – Keith Hontz, Sr. Network and Systems Administrator
“The ability to back up a physical server and migrate to a virtual environment.”
“Great customer service” – Bill Bryant, Senior Estimator
“Very responsive, understands what I need and what they can do to accommodate those needs. Very easy to use. We use their service all the time with no trouble at all. Their products integrated seamlessly into our system.”
The road ahead: Upcoming innovations, updates and events
As Unitrends and Kaseya continue to innovate, the future is brimming with advancements designed to empower MSPs and businesses alike. Here’s what’s on the horizon:
Kaseya’s FedRAMP authorization commitment: Kaseya is setting a new standard by becoming one of the first MSP-centric platform vendors to pursue FedRAMP authorization across its technology stack. This initiative will help MSPs easily achieve Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) and other compliance certifications.
Announcing this multimillion-dollar investment, Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola emphasized, “This investment ensures that partners powered by Kaseya will leverage this authorization not only to power their SMB customers without disruption but also to grow their business — making them more profitable.” This ambitious commitment underscores Kaseya’s dedication to supporting MSPs and equipping them with the tools to thrive in an increasingly regulated landscape.
Backup for Entra ID coming soon: Spanning Backup, part of the Kaseya family, will soon introduce backup support for Entra ID, Microsoft’s identity and access management solution.
Kaseya Connect Global 2025: Looking ahead, don’t miss Kaseya Connect Global 2025 — the premier event for MSPs and IT professionals. Packed with exciting innovations, insights, updates, training, fun and much more, the event continues to be a game-changer for the industry. Be sure to stay tuned.
Future-proof your success: Partner with Unitrends for a resilient tomorrow
Through continued innovation and a forward-thinking approach, Unitrends has solidified its position as a trusted leader in the backup and recovery space. Looking ahead to 2025, the importance of robust data protection and data resilience cannot be overstated for businesses. By partnering with Unitrends, you’ll gain access to leading-edge solutions, seamless integrations and the expertise to ensure your organization is prepared for whatever challenges lie ahead.
Ready to take the next step? Book a call today and discover how Unitrends can help you achieve data resilience in 2025 and beyond.