I rate Datto 10 out of 10. It's the market leader. While I'm not a fan of the Datto networking hardware, it does what it's supposed to do. However, I tend to stick with Cisco for networking hardware and back things up using Datto. If I were to recommend an RMM tool, I would say ConnectWise is better. 

Speaking about how the product is deployed in my company's business operations, I would say that it is an appliance with a critical infrastructure.

In terms of data protection capabilities, the tool's ability to boot a device and have a separate network has saved the day for many of our company's clients who use the solution. If you have a collection of old servers, and if one of the old servers dies, you could be dead in the water if you cannot locally boot a server. Even the new gears in place can have an issue if people are not spending money on robust hardware tools, and replace them. It is necessary to have the local boot options if and when you have a hardware issue.

The product brings the most value in the area of virtual boot when it comes to disaster recovery since it can boot up a version of the server from before an incident, which is helpful and allows your company to have a lower RPO or recovery point objective. It makes a big difference if you can have an RPO in hours rather than in days.

The image-based backup functionality has revolutionized and impacted our company recovery time objectives since we deal in hours and not in days.

The interface of the product is intuitive. I like the product's functionality that provides the ability to see everything at a glance, along with the alerting feature.

Maintenance is required since certain drives die at times. In general, maintenance is required to deal with dead RAMs and hard drives.

The former clients with small offices and the old Linux servers that used to die in production used to boot such servers with the help of Datto Cloud Continuity. The aforementioned process allows the clients to continue running their business while buying time to get replacement hardware, making a big difference that helps them reduce potential data loss or downtime. The local boot provided by the product saved the day for many of our company's clients.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it.

Though the tool is not inexpensive, it provides enterprise-level protection from ransomware.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

I like the overall solution, but I dislike the fact that signing a three-year contract is required.

Comparing Datto Cloud Continuity with similar products, I rate the overall solution a seven or eight out of ten.

I rate Datto Cloud Continuity a seven out of ten. I advise others to visit the service settings inside the computer in case they encounter backing-up issues.

Ransomware and attacks on the infrastructure seem to be what's on everybody's mind today, but the truth be told, business email compromises cost more money last year than ransomware. If you want to balance your approach to protecting a client, you need to understand the key points for protecting your client. Datto has partnered with a company, which I don't really like, for cybersecurity awareness training. That's very important because social engineering or business email compromise is going to be a huge issue. You need to know how to fight that. We all know the human firewall is the weakest point in our link. I could sell you $6 million worth of software and specialized hardware, but if you're not changing the thought process of your employees or the people who are working for you to recognize social engineering, which is basically business email compromise, you're not protecting the weakest link in the chain. The least educated are the employees. If you want to put together a cybersecurity stack that works, you need to incorporate all different facets, such as multi-factor authentication, password management, and timeouts or limits on failed password authentication. However, when you have all these restraints on your employees, it's somewhat uncomfortable. So, you got to force that down to the sea level and say that this is how I'm going to help you. Without proper education about malware, business email compromise can't be avoided. For example, about two years ago, a client transferred $275,000 to an account through the electronic funds transfer. If they had recognized the faults in the email, they never would've done anything. They would've said that this is a lie, and an attempt to steal. The ability to recognize what's conceivably wrong with that text or that email is imperative. It is an imperative piece of the whole cybersecurity stack.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. They are laser-focused on bringing forth proven protection technologies and stopping cybercriminals from being able to breach, break, steal, or compromise your data.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with Datto. We're only end-users of their product.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.

While I don't have advice specific t the product, I'd advise other users that, whatever product they go with, they have to make sure that they're evaluating it according to their system. Everyone's environment is different and so everyone's needs are different. What may be right for us may not be right for others.

In general, I would rate this solution at an eight out of ten. It's been a pretty positive experience overall.

Avoid it until it matures. I would wait until they support:

• Hyper-V: If that is important to you
• VLANs: To capture backups outside of a single LAN

• Cloud Recovery: Virtual firewall, VPN appliance. Better security and controls.

Datto is now merged with AutoTask.  This may have an impact on roll-out of new features, capabilities, as their focus will be integration with their in-house RMM.

Hyper-V Integration: Datto has VMware ESXi integration – direct hypervisor level backup of each virtual machine works well. Unfortunately, it cannot do the same with Microsoft’s Hyper-V.  Keep in mind that Datto is geared towards the SMB market, where Hyper-V is quite popular. Each Hyper-V VM must install the rather heavy agent (StorageCraft + VirtualBox component).

Lack of VLAN: Datto does not have the ability to create virtual interfaces, or VLAN tagging. This becomes an issue if you have a VM located in another network or DMZ – the backup will have to be routed to the datto appliance. This is often the case with Hyper-V guests, as the issue is exacerbated by the inability to backup natively at the hypervisor.

VirtualBox: Simulated disaster tests clearly show that the datto appliance cannot really replace a busy server. This becomes painfully obvious with SQL servers, SharePoint, and Exchange. Datto uses a low-end ZOTAC “PC” grade appliance, and often times with SATA drives and insufficient RAM when compared to a server. How can it truly measure up to a real server with 128GB of RAM, RAID-5 or 10 with 8+ HDD? The answer: it does not. Datto is now rolling out KVM support, so expect better performance.

Cloud Recovery: This has to be done with assistance from Datto support, in both real and simulated conditions. To simulate a disaster and cloud recovery, you need to schedule ahead of time (10 business days, last I checked) to obtain an engineer. Now, the recovery point will also be about two weeks old at this point, which for testing purposes is not a major issue. Unfortunately, the interface that Datto provides is quite primitive. You have the ability to console into the VM, and some port forwarding (For RDP, HTTP), but that’s it. Networking needs to be defined ahead of time (such as DMZ VMs, or VLANs). You will also need to reconfigure all the networking under Windows and Linux. There is no Firewall or VPN virtual appliance provided. In a real-world, complete disaster scenario, a client would have limited access to their “cloud servers” – unless you have a remote desktop server in your topology. Not only is your recovered infrastructure at greater risk/exposure to the Internet from the lack of a specialized Firewall, you also have to deal with limited connectivity. Anyone who takes the cloud recovery as a serious option, needs to plan and anticipate that need. You will need an OpenVPN client, or similar to connect securely to your "cloud" recovery area.

I really wanted to like Datto. Their marketing is slick, no doubt about it. I expect that certain limitations are due to the fact that Datto does not own the backup technology used – it is based on StorageCraft.  All Datto does is a web interface wrapper, built on Zotac generic brand appliances.  They leverage opensource in almost every other aspect, but unfortunately they have weak implementations.

That prior to the acquisition and evaluation of solutions like datto, make a plan that works for times of recovery and at points of return, in case they need to enable the platform as an alternative (secondary application) to your primary applications.

By evaluating and choosing, we can question the supplier and challenge their technology, qualifying quantitatively who best meets the needs according to the criterion cost/benefit.