Asigra Inc., a leading cloud backup, recovery and restore (BURR) software provider since 1986 has been selected as a finalist for Red Herring's Top 100 North America award, a prestigious list honoring the year's most promising private technology ventures from the North American business region. At the Red Herring Americas 2013 award event on May 23rd, Asigra EVP, Eran Farajun, will present on cloud-to-cloud anytime/anywhere data recovery as a critical capability of enterprise data protection.

Red Herring has been selecting the most exciting and promising start-ups and "scale ups" since 1995. Finalists are still evaluated individually from a large pool of hundreds of candidates based across North America. Twenty major criteria underlie the scoring and process. They include, among others: the candidate company's addressable market size, its IP and patents, its financing, the proof of concept, trailing revenues and management's expertise. Each company goes through an individual interview after filling out a thorough submission, complemented by a due diligence. The list of finalists often includes the best performing and prominent companies of that year.

This unique assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the company's actual track record and standing, which allows Red Herring to see past the "buzz" and make the list a valuable instrument for discovering and advocating the greatest business opportunities in the industry.

2013 will be remembered as a special vintage. "The finalists list confirms the excellent choices made by entrepreneurs and VCs and the start-ups' solid roots, embracing their innovations. By all metrics, it emphasizes entrepreneurial excellence," said Alex Vieux, Publisher and CEO of Red Herring.

Finalist selections for the 2013 edition of the Red Herring 100 North America award are based upon technological innovation, management strength, market size, investor record, customer acquisition and financial health. During the several months leading up to the announcement, hundreds of companies in the fields of security, Web 2.0, software, hardware, life sciences, cloud, mobile and others completed their submissions to qualify for the award.

Finalists are asked to present their winning strategies at the Red Herring North America Forum in Monterey, Calif., May 21 to 23, 2013. The Top 100 winners will be announced at a special awards ceremony the evening of May 23 at the event. The event provides a rare opportunity to meet the founders, investors, and top executives of these disruptive companies all under one roof. The forum will explore the market's appreciation of innovation as a fast-track to success, and how firms from the Americas are leading the charge in many tech sectors. It will discuss the drivers for successful entrepreneurship, and will demonstrate how innovation is creating business opportunities for challengers and incumbents alike.

As a finalist in this year's awards, Asigra will present on the growth in adoption of cloud-based backup technologies, especially among enterprise organizations. Asigra's end-to-end data recovery solution for public, hybrid and private cloud backups is the latest generation software to consolidate all enterprise backup data into a single repository for compliance readiness, recovery assurance and simplified management. Asigra Cloud Backup™ protects physical, virtual and cloud environments and breaks new ground with cloud application support (SaaS and PaaS), industry-leading mobile endpoint support, advanced virtual disaster recovery and NIST FIPS 140-2 certification.

"There is a growing market for cloud-based data recovery as IT professionals confront the challenges of data growth and increasingly complex IT infrastructure," said Farajun. "With true end-to-end data recovery that covers physical, virtual and cloud computing environments, I will highlight emerging opportunities in the backup and recovery space and how we outperform in these areas."