Most organizations use the cloud in a hybrid manner. Some applications and workloads remain on-premises, while some are transitory between on-premises and the cloud, and still others are cloud only. The distributed IT model puts a new strain on the data protection process because unique and critical data can now exist anywhere including the data center, remote offices, users’ laptops and devices, SaaS applications and cloud-native applications. To try to keep up, IT starts using a variety of data protection solutions, leading to data protection sprawl, which lowers the quality of the data protection process and complicates recovery.
One of the weakest elements is protecting cloud-native applications like those that exist in Amazon Elastic Compute (EC2), use Elastic Block Storage (EBS) or cloud-native applications that run on Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon’s Data Warehouse solution, RedShift. Protecting these environments typically requires the organization to write scripts or add code to the applications.
While organizations are starting to create and leverage cloud-native applications, they still have on-premises workloads and processes that also require protection, including on-premises applications, laptops, devices, and SaaS applications like G-Suite and Microsoft Office 365. These organizations want to leverage the cloud in some way, but most protection applications see the cloud as a digital dumping ground and don’t fully leverage cloud compute and storage to create a scalable protection environment.
Druva – Creating an End-to-End Cloud Data Protection Strategy
Druva is emerging as a leader in the cloud data protection market. Their inSync product is a cloud-hosted data protection application that protects endpoints (laptops and devices) as well as SaaS (G-Suite, Office 365, Salesforce.com) applications. Druva’s Phoenix product is a cloud-hosted application that protects on-premises physical servers, databases, VMware, Hyper-V and NAS systems. Both of these products do more than use the cloud as a storage endpoint. The inSync and Phoenix applications use cloud computing, as well as storage, to create a scalable data protection solution, eliminating one of the primary concerns over traditional backup, how to scale the software and secondary storage.
Missing from Druva’s cloud portfolio though was the ability to protect cloud-native applications beyond the common SaaS applications. To fill this void, Druva recently announced the acquisition of CloudRanger, a data protection solution for Amazon EC2, EBS, RDS and RedShift. CloudRanger provides the ability for organizations to automatically protect their applications and data residing in the Amazon Cloud, instead of using scripts or hard coding protection into the applications themselves. Utilizing AWS’ native snapshot capability, CloudRanger customers can create and delete AWS backups on a schedule that they design. Leveraging the CloudRanger GUI, customers can also set retention policies, apply custom tags, or instance IDs for each backup policy.
CloudRanger Backups can also be multi-region. It can protect applications running in multiple regions, and it can copy snapshots between regions. Finally, the solution also provides an easy way to implement a disaster recovery plan. In the event of a disaster, one can recover Amazon EC2, EBS, RDS and RedShift snapshots from one region to another. The solution even includes an automated disaster recovery feature so organizations can frequently test their ability to recover in the case of a disaster.
StorageSwiss Take
Druva’s unique position in the market is its ability to leverage the cloud not only for storage but to scale the compute requirements of data protection. It even leverages Amazon’s DynamoDB to track backup metadata. The company provides a robust solution for endpoints, SaaS, and on-premises server/virtual machine data protection. The acquisition of CloudRanger makes the offering significantly more complete. Druva can now protect organizations at every stage of their cloud journey. The combination of all these attributes lends credence to Druva’s claim of “beyond data protection” which includes services such as governance, compliance and analytics.
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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