With an Eye toward AWS, Druva Acquires Cloud Storage Management Company

According to recent Gartner research, spending on public cloud services will increase by almost 23 percent, to $186.9 billion this year. Cloud solutions like Amazon Web Services have spawned an entire industry for companies that want to help manage the workflow. This is key both for companies in the hybrid zone and those looking to migrate all essential resources to the cloud.

Recognizing this scenario, Druva is acquiring cloud storage management company CloudRanger, which specializes in backup and disaster recovery solutions specifically for AWS. According to Druva, the acquisition will improve the Druva Cloud Platform's data protection and data management coverage.

The Ireland-based company is betting that adding support for AWS will increase the Druva Cloud Platform's appeal to the enterprise market. According to Dave Packer, Druva vice president of product and alliance marketing, CloudRanger will be able to simplify management and slim down costs of enterprise workloads run in AWS.

According to Packer, only 51 percent of organizations back up their mission-critical data every night. He says that companies often have difficulty in meeting the recommended threshold of daily backup due to a number of different factors.

“A large portion of it is due to the volume of data, its distribution across the organization (different sites), and the ability for the infrastructure [network, storage, compute] and older backup systems to keep pace,” said Packer. “Most deployed older systems use a classical GFS backup model and have a lot of overhead when creating synthetics. Due to these dynamics, often companies cannot stay within the backup windows and therefore are forced to compromise and undertake different measures to address the recovery/continuity gap to try to stay within reasonable service levels.“

Whether moving data to the cloud completely or taking a hybrid approach, there is a considerable amount of complexity to deal with.

“The complexity comes from the distribution of where the data is stored in the cloud and an inability to access systems/infrastructure in the same way organizations would do on-premises,” said Packer. “Trying to use on-premises systems to manage, or backup, the cloud is somewhat futile; organizations are migrating to the cloud to move away from that model to begin with. And, since tape isn’t a cloud-option, organizations need to be more diligent on having visibility into what is there, how its lifecycle is managed, and ensure proper use of cloud storage-tiers — this is only further complicated by multiple account and region usage.”

Packer is arguing that many organizations don’t have the tools or features like a unified control plane to manage such scenarios. Druva is angling to meet this head on with the CloudRanger acquisition.