Druva's CloudRanger Integration Helps Manage, Protect Workloads in the Cloud

Druva's integration of the CloudRanger disaster recovery platform for workloads running on AWS addresses some of the major management issues around the increasing number of workloads in the cloud: data visibility and protection.

Druva, a cloud data protection company, purchased CloudRanger in June and has since integrated CloudRanger into its Druva Cloud Platform and improved it with several major new features.

Steven Hill, a senior analyst at 451 Research, said CloudRanger’s approach to workload data protection in the cloud and its expanded capabilities will help companies more effectively manage cloud computing.

CloudRanger uses a snapshot-based approach to backup, providing file-level visibility in a cloud-based snapshot. This enables users to search across all AWS accounts and snapshots to find specific files. This is especially useful for companies running transactional workloads within AWS that need an application-friendly data protection model.

Hill said block-based databases or analytics workloads really benefit from the speed and consistency of snapshot technology, although the protection model extends well to any appliance based on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

“It allows you to find and recover data without actually spinning up the snapshot, which can be a real time-saver, especially if you have to dig through a large number of snapshots for legal or data recovery purposes,” he said.

CloudRanger also now includes an automation disaster recovery function, which Druva said allows organizations to replicate and clone entire AWS accounts along with associated environments across regions.

That’s an important change, Hill said, because it addresses the challenges of managing and protecting workloads in the cloud.

“It really comes down how quickly you can react to and minimize the effect of an application outage,” he said. “CloudRanger takes a volume/snapshot-based approach to protecting applications running on AWS, which supports a combination of really rapid data capture of running applications and the ability to restore those applications quickly in the event of an outage. AWS is a massive ecosystem, and CloudRanger’s AWS-based, cloud-native approach to data protection provides better access to all that inherent resilience and associated services.” 

Druva also is emphasizing the benefits of these enhancements on data governance, including chain of custody and compliance. Its policy-based management of snapshots, for example, can help maintain chain of custody during a court order for evidence. That’s because snapshots provides an exact replica of an application space at a precise point in time, and multiple snapshots can establish that behavior over time. These capabilities, combined with the ability to set litigation holds at snapshot level, help ensure the integrity of all data within that snapshot.

That same functionality can be used to enforce compliance because the snapshot management technology in CloudRanger also can be used to validate that data protection is occurring according to regulations. Policies can be easily verified and tested, and the snapshot itself can serve as proof of compliance. The file indexing capabilities simplify additional forensic investigation.

With CloudRanger, Druva is on the right track, Hill said. As more and more companies look toward a multi-cloud future, the need for a unified disaster recovery/business continuity technology that can seamlessly span multiple clouds will become more and more important.