Spanning, a confidential leader

Spanning Cloud Apps (www.spanning.com), leader in Cloud-to-Cloud data backup, has participated to the 14th IT Press Tour a few days ago. The company, recently acquired by EMC, is one of the few players that address the challenge to protect user data in top SaaS applications such Google Apps or Salesforce. The company based in Austin, TX was founded in 2010 and has today 55 employees for 4000+ customers worldwide. Companies used to protect data for on-premises applications even if many of them don't backup at all data. The main justification for Cloud-to-Cloud backup is based on the characteristic of the data in cloud used by SaaS based application. In their recent Data Protection Index report, EMC revealed that companies lost 1.7 trillions $. In addition to that, survey respondents recognize that it's tough to protect Saas based data and many customers think that subscribing to a SaaS implies a data protection service of the data manipulated by these applications. The reality, it's not the case and data are exposed to dramatic scenarios. People really experienced lost of data and consequences are critical for businesses. The second difficulty is that SaaS data are not easy to control and protect as all the IT infrastructure is controlled by other companies. The skill needed to integrate such protection mechanism are not so common so having a recognized tool to do that is fundamental. The last mandatory element is the compliance component. Spanning does all that and does that very well. The service offered by Spanning covers essentially 3 things: of course, Backup as the data need to be copied to a secondary place, here everything is secured on Amazon, Restore, the key part and the most critical aspect of the service. In 2 words, a backup is evaluated by its Restore function not the Backup capability and many of the vendors promote new backup features. Users want easy, consistent and fast restore for their data, this is the last copy of their data most of the time. Spanning is recognized for Google Apps and Salesforce and recently add the same capability for Microsoft Office365 meaning that today Spanning has probably the largest data perimeter from SaaS world. For Google, Spanning secures Drive, Gmail, Contacts, Calendar and Sites, protection today 350,000 accounts and 4000+ domains representing billions of emails and documents. For Salesforce, the demo made by Jeff Erramouspe, CEO of Spanning, was impressive by the simplicity and the integration with the UI.


EMC participated to the Spanning meeting and Russ Stockdale, VP and GM Data Protection Cloud, has presented the following presentation to help us understand where Spanning fits and also give us the EMC strategy in Data Protection.


Spanning also announced the support of Microsoft Office365 illustrating perfectly their leadership position in the market. That support is currently in Beta and plans to be be GA in H12015. Clearly EMC acquired a real gem, leader in its domain, let's see how competition will react...