HYCU now supports Azure

HYCU, the emerging leader in next-gen data protection, continues its transformation towards a global comprehensive data protection player this time with the addition of Azure support. Remember the company comes from a niche on-premises Nutanix backup vendor a few years ago and it is now shaking leaders' positions.

Following HYCU for GCP in 2018 and Protégé announcement made during the June 2019 IT Press Tour, HYCU continues to develop a new trajectory for the company. This time the expansion is with Azure and we find similar approach existing with GCP.

The team insists on three majors functions for enterprises: Data Protection, Data Migration and Disaster Recovery.

The product is very rich with now with strong classic capabilities from HYCU available on Azure and specific ones. Data are stored on Azure Blob and as Change Block Tracking is not available on Azure, the company has developed a technique that mounts a snapshot, navigates this mounted image and finds the block difference thanks to hashing of each 4kB block.

SaaS backup is hot and is here to stay and many players recognized the pattern. Some vendors come from classic zone like Actifio, Commvault, Druva, Veeam or Veritas, others appeared with the cloud boom like Cohesity or Rubrik and finally a few were founded as pure SaaS actors such Clumio in addition to references like Barracuda Networks.

The other paramount feature is the multi-cloud to stay cloud-agnostic for enterprises able to move and change providers at the speed of light. Of course, data has gravity but if data management tools copy file in various cloud at the same time, this independence is reached with a super fast switch over capability.

The other key point is the rapid adoption of SaaS applications by enterprises and the need to protect data. Some dedicated players have jumped into that segment like Kaseya/Spanning, Datto/Backupify, OwnBackup, CloudAlly, CloudHQ or SpinBackup and we expect some convergence of solution with "classic" generic SaaS backup vendors. Some already made the move such Acronis, Asigra, Cohesity, Commvault, Druva, Veeam or Veritas. This convergence is also driven by users as they wish to reduce the multiplication of such solutions so having one horizontal answer is key. Winners will be these players with horizontal solution and I have serious doubt over the long run for super vertical SaaS players.

For SaaS backup features, we consider fundamental these few items:

• Native cloud service with marketplace presence and integrated billing,
• Agentless for more transparency and agility,
• Various Hypervisor support with vSphere being a must,
• Backup images portability and mobility to ease multi-cloud,
• Application aware with strong consistency,
• Flexible RPO and RTO capabilities,
• and Security with in-transit/at-rest encryption, IAM integration...

HYCU future will be interesting and this year especially. We anticipate some extension to AWS and the introduce of an analytics service, at least we hope, to contribute to the capacity planning, application SLAs and workloads management.

A few M&As should happen in the coming months as SaaS is so hot that some players must react quickly by adding new capabilities and applications support such Salesforce, Workday, NetSuite, ServiceNow, Office 365, G Suite or Box.