N-able shows strong adoption for Cove Data Protection

N-able, a reference in IT solutions for MSPs around security, remote monitoring and management and data protection, joined the 46th IT Press Tour to update the group on the company strategy and Cove Data Protection. Just a few days following its Empover conference in Las Vegas, we had the opportunity to get a private update on company and products. And for some of you who wish to get a recent live update from N-able CEO, John Pagliuca, I invite you to listen to it here.

To give you an idea of the size of the company, N-able, traded on NYSE under the NABL ticket, generates $360 million annual revenue with 45% coming from outside the US covering more than 25,000 MSPs globally. We understand 20-25% of the revenue comes from Cove Data Protection which translates into 72 to 90 million which is significant for more than 12,000 MSPs just for this backup service. Today 150PB is the total of data stored in the N-able cloud with more than 1 million Microsoft 365 uses and more than 145000 businesses.

Renamed a few months ago Cove Data Protection is a cloud-first data protection solution supported by 30 data centers worldwide. The philosophy of the product is interesting, it is an agent-based solution serving a file/data selector and also responsible for the source dedup and encryption. The dedup, named TrueDelta , is by machine only at the byte level providing a fine granularity with very low network traffic, only efficient data, I mean new data, are copied to the cloud location. Thus no global dedup is offered, as all signatures are stored on each local system in a SQLite database. These signatures are not globalized on a central database, at least they’re not computed to offer this global reduction. But again as it worked at the byte level, the result is pretty good. But let’s consider 100 Windows laptops, the first copy consumed network and storage space and will copy 100 times the OS. Then the transfer is reduced but that first full copy for 99 machines could be avoided if the very first machine serves as a reference. 99 copies occupy some space.

The interesting feature is the Local Speed Vault aka LSV to offer a short RTO with bootable images. As the terms says it is a local copy of the cloud data and avoid to address the cloud for te recovery. In that case the agent writes to the 2 targets - local and remote - at the same time.

As Chis Groot, GM, and Stefaan Voss, VP Product Management, have shared during the tour session, they have a clear strategy around the core platform with simplicity as a mantra, then DRaaS capabilities illustrated by LSV and workloads expansion with things like M365, Teams, G-Suite…

The roadmap is ambitious with Azure Public Cloud support for Standby Image in H1 2023 but also Azure AD and other key workloads and applications.