Multi-cloud data protection provider HYCU has arrived in the hot SaaS backup market with a managed service for Office 365 workloads.
HYCU Protégé for Microsoft Office 365, generally available Wednesday, provides cloud-native backup and recovery for services including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and OneNote.
"It protects everything in Office 365," said Subbiah Sundaram, vice president of products at HYCU.
The Office 365 backup is part of the same HYCU Protégé management console that offers protection for AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Nutanix and VMware workloads.
HYCU backup features include compliance, security
While the HYCU backup service enters a crowded market, its coverage of the major elements of Office 365 at its launch -- plus its compliance and security capabilities -- help it stand out, according to Krista Macomber, senior analyst at Evaluator Group.
"Unlike many others in the space, it's more than strictly software hosted in the cloud -- it's a managed service, even including storage capacity and dynamic scaling of resources," Macomber said. "Additionally, it has the benefit of being an Azure-native service."
Customers can scale quickly. For example, an organization could start with 10 users and grow to 10,000 the next day, Sundaram said.
There is no limit on data retention in the HYCU backup service.
Recovery is granular across any level, from an email to a mailbox, from one chat to an entire OneDrive, Sundaram said.
For security, HYCU encrypts data during transit and at rest.
"We hear Office 365 customers talk about the need to protect against accidental data deletion and to protect against cyber attacks -- as well as the need for granular restoration," Macomber said. "HYCU's service checks those boxes."
Support for Office 365 is the latest element to the HYCU Protégé multi-cloud data protection product.
Macomber also praised the product's e-discovery, including tagging, search and audit trail capabilities.
HYCU, based in Boston, claims about 2,000 customers. While all sizes of business have adopted Office 365 and can use HYCU, the backup vendor's sweet spot is midsize to large enterprises, Sundaram said.
The HYCU backup for Office 365 is available through reseller and channel partners, as an add-on license at $4 per month, per user. The product includes unlimited backup storage capacity. It has been in early adoption for about 45 days, Sundaram said.
It protects everything in Office 365.
Subbiah SundaramVice president of products, HYCU
What SaaS customers need for data protection
The market still requires education about why Office 365 needs protection, according to Macomber. Microsoft provides protection at the infrastructure level, but users need to back up data within the platform.
In recent years, several vendors have released backup products specific to Office 365 or added support for the application to their platforms, including Arcserve, Barracuda, Spanning and Veeam.
Customers want to minimize complexity, especially with often complex disaster recovery and data migration, Macomber said.
"For the customer's HYCU estate, Protégé answers that need, connecting HYCU's various cloud-specific offerings," she said.
HYCU backup will expand into more SaaS platform support, with another launch likely in the next couple of weeks, Sundaram said. He declined to say which service is next, but other popular SaaS applications include Salesforce, Google Workspace and Box.
