Rewind's Backups for Trello provides an automated method to restore Trello boards. The vendor continues to target SaaS applications outside of Salesforce and Office 365.
Rewind has added the Trello collaboration application to the list of SaaS products under its protection.
The vendor launched Backups for Trello, a backup as a service (BaaS) offering for recovering Trello data. Rewind backs up Trello boards and the objects within them, including lists, cards, checklists, custom fields, labels and attachments. It also backs up all relationships among those items, enabling customers to roll back individual components or entire boards to an earlier state.
Rewind saves incremental backups of customers' Trello boards and restores them in an automated fashion. While customers can restore on demand, the first few restores are more hands-on, as Rewind's support works closely with the customer to ensure the automated restore process is putting data in the correct place.
Trello, owned by Atlassian, is a project management and productivity tool that helps businesses organize and visualize projects for easier collaboration. It reported having more than 50 million users as of October 2019.
The application has no native means of backing up and restoring data, so users are vulnerable to accidental or malicious deletions. This can throw projects into disarray and affect productivity, and the impact is more severe depending on the business's reliance on Trello, said Rewind CEO Mike Potter.
Common customer workarounds for this include making a duplicate board in Trello or exporting a CSV file of data. Neither of these are true backups, Potter said, as restoring Trello back to a "fixed" state using these methods is manual and time-consuming.
Rewind can restore Trello board components or the entire board to a specific data and time.
"A lot of SaaS platforms provide a way to export the data, but it's not a backup; it's just a copy of your data," Potter said.
Trello has very little third-party backup support, so he felt this was an underserved market, Potter added. Similar circumstances led to Rewind acquiring BackHub in February to provide GitHub backup service for its customers. Most of the requests for Trello backup came from Rewind's GitHub customers, Potter said, adding that Rewind's support for Trello is a good strategic step into the Atlassian ecosystem of products.
Rewind Backups for Trello costs $1 per board, per month, with discounts for larger volumes of boards. An unlimited number of users can use a single Trello board.
Rewind also provides BaaS for BigCommerce, QuickBooks Online, Shopify and GitHub.
Outside of Office 365 and Salesforce, the SaaS application backup market is underserved, said Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), a division of TechTarget. While it makes sense that bigger backup providers such as Commvault and Cohesity are going after the most popular SaaS applications, there's a long list of others that businesses of all sizes rely on daily.
A lot of SaaS platforms provide a way to export the data, but it's not a backup; it's just a copy of your data.
Mike PotterCEO, Rewind
Deletions and downtime on an e-commerce application, point-of-sale application or ZenDesk can have significant business impact, Bertrand said. Customers are using these applications without good data protection in place because they have no choice right now.
"The SaaS application market is well ahead of where the data protection maturity is," Bertrand said.
Rewind is well positioned because it's "going after platforms other vendors aren't even touching," Bertrand added. Rewind will be launching backup for ZenDesk into beta soon, according to Potter.
Figuring out when an application becomes business-critical and deserves a more comprehensive data protection method can be a tough challenge for CIOs, said Vinny Choinski, senior IT validation analyst at ESG.
For example, an organization may start with only a few users on Slack or Microsoft Teams, but that number can grow so gradually that users don't recognize how dependent they are on the app until it unexpectedly goes down. This is different from Salesforce usage, where IT made a conscious decision to adopt the platform, Choinski said.
"Some of these applications don't have the same recognition as Salesforce or Office 365 because they can accidentally become a part of production," Choinski said.
