HYCU Protégé adds AWS protection for outages, cyber attacks
When cloud providers like AWS go down, business apps go down with them. Data protection tools from Cohesity, Rubrik, Veeam and now HYCU Protégé for AWS prevent downtime.
Tuesday's AWS outage served as a reminder that it's critical to protect data in the hyperscale cloud platform -- or any cloud-based system, for that matter.
Customers will have one more third-party data protection option to consider when HYCU Protégé for Amazon Web Services becomes generally available in the first quarter of 2022.
"We always have to be prepared for the possibility of an outage," said Subbiah Sundaram, vice president of products at HYCU, a multi-cloud backup and recovery vendor. "Customers don't just need -- but have to have -- a disaster recovery strategy."
Tuesday's AWS outage affected the US-EAST-1 region and limited access to many major websites and business applications. The ability to recover data in another location helps users get back online, said Krista Macomber, senior analyst at Evaluator Group.
"They could recover into a different region that has not been impacted by the particular outage," Macomber said.
In the works before the outage, HYCU Protégé for AWS includes selective cross-regional recovery, which enables customers to use multiple regions and locations to spin up applications.
"In the public cloud, [users] need to focus on multi-region availability of their data so that they can do rapid failover and also not have to pay for egress charges," Sundaram said.
We always have to be prepared for the possibility of an outage.
Subbiah SundaramVice president of products, HYCU
Studies have shown that use of the cloud, including AWS, has risen sharply since the start of the pandemic. Many cloud infrastructure providers, such as AWS, and SaaS application vendors have a shared responsibility model in which they are responsible for the platform and users are responsible for their data. As a result, third-party data protection is often necessary.
HYCU responds to market needs
The AWS data protection market has gained steam and includes major players such as Cohesity, Dell EMC, Rubrik and Veeam. In fact, AWS itself recently launched a native disaster recovery service.
"AWS is building out its data protection capabilities and services, which is leading to discussion about why a third-party offering is needed," Macomber said. "But the feature set and availability from AWS remains limited, and by and large we're seeing customers recognize this."
Every hyperscale cloud provider should have its own backup and disaster recovery offering, said HYCU CEO Simon Taylor.
Within HYCU Protégé for Amazon Web Services, users can discover all their instances on AWS and their data protection status from one unified view.
However, multi-cloud data protection is a major challenge. That's where third-party protection can come in and simplify how and where a business manages its data, Taylor said.
HYCU Protégé for AWS provides data protection, management, migration and recovery for workloads on the cloud platform.
The release rounds out HYCU's support for the top three hyperscale cloud providers. That support started with Google Cloud and then Microsoft Azure.
While AWS is the most popular of the three, HYCU began with Google Cloud data protection because of gaps in the market and because Google's types of customers, such as media, were the most exposed to ransomware, Taylor said.
However, all hyperscale cloud users are susceptible to ransomware attacks, he said. Cyber attacks have been prevalent during the pandemic as users work in less secure remote offices.
Most of HYCU's 3,000 customers use AWS.
"It was very clear the market need was off the charts," Taylor said.
HYCU secured an $87.5 million funding round earlier this year and used some of that investment toward its AWS release.
The AWS product's key capabilities include granular recovery -- such as of persistent disks and configuration files -- and cross-region cloning and recovery, Macomber said.
HYCU Protégé for AWS also features one interface to identify and manage AWS-based workloads, "set and forget" policy-based data protection, and the ability to set different service-level agreements for applications within the same cluster.
HYCU Protégé for AWS is in early release and will be available through authorized reseller and channel partners in early 2022.
"Pay as you go" pricing is based on source capacity and how much data a customer protects, Sundaram said.
HYCU finishes up busy year
HYCU previously supported AWS as a backup target. In addition, HYCU supports Nutanix Clusters on AWS and VMware on AWS.
The vendor started as backup for Nutanix in 2017 and later launched VMware protection. This year, HYCU's Protégé multi-cloud backup and recovery platform added support for Office 365 and Kubernetes.
"The two biggest principles that HYCU has carried from its initial Nutanix products to its cloud and Kubernetes services are native support for the environment being protected and application awareness," Macomber said.
Also this year, HYCU launched the "R-Score" website, which grades a company's ability to recover in the event of ransomware.
HYCU, based in Boston, has added 100 employees this year, a goal the company had when it attained the funding round. It now has about 350 employees.
