Druva debuts fully integrated support for Microsoft Azure
Druva's SaaS platform expands beyond AWS with new embedded support for Microsoft Azure storage workload backups after more than a decade of AWS exclusivity.
Druva now offers backup services within Microsoft Azure, the first additional embedded cloud that the backup vendor supports beyond AWS.
Druva's Data Security Cloud now supports Azure Storage for Microsoft Azure VMs and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud VMs, with support for additional services planned in the coming months through a strategic partnership with Microsoft, according to Druva.
DSC is Druva's sole product, sold as a SaaS platform, which provides enterprise data management and backup services including governance and ransomware recovery. The service also offers coverage for SaaS applications including Salesforce and Microsoft 365.
The platform has backed up data exclusively to AWS for all its offerings in the past, but these two additions are the vendor's first foray into multi-cloud support and recovery.
Most enterprises are now using a variety of clouds, either for specific workloads or to have a secondary failover cloud should issues like a ransomware attack arise, said Simon Robinson, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia.
AWS might be the de facto public cloud provider for many organizations, as it has absorbed almost 30% of the cloud market, but other vendors like Azure and Google Cloud are keeping pace, Robinson said.
Any vendor looking to appeal to the market more broadly must take into account that organizations are using multiple clouds -- either by design or accident.
Simon RobinsonAnalyst, Enterprise Strategy Group
"When people said 'public cloud,' they were effectively talking about AWS," Robinson said. "But it's increasingly a two- or three-horse race. Any vendor looking to appeal to the market more broadly must take into account that organizations are using multiple clouds -- either by design or accident."
Azure clouds
Druva already supports a variety of Microsoft and Azure services, but this new partnership and engineering work enables customers to use Azure Blob Storage, the built-in object storage service in Azure, according to Jaspreet Singh, CEO and co-founder of Druva.
"We're pretty deep into the AWS architecture, but we've been looking at Microsoft [Azure] for almost 18 months," Singh said. "We've got a whole roadmap planned with Microsoft on certain services they're launching and how we protect them."
Druva also supports other Microsoft services using AWS' S3 object storage for backup, including Microsoft Sentinel, Windows, Microsoft 365, Entra ID and Dynamics 365.
Support for additional clouds, like Google Cloud or Oracle, isn't planned in the immediate future, he said.
"I think these two [clouds] give us plenty of coverage around the globe. We might do something very regional in the future, but [it's] not planned yet," Singh said.
Druva had planned to file an IPO around 2021, but market conditions made the company reverse course, according to Singh. The company is open to considering an IPO or being acquired, but will take advantage of remaining private in the immediate future.
"[We're looking at] the things that you cannot do on the public market like more M&A, driving more aggressive growth [or] do critical architectures like we did for Microsoft," he said.
Singh's options might open up in the near future as the technology market should permit favorable conditions for IPOs, said Krista Case, an analyst at The Futurum Group.
"From an IPO perspective, the market is getting better," she said. "[Companies] like Druva are monitoring this quite closely, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're evaluating all options."
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.
