Druva founder and CEO talks Azure integration, IPO and AI

Druva, a SaaS cloud backup vendor, has operated its platform exclusively within an AWS environment until now, even when offering services supporting other Azure workloads like Microsoft 365.

However, a new partnership with Microsoft will now enable customers to store backups by Druva within the Microsoft Azure data center and region of their choice, similar to AWS, according to Jaspreet Singh, founder and CEO of Druva.

Additional capabilities and further integrations with Microsoft services are planned in the months ahead alongside the launch of the Druva Security Cloud within the Azure Marketplace, he said.

In this Q&A, Singh discusses why Druva is integrating with Azure now, as well as some of Druva's other recent news, including its former IPO ambitions, how the Dru AI copilots are evolving and backup industry market trends.

Editor's note: This Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Why did Druva start working with Microsoft Azure backups after years of exclusive AWS protection?

Jaspreet Singh

Jaspreet Singh: As customers [embrace] workloads across multiple clouds, we were consistently asked [if] we could protect data across multiple clouds.

We're pretty deep into the AWS architecture, but we've been looking at Microsoft Azure for almost 18 months to think about this [new] architecture where customers could seamlessly choose any AWS region or Azure region to deploy the Druva service.

We've got a whole roadmap planned with Microsoft on certain services they're launching and how we protect them. There will be a series of announcements in which we're integrating with Microsoft on particular services.

The demand was always there. To make sure [our] SaaS is performing cost-effectively and securely, we had to go deep and make sure customers don't even know how we run [or] where we run.

Are there any plans to support additional clouds in the near future?

Singh: There's a ton of differences between Azure and AWS. [We] have to completely and seamlessly abstract it [as a SaaS platform]. It's much easier for a software provider, say a Cohesity or Veeam, to work across clouds because they simply have to make it performant. We have run, operate and secure end-to-end. That took time.

It's extremely difficult for us to go long tail on a cloud, so nothing is planned on the horizon yet. 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.

There's plenty of other announcements coming this year from an innovation perspective in [how] we think about multi-cloud environments, how we think about the security of them, and how we think about the role of AI.

Druva has been hinting at an IPO for years. What's the latest on this?

Singh: We had filed to go public in 2021-2022, and we had to pull back given how the market did. The bar for going public used to be [roughly] $100 million about six or seven years ago. [Now it's] $300 or $400 million. You've got to see the investor appetite and make a conscious decision on when and how [to go public].

As the last private [backup] company left, we're highly valuable because if any acquirer is to come, this is the only opportunity you're going to get.

Druva continues to do very well. We're building and scaling [up]. We're the last private [backup] company left of any [large] scale. Either [backup vendors] are public or have done mergers or been bought by private equity.

We want to maximize that opportunity. [We're looking at] the things you can do [as a private company] that you cannot do on the public market, like more M&A, driving more aggressive growth [or] doing critical architectures like we did for Microsoft. As the last private [backup] company left, we're highly valuable because if any acquirer is to come, this is the only opportunity you're going to get.

Druva has released two AI assistants, Dru Assist and Dru Investigate. What do these do, and what's customer uptake and reaction to them?

Singh: Dru Assist is now front and center of our website [as] a primary way we interact with customers. It's been very well received.

We had a tremendous amount of learning with Dru Investigate. I believe 700-plus customers have tried it. We had a major customer outage, but they were able to successfully use [Dru Investigate], and we have tons of learning from it.

But what we also realize is that the bar from ChatGPT is so high that people don't know where to draw boundaries. They ask questions [to either assistant] like, 'Tell me how a backup is doing right now.' [Which is] not an investigative use case but a real-time data use case. Or [they ask] 'Can you create so-and-so policy for me?'

We got very complex questions, and what we established was there was a big need [about data complexity] and the expectations from a SaaS model like us. We will think about this as a very modular and multi-agentic problem. Based on the data quality, data access given, these agents could solve a very complex problem.

There's a lot to come there. We probably have [a few] versions planned this year to be very sophisticated and have a lot of security and privacy baked in. You [also] see customers who have their own AI environments and they want Druva integrated into their environments, [which include] Microsoft Copilot, Amazon Bedrock or their own agentic environments.

What do you see as trends in the backup industry throughout the coming year?

Singh: While the traditional backup market may shrink, the cloud [backup] market will grow very rapidly. It will still not cover 100% of customers, but it will cover a big circle [of them that's] growing very rapidly.

[Those] new customers don't want infrastructure, they want consumption. They don't want fixed costs.

The operational recovery needs to be different.

There are three interesting trends that are growing: One is cyberthreats and how you recover from cyberattacks.

Second is a process threat from a legal, compliance and privacy perspective that's only going to get more and more complicated. What do I own, what do my customers own, [and] how do I protect my data for a legal case, a lawsuit or privacy policy request. Third is a human threat which has become more complicated. You can audit things more deeply in cloud, and backups have all the data.

AI will evolve rapidly, and there will be an expectation that [those services] will start to integrate with enterprise applications. Conversational interfaces like Teams or Slack will become critical applications to secure not from a recovery perspective but from a legal and compliance perspective for forensic investigation purposes.

As countries become more nationalistic, data becomes more localized. I think that will definitely push companies to think about their assets, their IP differently than they did in the past.

Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.