Druva Works With AWS To Bring One-Click Disaster Recovery As A Service

Cloud data protection and management technology developer Druva Tuesday unveiled a new disaster protection offering that uses Amazon Web Services' cloud architecture to provide Disaster Recovery as a Service.

With the offering, Druva is giving its channel partners a new method of providing a one-click way to fail over operations from on-premises or the cloud to AWS without the need for extra hardware or complex policies, said Jaspreet Singh, CEO of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Druva.

Druva's new Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service offering allows data to be protected and recovered directly via customers' pre-existing AWS policies, Singh told CRN.

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"We make it extremely easy for one-click failover," he said. "This will dramatically decrease the cost of disaster recovery while pushing the cost of disaster recovery testing to zero, or to near zero."

Looking ahead, Druva will be seeking ways for channel partners to help customers capture more value from their stored data, Singh said.

The company already streamlines disaster recovery by running it along with archiving from the same pool of data, he said.

The new AWS-based offering also allows users to replicate virtual machines and clone full virtual PCs, and then move them across different regions for resiliency and for disaster recovery testing, he said.

Going forward, Druva plans to make the data forensics process easier with new search functionality, as well as make it possible to get critical insight from unstructured data, Singh said.

"That's hard to do," he said. "We want to make it easy."

The ability to provide Disaster Recovery as a Service with AWS is very exciting technology news, said Giles Westie, founder and president of DataPivot Technologies, a North Andover, Mass.-based solution provider that started working closely with Druva nearly one year ago.

"I know a lot of clients who want disaster recovery testing to be easier and faster," Westie told CRN. "The fact that Druva will be able to do disaster recovery testing on demand without the need to build anything is important. Disaster recovery testing in the past was very expensive, and very painful. If Druva can attack disaster recovery testing in a public cloud in an easier and cheaper way, there's definitely demand."

DataPivot's focus on the ease and cost of disaster recovery and its testing stems from the company's customer base, all of which are either in regulated industries or are publicly traded, according to Westie.

"They require regular disaster recovery testing and off-site recovery," he said. "We've done several successful disaster recovery tests. Even we would appreciate an easier process."

Druva's data protection and management technology is available for customers working on the edge, in the data center and in the cloud with such platforms as Amazon EC2, Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce, Singh said.

The company has over the past year focused on capturing data from new, cloud-ready workloads and on looking at how to add value to that data, he said.

"We are going into a variety of cloud workloads," he said. "Last year, we acquired CloudRanger for Amazon and Google workloads. CloudRanger was one of Amazon's biggest partners for AWS workloads."

Druva currently is not a profitable company, although it could be at any time, Singh said.

"Today, our focus is on market growth," he said. "We are a high-growth company. We have a very strong, sticky customer base with recurring revenue and a 120 percent net retention rate. If we slowed growth, we could be profitable any day."