The 20 Coolest Cloud Storage Vendors Of The 2016 Cloud 100

Coolest Cloud Storage Vendors For 2015

Customers have turned toward cloud storage for a wide range of services that traditionally were within the purview of on-premise storage, including data protection, disaster recovery, archiving, temporary capacity increases, and other functions where there is less value to high-speed access to data.

Yet the cloud is more than a place to keep data one hopes will never be accessed. Customers are increasingly moving mission-critical data toward the cloud, either for primary storage, test and development, workload bursting, or file sync and share. And that means solution providers that have not yet made cloud storage a part of their practice risk being left behind. Here is CRN's list of the 20 coolest cloud storage vendors of 2016.

If you missed it, check out the vendors in the other categories of The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2016.

Acronis

Serguei Beloussov, CEO

Headquarters: Burlington, Mass.

The Acronis Backup Cloud backs up data from any source, stores it locally or in a private or public cloud, and recovers it to any destination and system. The company in July expanded the Acronis Backup Cloud with Microsoft SQL and Exchange capabilities and a new private cloud-based file sync and share service.

Arcserve

Mike Crest, CEO

Headquarters: Eden Prairie, Minn.

The Arcserve Cloud offers disaster recovery as a service and includes off-site data retention for long-term storage. Virtual machines can be spun up in the Arcserve Cloud for fast failover and failback. The company also offers the Arcserve UDP Appliance Series that integrates hardware and software into an SMB data protection solution.

Asigra

David Farajun, CEO

Headquarters: Toronto, Ontario

Asigra Cloud Backup is an enterprise-class data protection software solution with a single integrated approach including virtual machine replication to protect all sources and types of corporate data. The company in 2015 expanded Asigra Cloud Backup with a focus on converged data protection for physical, virtual, cloud and mobile computing environments.

Avere Systems

Ronald Bianchini, President, CEO

Headquarters: Pittsburgh, Pa.

Avere develops the Avere FXT Edge series of physical and virtual NAS appliances with built-in cloud gateways for a hybrid cloud NAS solution. The virtual Avere vFXT lets businesses run applications on cloud computing services by bursting data to a public cloud or running a multiprotocol scalable NAS in the cloud.

Barracuda Networks

William "BJ" Jenkins, President, CEO

Headquarters: Campbell, Calif.

Barracuda Backup combines on-premise and cloud data protection in a single application that integrates with other Barracuda applications for messaging and archiving. The company in 2015 unveiled the Barracuda Backup Virtual Appliance (Vx), a software solution for virtualized environments, and acquired Intronis to expand its presence in the MSP market.

Carbonite

Mohamad Ali, President, CEO

Headquarters: Boston

Carbonite, which grew from a provider of consumer cloud backup to a channel-focused business cloud-based data protection provider, solidified its enterprise focus with the 2015 acquisition of patents and intellectual property from Rebit. It followed up in January with the acquisition of Seagate's Evault business continuity and disaster recovery business.

Cloudberry Lab

Alexey Serkov, CTO

Headquarters: Aliso Viejo, Calif.

CloudBerry Lab provides cloud-based backup and file management services to SMBs. CloudBerry Managed Backup enables MSPs, solution providers or IT services companies to provide cloud backup services to clients using one of more than a dozen public storage clouds, including Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Google Cloud Storage and Microsoft Azure.

Ctera Networks

Liran Eshel, Co-Founder, CEO

Headquarters: New York

Ctera provides hybrid cloud data protection, enterprise file sync and share, remote and branch office storage, and managed NAS capabilities. The company in October said its Ctera Enterprise File Services Platform supports the Amazon S3 Infrequent Access storage tier, which provides a cost-effective option for storing and retaining long-term data.

Commvault

Robert Hammer, Chairman, President, CEO

Headquarters: Tinton Falls, N.J.

Commvault is a developer of end-to-end cloud-based data protection, infrastructure management, and retention and compliance technology for midsize and enterprise businesses. Commvault in October revamped its data protection technology with open standards-based capabilities.

eFolder

Kevin Hoffman, CEO, CTO

Headquarters: Atlanta

eFolder started as a solution provider but morphed into a provider of cloud backup, disaster recovery, business continuity and file sync services. The company's new eFolder BDR for Replibit is an image-based backup and disaster recovery service that replicates images of server backups every few minutes to the eFolder Cloud for fast recovery.

Egnyte

Vineet Jain, Co-Founder, CEO

Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.

Egnyte's Adaptive Enterprise File Sync and Share Services provide secure and intelligent access and sharing of files stored on-premise and in the cloud. The solution allows secure access to and sharing of corporate data from any device anywhere without a VPN while allowing collaboration between multiple users inside and outside an organization.

iland

Scott Sparvero, Co-Founder, CEO

Headquarters: Houston

iland is an enterprise cloud infrastructure provider with eight data centers in the U.S., England and Singapore. Its complete hosted cloud solutions include disaster recovery as a service to protect on-premise, virtual and physical systems and workloads, as well as cloud-based data protection using the Veeam Cloud Connect applications.

Infrascale

Ken Shaw, Founder, CEO

Headquarters: El Segundo, Calif.

Infrascale provides disaster recovery as a service via its on-premise data protection appliance, which provides fast local or remote recovery; its data protection cloud; and its cloud failover appliance, which allows servers and client devices along with their workloads to be booted up in the cloud in case of a disaster.

Nakivo

Bruce Talley, Co-Founder, CEO

Headquarters: Campbell, Calif.

Nakivo Backup & Replication protects and recovers VMware virtual machines and data on-site, off-site and in the cloud. It offers data protection for virtualized environments, including local and off-site virtual machine backup and replication, support for live applications and databases, instant granular recovery, network acceleration, data deduplication and compression, and encryption.

Panzura

John Peters, CEO

Headquarters: Campbell, Calif.

Panzura's Global Cloud Storage System integrates three components: the Panzura Controller physical or virtual appliance deployed on-premise or in the cloud; the Panzura SkyBridge software for creating a hybrid cloud that includes the corporate data center; and the Panzura Global File System for accessing and collaborating from anywhere.

SoftNAS

Rick Braddy, Founder, CEO, CTO

Headquarters: Houston

SoftNAS develops software-defined NAS solutions and protects mission-critical data through any combination of public, private and hybrid clouds, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, CenturyLink Cloud, and VMware vSphere and vCloud Air environments. The company last year added object storage services and software-based WAN/cloud acceleration and closed a $5 million funding round.

Veeam

Ratmir Timashev, President, CEO

Headquarters: Baar, Switzerland

Veeam provides data protection leveraging virtualization, storage and cloud technologies. The company last fall introduced Veeam Availability Suite v8 with Veeam Cloud Connect that lets service providers offer cloud-based data protection. It also introduced Veeam Availability Suite v9 with Veeam Cloud Connect Replication for disaster recovery as a service.

Vembu

Sekar Vembu, CEO

Headquarters: Addison, Texas

Vembu develops technology that lets partners build their own cloud storage offerings. Its BDR v3.0 backup and disaster recovery offering, released last year, provides live VMware replication functionality with guaranteed return to operations and recovery point objectives of less than 15 minutes. The company also introduced a Virtual Backup Appliance for VMware environments.

Zerto

Ziv Kedem, Co-Founder, CEO

Headquarters: Boston

Zerto provides enterprises and cloud providers enterprise-class disaster recovery and business continuity software specifically for virtualized data centers and cloud environments. The company's solution provides continuous data replication and recovery designed for virtualized infrastructures and the cloud. It was rewarded for its efforts early this year with a $50 million funding round.

Zetta.net

Mike Grossman, CEO

Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.

Zetta.net provides enterprise cloud backup, disaster recovery and archiving services. Its flagship Zetta Backup and Recovery is a direct-to-cloud backup and disaster recovery as a service solution for enterprises, businesses, and managed service providers designed to back up and recover file systems, databases, server images, and other large data sets.