Clumio Expands Operations in Canada

By Brian O’Shea, VP sales

In April of this year, I lead Clumio, Inc.‘s launch into Canada, signifying the company’s first suite of clients outside of the US.

Our neighbors to the North have access to a service that can protect data when it’s on the move in the all cloud world.

This expansion allows us to offer Canadian enterprises a holistic data protection service that crosses environments and eliminates the need to create a different set of tools, workflows, and polices for each cloud. Regardless of where data is managed, created or stored, Canadian companies can have a simplified solution to enterprise backup that provides the ability to scale, flexible economics and inherent elasticity, while still protecting the data within the borders of Canada.

Clumio’s Canada-based sales team is spearheaded by Chris Gowans and Wayne Silberman, who both bring experience in technology and customer service. While delivery of these services in Canada is still in its early stages, they have been working hand-in-hand with our partners and clients to transform their backup experience.

Robert Murdoch, head of IT for Maple Lodge Farms, the largest chicken processor in Canada as our first customer in the region, said: “Clumio liberated our organization from the constant burden of managing backup across environments. The ability to have a single set of policies that I can easily assign to different data sources like VMware and Microsoft365 completely changed the backup experience. To do it with SaaS and without hardware or software to install and manage was like voodoo magic.“

As fast as its expansion into Canada came in our journey, the move is another step in the company’s progress in delivering a consolidated data protection service in, for and to the public cloud.

The Clumio founders understood that designing, managing and maintaining backup systems is time consuming and expensive, and that data growth and hybrid cloud architectures make backup and recovery more challenging.

Our first education customer in Canada is Graig Kelly, technology manager, infrastructure, McMaster University, named Canada’s most research-intensive university for three years running.

He summed up his experience with us this way: “The Clumio service seamlessly takes our backups offsite with the security and data sovereignty that we require. SaaS for data protection is the best model for our budget planning as it removes the cost and complexity of on-premises hardware from the equation. Getting a performance boost in the process was the icing on the cake.“

Since the company’s launch as a secure and efficient way to protect vSphere, VMware Cloud for AWS, and native AWS services data sources, we have continued to enhance our product and service offerings.

Our secure backup as a service now supports Amazon EBS and RDS. Clumio protects EBS data with an air gap solution that removes data loss vulnerabilities due to ransomware or bad actors who gain access to your AWS account. Our RDS solution converts snapshots into files that can be accessed without the usual time and expense of restoring a full replica of the data.

We addressed a market-wide data protection gap for Microsoft 365 with our consolidated data protection service. Enterprises that standardize on Microsoft 365 have a backup strategy to protect and ensure the compliance of their email data.

With each of these service capabilities, Clumio is executing on its vision for a consolidated data protection service that can safeguard enterprise data in multiple public clouds, regions and cloud accounts with a single service.

Attacking data protection in a transformational way means going beyond simply providing a service, but also creating a 100% channel model for our partners. Our company is aware that in order to scale, we need to double down with our partners and invest wisely to ensure our partnership grows as the adoption of SaaS data protection accelerates. We provide our partners with an opportunity to help customers, but also the ability to repatriate revenue and margin from cloud spend to “sold SaaS” spend. Part of our strategy is to create an annuity business for our partners, and to give them a seat at the table so that they can participate in conversations about how robust data protection strategies can accelerate the cloud initiatives of their customers.

Ray Ward, a regional solutions manager at our valued partner SHI International Corp., said: “Our business is all about helping our enterprise customers meet business and technology challenges head-on. Vendors that make something incrementally better aren’t going to move the needle. Especially in the all cloud world, you need a partner that is going to attack a problem in a completely transformational way. That’s Clumio: building a backup as a service natively on the public cloud that gives us a platform to solve pressing business issues in a way that drives innovation, improves security and optimizes cost as the #1 priority.“

Our expansion into Canada is a significant milestone in our mission to deliver a consolidated data protection service in, for and to the public cloud. We will continue to work diligently to understand the needs of our clients in Canada, to enhance our line of services, and to increase our data protection support in the region.