HYCU Introduces Purpose-Built Multi-Cloud Data Protection for Azure

HYCU, Inc. announced HYCU for Azure, a data protection solution by expanding HYCU Protégé.

With this addition of purpose-built support for Azure Cloud, HYCU Protégé now provides integrated data protection, migration and disaster recovery for Azure users broadening the capability for companies to leverage their cloud of choice for their data the way they would want to control it.

In celebration of World Backup Day, and to address the need for companies to handle the overwhelming impact of the rise in remote and at-home working in light of the COVID-19 Novel Coronavirus pandemic, HYCU is making its Azure data protection functionality available free of charge for the following three months.

“Our strategy has always been to select leading platforms, be they enterprise clouds or public cloud and to deliver purpose-built solutions for each platform to give a true native service and value experience for the customer,” said Simon Taylor, CEO. “We have now introduced a purpose-built cloud data management solution for Azure. With HYCU for Azure, customers will be able to migrate data from on-prem to the cloud, protect the data on Azure, make Azure a DR target for both applications and VMs running on-prem and also have a simplified DR solution for their applications on Azure. I couldn’t be prouder of our engineering team for continuing to set the bar high in what companies should expect from their cloud-native data management solutions.”

With 60% of business running applications on Azure, Azure has experienced growth in particular with early stage cloud-adopters¹. In a recent informal survey of HYCU customers, more than 70% were running applications on Azure.

Highlights of HYCU for Azure include:

True as a Service Offering: As opposed to legacy backup solutions that require a separate infrastructure to run in the cloud, it runs as a native service, available via subscription directly from Azure Marketplace and billed as part of the Azure bill.
Extends and Leverages the Power of the Azure Platform: Using native snapshots and integration with Microsoft’s Active Directory, it is built on native APIs, supports all BLOB storage classes and auto selects the right class of Azure BLOB storage for the policy the customer chooses.
Simplified, Impact-free, Enterprise Class Data Protection of VMs/Apps on Azure: Agentless, it provides flexible backup policies to meet different SLAs as well as 1-click view of protected and unprotected Apps/VMs. Easy to perform granular recovery, it also leverages its own IP for Change Block Tracking to provide incremental backups forever for efficient storage consumption.
1-click, App Consistent Migration from On-Premises on to Azure and Back: As both application aware and consistent, HYCU provides 1-click migration with no worries about network constraints. Delivered as a true self-service, even for migration and Test/Dev, HYCU for Azure requires zero compute resources on the cloud during migration.
1-click App Consistent DR for Customers Who Want to Use Azure as a DR target: With simplified failover and failback, no limitations with network constraints and no additional compute required on the cloud, HYCU for Azure is an efficient and cost-efficient DR service for users that need that capability.

“HYCU continues to evolve its solutions for both on-prem and public cloud,” said Christophe Bertrand, data protection senior analyst, ESG. “While Microsoft provides native backup service for customers who want protection for infrequent individual VMs/Apps, for customers that need systematic backup and recovery for business-critical applications, HYCU now offers a cloud-native and flexible solution. It’s not just an interesting solution to protect workloads between on-prem to Azure and back, but it also allows to leverage the power of Azure as and when customers may need it. As I have said before, much as HYCU has done for Nutanix, VMware and GCP, they are delivering an innovative ‘natively-developed’ solution that will be of interest to the growing number of Azure users.”

HYCU will be sharing more on HYCU for Azure on The Cube, in celebration of World Backup Day.

HYCU for Azure is available with data migration and DR functionality generally available in 30 days. It is available on Azure Marketplace and through authorized AZURE provider partners. Subscription and billing are handled through Azure Marketplace. Pricing is determined by the amount data being protected and frequency of backup.

1 Source: Impact: 10 Cloud Adoption Stats IT Decision Makers Need to Know for 2020 (October, 2019)

Comments

First, following HYCU for GCP announced in 2018 and HYCU Protégé in June 2019, the company has morphed from a specialized player in on-premises backup for Nutanix to a more comprehensive general purpose data protection actor covering on-premises, clouds and various applications environments workloads. Of course Nutanix is still supported.

The second remark is related to the evolution of backup towards a SaaS model both in term of acquisition and consumption model but also for its service approach no longer seen as a product to deploy, manage and support with its own infrastructure.

Next, the ecosystem has changed a lot for a few years with classic players with a new backup flavor like Actifio, Commvault with Metallic, Druva, Veeam and Veritas or new comers such Clumio, Cohesity or Rubrik. Pure SaaS players are still active like Barracuda Networks.

Multi-cloud criteria are paramount for data protection both in terms of backup, archive and disaster recovery images residence but also for location where the application can be migrated or failed-over.

The other consideration is the coming convergence of needs and players covering SaaS enterprise applications to protect with dedicated players like Kaseya/Spanning, Datto/Backupify, OwnBackup, CloudAlly, CloudHQ, SpinBackup and "generic" SaaS backup. Some vendors mentioned above already jumped into it like Acronis, Asigra, Cohesity, Commvault, Druva, Rubrik, Veeam and Veritas.

Directly coupled with that remark is the necessity for enterprises to reduce risks and cost associated with the multiplication of solutions especially data protection. In other words, these users need a global horizontal solution able to cover their legacy IT environments but also their SaaS growing footprint. This is critical for large enterprises and a key criteria for product selection.

Data Management is wide in terms of functions it provides and the cloud has contributed to extend on-premises capabilities. HYCU targets three key functions all enterprises need: Backup/Recovery, Migration and DR. With that enterprises are able to continue their business operations wherever their IT runs, it could run on-premises for quarters and then be migrated to cloud for specific various failures or just adoption of cloud.

Among criteria to consider when selecting a SaaS backup solution, we list these following items:

Native cloud service with marketplace presence and integrated billing,

Agentless for more transparency and agility,

Various Hypervisor support with vSphere being a must,

Backup images portability and mobility to ease multi-cloud,

Application aware with strong consistency,

Flexible RPO and RTO capabilities,

and Security with in-transit/at-rest encryption, IAM integration...

We anticipate from HYCU some new services around the summer and AWS is a must now to support the top 3 cloud giants. Connected to all environments, an analytics service should be a good idea to offer a global view of systems and applications, how resources are consumed, provide capacity planning and anticipate failure and workloads peaks.

We also think new M&As will happen in this segment especially for backup vendor for adding SaaS enterprise applications protection such Salesforce, Workday, NetSuite, ServiceNow, Office 365, G Suite or Box.