My head’s in the clouds: I just joined Druva

After almost 25 years of specializing in backup and data protection as an end user, consultant, and analyst, I’ve decided to work for my first vendor.  I started today at Druva.

Why a vendor?  Why Now?

I figured that it was time to put up or shut up. Put my money where my mouth is.  To fully understand this industry I have to experience it from all sides, and that includes the side trying to make it all happen.  I’ve been an end user, a consultant, and an analyst.  Now it’s time to try making it happen.

Why Druva?

I’ve been a fan of cloud-based data protection for some time now, as anyone who ever attended one of my backup schools can attest.  It makes the most sense for the bulk of the market and offers a level of security and availability simply not available with traditional solutions.

Anyone who has heard me speak knows I’m not anti-tape.   In fact, I think tape is a great medium for some things. But it hasn’t been the right medium for operational backup for quite some time.  Obviously more to come on this and other subjects.

But if disk is the right medium for operational backup, how do you get that data offsite to protect against disasters?  There are many answers to this question, but I have felt for a long time the best answer is to back up to the cloud.  If your first backup is to the cloud, then it’s already offsite.

Of course, having your only copy of data in the cloud can be problematic for large restores with a short RTO. This is why Druva has the ability to have a local copy of your data to facilitate such restores.

Druva was founded in 2008 by Jaspreet Singh and Milind Borate and it has over 4000 happy customers running its products.  Druva’s first product was inSync, which focuses on protecting & sharing data from desktops, laptops, and cloud applications such as Office365, GSuite, and Salesforce.com. Druva’s second product is Phoenix, which is designed to protect datacenters.  It protects VMware and Hyper-V workloads, as well as physical machines running Linux or Windows.   One of  Druva’s differentiators is that all data, regardless of source or type, is stored in a central deduplicated repository to facilitate data governance, ediscovery, and data mining.   I’ll be talking more about those things as I learn more about the company and its products.

This post was going to be longer, but the first day at my new job turned out to be a lot of work.  So I’ll keep it short and sweet. Mr. Backup has joined Druva!

Keep it cloudy, my friends.

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at Sullivan Strickler, which helps companies manage their legacy data