The cloud era has arrived. This statement couldn’t ring more true with Druva’s entrance as a Visionary in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions.
As I reflect on this moment, I remember when the “no software” trend began over two decades ago. In 1998, Salesforce jump-started the “no software” trend by moving CRM to the cloud. It was a bold move from such a namestake industry titan and encouraged others to follow suit. One by one, Workday, ServiceNow, and NetSuite began moving major HCM, IT, and ERP applications, respectively, to SaaS. Developer tools followed suit as companies like Mulesoft, Github, and Twilio brought developer tools to more easily manage DevOps and API integrations. With all these applications and tools in the cloud, the only thing left was to bring on infrastructure-related technologies. Enter companies like Snowflake, ZScaler, and MongoDB.
There are roughly 34 buying centers in enterprise IT, which Gartner, Inc. predicts will reach a total spending of $4.1 trillion globally in 2021. It is inevitable that each and every one of these technology sectors will move to the cloud and a SaaS-based approach. Given the rapid proliferation of data, accelerating cloud migrations, rising cyber threats, and growing adoption of SaaS applications, it’s clear that data protection is the next industry ripe for transformation.
Paving the way for the cloud era
Druva started with this vision in 2013. Cloud was in its infancy, but we committed ourselves to building for the connected future to come and launched Druva inSync Cloud. We were told tirelessly that physical proximity was imperative to maintaining enterprise-critical infrastructure and data centers — that being close to the data was the only way to manage and protect it. We lost almost all of our existing customers and the naysayers called it a “science project.”
Fast forward to 2016, and criticism surrounded us once again as we launched Data Center Backup and laid the foundation for the Druva Cloud Platform and Microsoft 365 backup. At every step, our competitors have waited for us to falter, but now with over 40 percent of organizations supplementing, or completely replacing traditional backup applications with cloud-based solutions by 2022, according to Gartner, Inc. it’s undeniable — the future is in the cloud.¹ Now those same naysayers are rushing to launch SaaS solutions as fast as possible.
The rebirth of enterprise backup and recovery
With accelerating cloud migrations, rising cyber threats, and growing SaaS applications, organizations are increasingly looking for a modern SaaS-based approach to data protection to enhance business agility and transform data into a defining asset.
This year’s report is the strongest acknowledgment of our vision yet, debuting an updated category that extends to the cloud, as well as the edge. This change in criteria reflects our new reality — in the age of SaaS applications and edge devices, the data center is no longer the center of your data. Organizations need enterprise-level backup and recovery.
SaaS is the winning model for data protection
A SaaS delivery model is designed for today’s modern data challenges. It radically simplifies backup, recovery, and disaster recovery by removing traditional barriers and costs to deploy, manage, and scale data protection globally.
The SaaS delivery model — and ownership of the complete data protection stack — helps take control of all things security, operations, and cost management-related, while making product updates and innovation rollouts seamless. Offering sophisticated detection, rapid recovery, and a powerful ecosystem of industry-leading security partners, it allows businesses to solve ransomware recovery holistically — and gives the confidence to fight back against malicious actors. It prepares organizations for the cloud era with a transparent consumption-based pricing model that lowers TCO and enables IT teams to focus resources and budget on impactful business initiatives — not managing and replacing hardware. And it not only helps organizations to better understand, accurately assess, and optimize the true value of data, but delivers the power to continue to innovate with it.
We are honored to be the leading SaaS platform included in this year’s evaluation, valued for the radical simplicity, global visibility, scale, and cost savings we deliver to our customers every day. This inclusion marks a major milestone for our company — and one we couldn’t have achieved without the support of thousands of customers, partners, and employees who placed their trust in our vision over these years. The time of the cloud has arrived, and I am confident Druva will be well positioned to rise for many years to come!
Read our press release for more details on today’s announcement and view a complimentary copy of the Gartner Magic Quadrant report here.
¹ Gartner, 2020 Strategic Roadmap for Storage, ID G00722078. Published 1 January, 2020.