One of the more frequent topics that I get asked about is “How do you back up production workloads, after they go to the cloud?”
A few months ago, I blogged on that – essentially saying that history is repeating itself (again). As new platforms usurp the old way of doing things (NetWare to Windows to VMware to SaaS), it is not typically the existing data protection behemoths that are first to protect the new platform. Instead, it is often smaller, privately-held innovators who are willing to do the extra work and “protect the un-protectable.” And in most cases, those early innovators ended up leading the next generation while the APIs eventually made standardized backups possible by anyone.
- ARCserve didn’t back up midrange systems, but led NetWare’s backup market
- Backup Exec and CommVault weren’t overly known for backing up NetWare, but dominated the early years of protecting Windows NT, later Windows Server
- Veeam didn’t back up anything before VMware, but it is the defacto VM-specific solution to beat today
So, as traditional workloads like file/collaboration and email move from on-premises servers to cloud services like Office365 and GoogleApps and SalesForce, there will likely emerge new dominant innovators that could put all of the legacy solutions on notice. That dominance has historically been based on two things: 1) early brand awareness in the space and 2) their influence on the platform provider that the rest of the backup ecosystem will eventually depend on.
So, I recently took the opportunity to visit with Jeff Erramouspe, CEO of Spanning Cloud to hear his thoughts on SaaS backup:
Thanks for watching.
[Originally posted on ESG’s Technical Optimist.com]