Backup-as-a-Service startup Clumio has laid off more staff as it focuses on public cloud backup.
Sources told Blocks and Files that two-thirds of its sales force have been laid off and job offers withdrawn from applicants. We understand that Clumio is rebalancing its business.
Poojan Kumar, Clumio co-founder and CEO, told us: “The time to shift our focus to the public cloud is now, and as CEO, I had to tighten in areas that were no longer a strategic focus, to do the hard, right thing for the company to ensure we can serve our customers in the long run.”
The SaaS data protection market is contested by several strong suppliers all seeking to capitalise on the move to the public cloud. These include Acronis, Cohesity, Commvault (Metallic), Druva, HYCU, Rubrik and Veeam (Kasten) among others.
Kumar told us: “Today starts a new chapter for Clumio with a mission to simplify data protection in the public cloud. Data protection in the public cloud is broken. Businesses are struggling with expensive, complex, and cobbled together technology. Operators lack the confidence in their systems to quickly restore from a major event, to know whether or not they are in compliance, or that their data is safe from bad actors.
“Clumio will not only focus on solving these problems, but we will also set forth on our goal to become the best ‘Public Cloud Data Protection as a Service’ platform on the planet.”
As a SaaS startup, Clumio protects data such as AWS EBS volumes, Microsoft 365 email and VMware VMs running in the public cloud against data loss and ransomware with a virtual air-gap technology. Originally it protected both private (on-premises) and public cloud applications.
Clumio revealed in January that: “We are amplifying our cloud efforts and restructuring a very small part of our sales team. We’ve actively communicated this with our internal team, and we look forward to delivering a customer-proven, cloud-agnostic SaaS solution for tomorrow’s cloud enterprise.”