HYCU has found another under-served backup market – SaaS app users – and wants SaaS vendors to write HYCU connectors using its API, instead of doing them itself. Enterprises get a SaaS app data protection dashboard and can buy backup modules from a HYCU marketplace.
Organizations are increasingly using SaaS apps, with more than 17,000 available in the US, and 217 SaaS services used by an average company. SaaS customer data is not protected and HYCU says 99 percent of those applications have no reliable backup and recovery available.
HYCU co-founder and CEO Simon Taylor said at a briefing in San Jose: “If the number of vendors in one of the industry’s leading market reports have only protected seven SaaS applications to date, the current approach to backup and recover SaaS has no future. The entire approach is broken.”
Fewer than ten SaaS apps are protected by vendors in the Gartner Magic Quadrant – meaning, HYCU claims, 77 per cent of business-critical data is not protected. More than half of the world’s companies have had ransomware attack their SaaS applications and 52 percent of the attacks succeeded, according to HYCU.
No data protection vendor is going to write 17,000 connectors between SaaS apps and its backup product. They’ll concentrate on the major SaaS apps like OwnBackup protecting Service Now, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.
Taylor thinks this approach is wrong, and needs reversing. He said: “New SaaS offerings are being built. New approaches to protect them are a must. That is why we have rethought the way data protection is done and found a way to provide ISVs and SaaS vendors the ability to add data protection with ease. Granular backup and recovery for SaaS is now available in as little as four days when it would have taken at least four quarters before to develop.”
SaaS app vendors use HYCU’s R-Cloud no-charge, low-code development platform to do this, developing backup modules to add to their SaaS apps. They can use HYCU’s data protection technology, orchestration, identity and access management, policy management, and analytics to ensure their customers’ SaaS data is protected.
Their customers get one-click backup with ransomware-protected vaults, granular and self-service recovery, and role-based access control.
Enrique Salem, HYCU chairman of the board and Bain Capital Ventures partner, said in a statement: “Today marks a significant new milestone in what HYCU has been able to accomplish and will set a new standard in what companies should expect from data protection solutions. Only HYCU provides the solution for organizations to protect, manage, and recover all of their SaaS applications.”
The first SaaS apps supported by R-Cloud will include Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Google Workspace, Google BigQuery, Salesforce, Atlassian Confluence, Jira Software and Atlassian Jira Service management, and Microsoft 365. HYCU wants to have 100 supported apps by the end of the year.
Startup BackupLABS, which writes its own connectors, protects Trello, GitHub and GitLab with support for Notion, Jira, Asana and more soon.
Atlassian Ventures’ Philip Braddock, portfolio management lead, said: “R-Cloud adds huge value for Atlassian’s 200,000+ cloud customers and we’re excited to see its impact on thousands of global teams.”
Dashboard and marketplace
This is one part of a tripartite HYCU announcement. The other two are R-Graph – a customer data protection dashboard through which to identify unprotected apps – and HYCU Protégé Marketplace, from which app data protection HYCU connectors can be purchased.
R-Graph discovers SaaS apps by working with Okta and Azure Active Directory. Customer CIOs and CISOs can use R-Graph to see all their SaaS apps on one dashboard screen along with their protected (green icon) or unprotected (red icon) status. They’ll be able to buy certified SaaS app protection services from the marketplace.
In February 2021, HYCU announced its SaaS-based Backup and Recovery for Office 365. At the time, Taylor said: “We see SaaS as a natural extension of the customer’s data estate.” A HYCU spokesperson told us: “As one of our first SaaS offerings, that’s the reason why it’s in the first ten to be released with R-Cloud. It’s the one that for us was an easy transition from the service to integrate with R-Cloud.”
DCIG founder and principle analyst Jerome Wendt said: “In my more than 20 years tracking significant developments in data protection and security, HYCU R-Cloud ranks in the Top Five. With more data unprotected than ever before, HYCU is turning the ability to backup, recover and protect SaaS data on its head, making it far easier and simpler while providing enterprises with unprecedented flexibility.”
Architecting IT principle and founder Chris Evans told us: “If it works, it’s genius. The other vendors are going to cry FUD, because they didn’t think of it first. The biggest challenge will be persuading SaaS vendors to adopt the API, but they’ve nothing to lose by getting involved. The idea and concept are all sound, it’s the adoption piece that will be the measure – how many can they onboard each month.”
Bootnote
In October, HYCU received a strategic investment from Okta Ventures as part of an extended B-round which brought in $53 million. This gave it access to >15,000 potential customers in the Okta ecosystem.
