Druva
Druva is a cloud data protection and management software company based in Sunnyvale, Calif. The company offers what it calls "data management as a service," providing data protection, governance and intelligence. Druva's specialties include enterprise endpoint backup, data loss prevention, secure file sharing, cloud server backup and archiving, server backup and disaster recovery (DR). The privately held company was founded in 2008 by Jaspreet Singh, Milind Borate and Ramani Kothandaraman.
As of July 2018, Druva claimed approximately 4,000 customers at the midmarket and enterprise levels. The company had raised about $200 million in investments, including an $80 million funding round in 2017.
In 2018, Druva acquired CloudRanger, a company that provides data protection for workloads in Amazon Web Services (AWS). CloudRanger now exists as a Druva company.
Major products
Druva Cloud Platform provides data management as a service for endpoints, infrastructure and cloud applications, combining data protection, governance and intelligence. The platform features autotiering, global deduplication, data visibility, policy automation, scalability into the petabyte range and security.
Druva has AWS cloud data centers across the world. As part of the platform, Druva offers its inSync, Phoenix and CloudRanger products.
The vendor's first product, Druva inSync, backs up endpoint data and cloud applications, such as Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce. It also provides archiving, data compliance monitoring, legal hold management and E-discovery. Features in the Druva backup product include global deduplication, security with encryption, certified AWS data centers, scale-out architecture and on-site caching.
Druva inSync recently added monitoring and detection tools to discover ransomware and help recover clean data. The software uses machine learning to detect data irregularities, such as changes in file types. Automated alerts flag any unusual activity in endpoints and cloud applications. Identification of the last good snapshot of data provides a recovery opportunity.
Druva Phoenix is a software agent that backs up and restores data in the cloud. Use cases include cloud backup, recovery and archiving for virtual machines (VMs) and physical servers. Phoenix features global deduplication, security with encryption, AWS architecture, autotiering and data transfer.
Druva CloudRanger provides protection and management of data in AWS. It offers backup, recovery and retention, with management of an organization's complete AWS footprint from one dashboard. Druva CloudRanger also features automated DR and testing, as well as a pay-as-you-go pricing model. The product replaced the firm's Apollo offering, which the vendor had announced but not made generally available.
It's a common misconception that a public cloud provider is also responsible for complete data protection services, so a product like Druva CloudRanger is important to ensuring business continuity (BC) in the event of an unplanned incident.
Competitors
Druva has positioned its data management and protection software to go up against such traditional backup vendors as Commvault and Veritas. Those veteran players are offering more data management capabilities.
Druva also competes with Cohesity and Rubrik. Those startups have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for their converged appliances that provide data protection and management for secondary storage.
In late 2017, Veeam Software bought N2WS, its first acquisition in 10 years. N2WS is now a Veeam company that provides data protection for AWS workloads, similar to Druva CloudRanger.
