GigaOm Sonar Report for Cloud-Based Data Protectionv1.0

1. Summary

Many organizations are investing heavily in the cloud to improve their agility and optimize the total cost of ownership of their infrastructure. They are moving applications and data to the public cloud to take advantage of its flexibility only to discover that, when not properly managed, public cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control.

Data storage and protection are among the biggest pain points of many cloud bills. Many of the services available in the public cloud need to be enhanced and hardened to deliver the reliability and availability of enterprise storage systems. The tools for managing the protection of data saved in those systems must operate well beyond simple snapshot-based data protection.

In addition, organizations are taking advantage of the flexibility and broad set of offerings provided by public clouds. It is not uncommon for an organization to consume cloud services from different public cloud providers. In that context, multicloud support and the ability to abstract management complexities behind a unified management pane drastically simplifies data protection operations and increases operational efficiency.

Cloud-based data protection solutions are designed to add enterprise-class data protection functionalities to the public cloud while improving data management processes and costs. Compared to traditional (agent-based) and snapshot backup solutions, cloud-based data protection offers several advantages and simplifies operations.

In this regard, the user should take into account some important factors:

• Speed: When properly integrated, cloud-based backup can take advantage of snapshots and other mechanisms available from the service provider to speed up backup and restore operations.
• Granularity: One of the biggest limitations of traditional backups is the inability to easily restore single files and database records, one of the most common requirements. To do this, the user has to mount the snapshot on a new virtual machine instance, recover the necessary field, and then kill the instance. This is a slow and error-prone process.
• Cyber resiliency and air gapping: Creating distance between source and backup targets is the basis of every safety and security practice in data protection, especially with the increasing number of ransomware attacks. Data immutability, air gapping, and proactive ransomware protection are foundational capabilities for hedging against cyberattacks.
• Operation scalability: Snapshots are good for making quick backup copies of data, but they tend to show their limits very soon. Most of the services available in the market make it difficult to coordinate snapshot operations and grant application consistency. At the same time, managing a large number of snapshots can quickly become complicated, and while automation exists, it usually lacks the user-friendliness necessary to manage large-scale environments. Agent-based solutions have a different set of challenges, but the scalability of operations can easily become a problem as well. With an agent, everything needs to be planned in advance, and it becomes yet another software component that has to be installed and managed over time.
• Cost and consumption model: Often delivered within a backup-as-a-service (BaaS) model, cloud-based data protection solutions provide a similar pay-as-you-grow approach through which the organization can immediately reap the benefits of data protection while avoiding the difficulties of managing the data protection infrastructure. Unlike with snapshot-based approaches, customers do not need to handle the costs associated with forgotten snapshots or stale resources.

For this report, we focused on cloud-based data protection tools and did not include on-premises vendors previously covered in GigaOm’s Radar reports on hybrid cloud data protection (HCDP) for SMBs and Large Enterprises. Among criteria for inclusion, we looked at solutions hosted in the cloud, built using a cloud back end (such as microservices or a serverless architecture) and using cloud storage. We also looked at each solution’s ability to predominantly protect cloud workloads, ideally in multicloud scenarios, and finally, we also looked at solutions that offer seamless, cloud-like consumption models, offering pay-as-you-grow economics coupled with elastic scalability.

This GigaOm Sonar provides an overview of cloud-based data protection vendors and their available offerings, equipping IT decision-makers with the information they need to select the best solution for their business and use case requirements.