Historically a pain point, backup is quickly becoming an asset for many enterprises as vendors push the envelope on security and bring analytics into the mix. The Sunnyvale, California-based Druva is a leader in realizing the potential of data protection as a source of tangible business value.

Established in 2008, the startup offers a device-independent backup and governance platform that ensures the availability of mission-critical information through file sharing, encryption and audit capabilities. Druva claims that its software supports nearly two million computers and smartphones across 76 countries.

The company announced this week that it has raised $25 million in a Series C round from high-profile investors Tenaya Capital, Sequoia Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. The capital will be used to accelerate the development of its flagship InSync suite, expand sales and marketing, and invest in new infrastructure to better accommodate enterprise customers.

While Druva is helping organizations tame the mobile workplace revolution, Sepaton is exploiting bleeding edge technologies to protect data in large-scale NAS environments. The firm’s new VirtuoOS solution packages automated dedupe, simplified provisioning and the ability to add support for new protocols into a sleek graphical interface.

Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante noted in a recent interview on theCUBE that “the Big Data explosion has completely changed the way in which people have looked at backup, because it’s put pressure on backup windows in a way that people were going unprotected, and many still are. They are not able to meet their backup windows, they are not able to protect their data. It’s a big issue, and one of those areas that doesn’t get enough attention.”

Compounded by the rise of data protection-as-a-service, the growing variety of mobile devices and rapidly increasing volumes of unstructured social data, analytics is disrupting backup across both the enterprise and the consumer space. Privacy has taken center stage in the latter segment thanks to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who shed light on the price of surveillance on the cloud. Lavabit, an encrypted email provider that shut down after refusing to hand over user data to the government, has temporarily resumed operations this week to let users download copies of their data.