With customers scattering data like marbles to different cloud and on-premise locations, its good to be the guy on the side selling coverall data protection. Well, venture capitalists think so — they just invested $80 million in Druva Inc.’s infrastructure-agnostic data protection as-a-service.

“The more data gets decentralized or fragmented, the more centralized the data management has to be,” said Jaspreet Singh (pictured, right), Druva’s founder and chief executive officer. Singh joined Druva’s Chief Marketing Officer, Matthew Morgan (pictured, left), for an interview at VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The many companies operating with a hybrid information technology model today are faced with a quandary. Data protection built specifically for the cloud doesn’t work for the business applications they leave on premise, according to Morgan. Likewise, old methods for protecting data on premise are too stiff and monolithic for the cloud and distributed applications.

“You can’t float an appliance in a cloud,” he told John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

This state of affairs leaves many unprotected, especially in the cloud, Morgan stated. In fact, Druva conducted a survey of VMware Inc. customers and found that three out of four of them desire as-a-service data protection.

Data gets centered

Druva has developed a data protection service that works across environments from on-premise hardware to public clouds. The company has combined all of its services into a single platform. It just announced that the Druva Cloud Platform will be available in the Amazon Web Services Inc. marketplace.

Making all data viewable, searchable and manageable from a single console obviously makes it easier to set protection policies for it. It also has security and intelligence bonuses, Morgan stated.

“Once you get that data into a centralized store, there’s incredible things you can do,” he said.  First, customers can better govern the data and adhere to compliance regulations when it is centralized. Then they can analyze metadata to recognize patterns and detect anomalies to ward off ransomware and other attacks, Morgan concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Druva Inc. have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE