Has anyone noticed these data backup and recovery companies inflicting identity crises on themselves? For the past couple of years, they’ve been loudly rebranding their products data management solutions. They must have heard the customer footsteps coming. This new, multitalented backup is suddenly a heavyweight contender against obstacles to cloud adoption. And, to some, it looks like perhaps the only feasible way to comply with tough new data regulations.

Many enterprises are struggling to get a handle on all of their data. Digital transformation, data analytics and privacy regulations all are pressing them to get smarter about it. Departmental silos were the first hurdle to gathering data in one spotless sanctum for easy access and insights. Now multi/hybrid-cloud environments have data and applications living on dispersed infrastructure islands.

It’s easy to see why one is everyone’s favorite number in multicloud. A single tool that works everywhere is one less thing to set up, provision, and manage in who-knows-how-many different ways. A single backup platform for all environments can also enable comprehensive multicloud data management, according to Poojan Kumar (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer at Clumio Inc. A backup platform can leverage its data corpus to deliver additional services, he added. Kumar believes cloud-native platforms are better equipped to dynamically build out these extra services.

“This is exactly what enterprises are asking for, especially as they make a transition from on-premises to the public cloud, where they’re piling on more and more applications in the public cloud and they really sometimes have no idea … where the data is sitting and how they can take advantage of all these data sources that, ultimately, Clumio is protecting,” he said. 

Kumar sat down with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a Wikibon Digital Community event that includes a video and CrowdChat at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. Joining Kumar during the event were Woon Jung, co-founder and chief technology officer of Clumio, and Chadd Kenney, vice president and chief technologist of Clumio. They discussed how backup addresses knotty problems in multicloud security and compliance. (* Disclosure below.)

Snapshots can’t cut it in compliance

Data on a backup platform is in prime shape for a number of adjacent use cases, according to Kumar. “It could be security use cases, because we know exactly what’s changing when it’s changing; it could be analytics use cases, because people are running tens of thousands of instances and containers and VMs in the public cloud,” he stated. 

Today, backup stands rather tall in one use case where other technologies wither. Data-compliance legislators are handing companies lists of new rules about how to govern and secure customers’ data.

“Backup is becoming a C-level staff and board room topic for privacy and compliance reasons, said Shane Jackson (@shanejacksonsj), vice president of marketing at Clumio, during the event’s CrowdChat. 

Jung also weighed in: “If you … look at what [Amazon Web Services Inc.]  offers today, they actually offer the ability for you to take snapshots, but actually that’s not a backup, and they’re fundamentally different.”

A snapshot is a virtual copy, not an actual copy, of data. This can make it inferior to a real backup — an actual copy of data — for several reasons. One is cost. “Many cloud architects compromise on retention due to cost of storing data in cloud, with up to 40% of cloud spend on managing snapshots,” Charles Goforth, cloud systems engineer at Clumio, said in the CrowdChat. 

This leads directly to compliance. Even if they’d foot the bill for snapshot retention, they may still not meet regulatory minimums.

“Compliance regulations require most enterprises to store their backups for at least one year, going all the way to seven years or 15 years in some cases. However, a snapshot-based data-protection solution does not allow enterprises to do that,” Shubhankar Chatterjee, head of UX and product management at Clumio, said in the CrowdChat. 

Hot and fast with cloud-based SaaS

With Clumio, enterprises can have real backup as a service up and running in less than 15 minutes, according to Kumar. Their data is centralized and searchable, allowing them to find sensitive data for compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and other legislation.  

“We actually don’t build software and ship software. What we actually do is build service, and service is what we actually ship to our customers,” Kenney stated. “We had the luxury of building from the cloud up on these very powerful cloud services to enable a much more simple model for our customers to consume, but even more so, to be able to actually leverage the agility and elasticity of the cloud.” 

If the latest news out of the Clumio camp is any indication, there is a high level of desire for . Along with VMware and VMware Cloud environments, it now works on AWS, with additional clouds platforms to be added. It won best in show at VMworld 2019 and landed a Series C funding round of $135 million.

Watch the entire Wikibon Digital Community Event video below. (* Disclosure: Clumio Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Clumio nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE