Backup and disaster recovery has always been important. But COVID-19 has sent cybercrime rates skyrocketing. This is in part due to the increase in remote work, which has opened up the attack surface and made businesses even more vulnerable than ever.

Offering the advantages of double-layer protection are cloud services provider Amazon Web Services Inc. and cloud data protection leader Druva Inc. Chris White (pictured, right), chief revenue officer of Druva, and Sabina Joseph (pictured, left), general manager of the Americas technology partners at AWS, joined Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. In a remote discussion, they answered theCUBE’s questions on how their companies align to provide simple and secure backup solutions for their joint customers. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following content has been condensed for clarity.]

Druva and AWS have had a long-standing partnership with Druva having been built on AWS. Can you tell us a bit more about just how deep this goes?

White: We architected our entire environment on AWS back in 2013. That enabled us to not only innovate back then, but to continue to innovate today and in the future. It gives us flexibility on a 100% platform to bring that to our customers, to our partners, and to the market out there. In doing so, we’re delivering on data protection, disaster recovery, eDiscovery and ransomware protection.

Talk to us about how AWS and Druva align on key customer use cases.

Joseph: When we start working with partners, we really focus on making sure that we are aligned on those customer use cases. From the very first discussions, we want to make sure that feedback mechanisms are in place to help us understand and improve the services and the solutions.

We have customers who are migrating their applications to AWS, moving their data into the cloud. And this is not a simple process, because the customer has large amounts of data and they have limited bandwidth. Druva is an early adopter of AWS Snowball Edge and worked closely with us to provide a solution where a customer can order a Snowball Edge directly from AWS. It gets shipped to them, they turn it on, it connects to the network, and they start backing up their data. Once they are done, they can ship it back and then all of that data gets loaded into the Druva solution on AWS.

For customers running applications locally on AWS Outposts, Druva was once again an early adopter, further expanding the data protection options they provide our mutual customers.

There has been a massive rise in cyberattacks, and Cybersecurity Ventures states there will be one ransomware attack every 11 seconds by 2021. So, it’s not about are we going to get hit; it’s about when? How does Druva help facilitate customer resiliency?

White: AWS and Druva have thousands of joint customers, and based on our shared security levels we’ve got a double layer of defense out there that most companies just can’t offer. From a specific use-case example, Katz Media Group Inc. originally came to us for three key things. They looked for reduced complexity, reducing their internal workload from a backup and recovery standpoint, and to simplify that backup environment. From the cost savings and efficiency they saw, they ended up moving on and doing key workloads, so data center workloads that they were backing up and protecting. This all came from a great partnership and relationship with AWS as well.

As we continued to simplify that backup environment, it allowed them to expand their partnership with AWS. So, ultimately, they got increased benefit from both Druva and AWS.

What sort of successes are Druva and AWS having together?

Joseph: One that comes into my mind is the University of Manchester in England. Part of their transformation strategy was adopting VMware Cloud on AWS, and they chose Druva to backup 160+ virtual machine images because Druva provided a simple and secure cloud-based backup solution. This saved them 50% off their data protection costs.

Another is the Queensland Brain Institute, which is part of the University of Queensland in Australia. They research therapeutic solutions to brain diseases, which generates terabytes of critical data that they not only needed protecting, but they also wanted to collaborate and have continuous access to the data. Using Druva’s solution, they can back up research papers, providing global and reliable access 24/7.

White: AWS allows us to continue to innovate to meet the needs of customers, whether that be VMware workloads, NAS workloads or new workloads like Kubernetes. We’re always going to be well positioned to address the customer’s needs, and the nimbleness of our joint partnership just continues to be demonstrated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Druva Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Druva nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE