The cloud-based data backup and recovery-as-a-service provider HYCU Inc. said today it’s making it easier for software-as-a-service companies and independent software vendors to deliver data protection to their customers.

The company has just announced the availability of R-Cloud, which it says is the world’s first low-code development platform for protecting SaaS-based critical applications. With the service, SaaS providers and ISVs can now offer a secure and scalable data protection-as-a-service to their customers, HYCU said.

HYCU is best known for its multicloud data backup and recovery platform HYCU Protégé, which provides an alternative to traditional, legacy-based backup services that rely on complex, appliance-based storage systems. It’s a much simpler backup service that covers any kind of application across multiple cloud platforms and on-premises architectures, including Nutanix-based data centers and VMware, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud environments.

The company argues that a similarly simplified backup and recovery service is required for SaaS applications. It says there are more than 16,000 SaaS apps in use across organizations today, and that 99% of those do not offer any reliable backup and recovery solution.

With R-Cloud, HYCU says, it’s empowering SaaS providers and ISVs to enable rapid backup and recovery for their software applications. The offering is the result of more than four years of development work that involved HYCU closely collaborating with numerous SaaS providers to create a way to visualize all of the data access an enterprise, identifying what is protected and what isn’t.

Then, it set about creating a way to recover that unprotected SaaS data in the event of a malicious attack or some other kind of failure. At its core, HYCU’s R-Cloud enables SaaS providers to leverage its expertise in data protection, orchestration, identity and access management, policy management and more to quickly safeguard their customer’s data.

SaaS firms can use R-Cloud to create and release a secure and verifiable data protection service to customers rapidly, ensuring they can access granular data backup and recovery with a few simple clicks. Before, HYCU said, it would take SaaS firms an average of at least four quarters to create such a service. Now, they can do so in as little as four days.

One of the key advantages of HYCU’s R-Cloud is that it’s entirely low-code, making it easy for SaaS firms to develop new R-Cloud modules via a simplified interface. They can integrate all kinds of useful capabilities into their SaaS data protection-as-a-service offerings, including comprehensive visualization capabilities that allow customers to see their entire SaaS data estate and protection status. SaaS apps built on R-Cloud will provide users with one-click backup, granular recovery and self-service capabilities such as role-based access control and the ability for SaaS administrators to protect and restore critical data.

HYCU founder and Chief Executive Simon Taylor said the fact that only seven of more than 16,000 SaaS apps in use today by enterprises offer reliable data protection shows that the current approach to creating SaaS backups is broken.

“We need to rethink it,” he said. “New SaaS offerings are being generated continuously and applications are being modernized and this just exacerbates the problem for IT leader. We have rethought the way data protection is done and found a way to provide ISVs and SaaS vendors, the experts in their own offering, an ability to add data protection with ease. Now they can provide granular backup and recovery in four days for their service which would have taken at least four quarters before to develop.”

HYCU has attracted a number of high-profile SaaS companies with the new offering. It said the first SaaS-based applications, databases and services supported in R-Cloud include Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Google Workspace, Google BigQuery, Salesforce, Confluence, Jira, Jira Service Management and Microsoft 365. More will be added to the HYCU Protégé Marketplace in the coming months.

NAND Research Principal Analyst Steve McDowell told SiliconANGLE that the data protection market is one of the strongest segments of the wider information technology market, and yet businesses of every size are increasingly adopting SaaS offerings such as Salesforce, Microsoft 365 and Jira to manage some of their most critical business processes without proper data protection.

“This is dangerous for organizations,” McDowell said. “While SaaS serves the needs of the business, it also limits the ability of IT shops to directly protect its data. Protecting your data in a SaaS application is often an opaque and cumbersome process. In most cases, IT shops have to trust the SaaS provider to do it for them. In other cases, they have to institute ad-hoc and often manual data protection strategies, like archiving data from Google Workspace.”

It’s for this reason that McDowell said he has high hopes for HYCU’s R-Cloud offering, which gives control of data protection back to IT organizations with a fully integrated solution that’s enabled by the SaaS providers themselves.

“HYCU has picked a great set of SaaS partners for its first release of R-Cloud, hitting a cross-section of the most widely adopted SaaS providers,” the analyst continued. “It’s telling that these SaaS providers have agreed to do the enablement work on their own platforms to make this happen, as it means they also recognize the need. R-Cloud is a compelling offering, one that solves a real world need. Coupling this new capability with HYCU’s multicloud backup products makes them a very compelling data protection provider.”

HYCU said that every app built on R-Cloud will be made available through its Protégé Marketplace, which provides organizations with access to a growing library of protected SaaS, database-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service applications.

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