When Commvault Systems Inc. launched Metallic, a software-as-a-service backup and recovery solution, at its GO event one year ago, the company could not have anticipated how different the world would look 12 months later.

With a vast migration of enterprise work to remote environments since March, endpoint protection has moved from “nice to have” to the “absolutely essential” category. The good news for Commvault is it was ready for that.

“When we spoke with you last year at GO, we had endpoint backup more for completeness to round out our portfolio,” said Janet Giesen (pictured, right), vice president of operations and programs for Metallic, a Commvault Venture. “We didn’t expect it to be a lead offering and take off the way it has. Now, with what IT teams need to do and what security teams and cloud architects need to do, we’re absolutely seeing that need for endpoint protection grow.”

Giesen spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. She was joined by Mark Jow (pictured, left), EMEA vice president of technical services at Commvault, and they discussed recent enhancements to the Metallic portfolio, expansion into new markets, and the rise of data protection as a service. (* Disclosure below.)

Multi-year Microsoft deal

Metallic has made rapid progress since its U.S. launch last October. It has expanded into Asia-Pacific and EMEA, and Commvault entered into a multi-year agreement with Microsoft Corp. in June to integrate Metallic’s SaaS data protection portfolio with Azure.

Throughout these recent moves, endpoint protection has continued to fuel Metallic’s customer adoption.

“We originally targeted Metallic and the SMB mid-market where people were looking for simple predictable, low-cost yet scalable infrastructure,” Jow said. “The massive drive to protect endpoints and to maintain compliance and control of data there is driving large enterprise customers to Commvault and Metallic as a solution for protecting not hundreds of endpoints, not thousands or tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of endpoints for some of the customers we’re now talking to.”

The most recent expansion of Metallic’s portfolio involves the rollout in October of Metallic Cloud Storage Service, or MCSS. The new service is designed to provide Commvault customers with a fully managed, secure, cloud-based SaaS target for protecting data as an air gap copy.

“Data protection as a service is becoming increasingly popular,” Giesen said. “What we’re finding as we talk with customers is that everyone has a cloud-based initiative, whether they are starting it or they’re well on their way. Having a data protection-as-a-service solution like Metallic can either be your first move into the cloud, starting with your backup targets and leveraging MCSS, or it can just be another point in a customer’s hybrid story.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE