While the industry’s leading software as a service providers take great pains to protect customer records, data loss is still a concern for companies due to risks such as user error and hacking. OwnBackup Ltd. is working to help organizations prepare for such contingencies.

The startup’s efforts have today attracted a $7.5 million investment led by early Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. backer Insight Venture Partners. It was joined by Salesforce Ventures, Oryzn Capital and Innovation Endeavors, the venture capital firm of Alphabet Inc. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.

The cash infusion follows a year in which OwnBackup saw revenue rise 330 percent on the back of strong demand for its products. Most of this growth can be credited to the startup’s flagship data protection services, which provide the ability to periodically sync records from a Salesforce.com, ServiceNow or Slack deployment to a cloud-based backup environment. Administrators also have access to a variety of recovery options designed to help them react effectively in the event that the copies need to be used.

One of OwnBackup’s most distinguishing features is a data comparison tool for assessing the scope of outages. If a company’s Salesforce.com records are corrupted, the administrator on call can send a copy to the backup environment and quickly check it against the most recent valid snapshot. They can thus pinpoint the files in need of recovery to avoid unnecessarily overwriting records with old information.

OwnBackup offers the data protection services alongside a so-called sandbox seeding tool geared towards developers. Currently available only for Salesforce, it’s designed to ease the task of moving information to the test environment that a company’s software team uses to try out new features. Users can customize what records are migrated based on their specific project requirements and anonymize those that contain personally identifiable data.

OwnBackup will use today’s cash infusion to expand the lineup of supported cloud services. The startup competes mostly with better-established players such as Barracuda Networks Inc. and Spanning, a former division of Dell Technologies Inc. that moved under the wing of a private equity firm earlier this year.

Image: StockSnap