Even pre Covid19 (remember that era?), we were already seeing a shift to more work on laptops and mobile devices, and workplaces were becoming more supportive of employees working from home. We were also already benefitting from the surge in cloud-based daily-work applications (Adobe, Google, Salesforce to name a few). These two factors combined formed the basis for rapid growth in the remote and distributed work environment.
Under the leadership of Sanjay Mirchandani, Commvault recognised that this shift created an opportunity to leverage their strong pedigree in data protection and security to address issues raised by remote working. They’ve since developed Metallic, their new SaaS offering, which fills a sizeable gap in the market.
I was fortunate to speak to Janet Giesen VP Operations and Programs for Commvault who heads up the Go To Market program for Metallic about what led them to this opportunity and how the solution serves a valuable and growing need.
Appetite for SaaS Data Protection
Metallic was launched in October 2019 after Mirchandani created an incubation group much like a start-up within a public company. The employees became intrapreneurs and formed cross functional teams to leverage the capabilities and technologies that Commvault could bring.
Giesen says that after studying use cases “there was an observation that there were very few competitors in this space” of providing data protection and backup in the cloud. After researching customer needs, they developed three initial service offerings to address the most common use cases:
1 – Metallic Office 365 Backup & Recovery, to protect SaaS office automation tools & data
2 – Metallic Core Backup & Recovery, focused on Virtual Machines & their data
3 – Metallic Endpoint Backup & Recovery, focused on laptop & desktop backups
Market Response
The team quickly realised that the largest gap in the market for SaaS data protection was in the mid-range and small enterprise business sectors, typically around the 500 to 2,500 employee mark.
This sector was the quickest to adopt data protection delivered as a SaaS, probably because this size organisation can make quicker decisions and their teams are fairly nimble. Research showed that roughly two thirds of these organisations had replaced their back up solutions in the last 12 months. And there was an opportunity because there was too much manual work. These businesses also didn’t want to take on too much ownership of the backups.
Since launch there’s been great response from customers and partners and increasing interest from enterprise. Metallic has truly paired the best of SaaS with the best of backup and made it easy for customers to consume.
Endpoint Security
Giesen says that “surprisingly, there are still some businesses that have not incorporated end point security in their overall security strategies”. According to a recent study, almost 15% of businesses are not using endpoint security. And yet 70% of data breaches from the edge are coming from the employee. The goal is to protect the data at the edge without interrupting what users doing.
Of course, now we’re in the middle of a pandemic with exponential growth in people moving from the office to working from home. Too much critical data is moving unprotected around the edge — particularly in situations with emergency response or first responders involved.
Endpoint data protection has become a critical priority.
There are some estimates that as much as 56% of the US workforce could potentially continue working from home, based on their current jobs. It will be interesting to see, coming out of the pandemic, what the remote workforce will look like. The realisation has sunk in that more jobs can be done remotely.
Free Trial
Commvault are currently offering a 45 day free trial of the Metallic SaaS solution for up to 1,000 endpoints per customer. That’s enough time to really understand the full data protection and recovery cycle. I personally trialled the application and found it easy to load. Just go to the Metallic.io website (link at the end). There’s no need to speak to anyone and it configures in minutes.
The Future, where to from here
When asked to look into her crystal ball, Giesen predicts that the future will require fast adoption and leveraging the cloud. Businesses will need to ask themselves: Where is the new normal going to be in terms of infrastructure and are we overly reliant in some industries and some sectors on physical infrastructure?
Questions will also be asked about whether businesses need to look at more distributed architecture and do they need to leverage the cloud in different ways (for example multi-cloud). Prepare for these conversations to accelerate and for Metallic to be front and centre meeting the need.
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