GigaOm Sonar for Cloud-Native Data Protectionv2.0

An Exploration of Cutting-Edge Solutions and Technologies

Table of Contents

  1. Executive Summary
  2. Overview
  3. Considerations for Adoption
  4. GigaOm Sonar
  5. Solution Insights
  6. Near-Term Roadmap
  7. Analyst’s Outlook
  8. Report Methodology

1. Executive Summary

Many organizations are investing heavily in the cloud to improve their agility and optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their infrastructure. They are moving applications and data to the public cloud to take advantage of its flexibility only to discover that, when not properly managed, public cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control. This can leave them exposed to unintentional risk due to their lack of experience managing diverse shared-responsibility models.

Data storage and protection are among the biggest pain points along many cloud adoption journeys. Many of the services available in a cloud need to be enhanced and hardened to deliver the predictable reliability and availability of more traditional enterprise technology architectures. The tools for managing the protection of data, state, and configuration saved in those systems must operate well beyond simple snapshot-based data protection.

In addition, organizations are taking advantage of the flexibility and broad set of offerings provided by public clouds. It is not uncommon for an organization to consume cloud services from different public cloud providers. In that context, multicloud support and the ability to abstract management complexities behind a unified management pane drastically simplify data protection operations and increase operational efficiency.

Cloud-native data protection solutions are designed to add enterprise-class data protection functionality that leverages modern cloud patterns of infinitely scalable storage, microservices, containerization, functions, automation, orchestration capabilities, and DevOps practices. These features enable greater scalability, resilience, and agility compared to traditional monolithic appliance, virtual, or cloud-hosted applications while improving data management processes and costs.

Compared to traditional backup solutions, cloud-native data protection offers several advantages by streamlining operations, minimizing duplication of infrastructure costs and effort, and leveraging investments in cloud adoption to more tightly align with a business’s strategic digital transformation objectives.

In this regard, organizations should take into account some important factors of cloud-native data protection solutions:

  • Speed: When properly integrated, cloud-native backup can take advantage of the underlying cloud’s elasticity, scalability, and competitive differentiators to speed up backup and restore operations. It’s not uncommon for cloud-native backup solutions to blur the lines between data protection, cyber security, and business continuity. This hybridization has the intended consequence of delivering supreme levels of resilience and business agility in a continuously evolving cyber landscape.
  • Granularity: One of the biggest limitations of traditional backups is the inability to easily restore the “what, when, and how it was” in the event of a data loss incident. To do this, users typically have to go through layers of people, processes, and technology inefficiencies to find, restore, and recover data to a known good state–often leaving teams to hunt and peck for nuggets of data using coarse-grained tools. This slow and error-prone process bleeds a business’s velocity and ultimately impacts its ability to maintain high levels of execution and momentum.
  • Cyber resiliency: Creating distance between source and backup targets is the basis of every safety and security practice in data protection, especially with the increasing number of cyber-attacks becoming the norm. The 3-2-1 principle, originating from the era of on-premises data storage, remains a widely referenced guideline in modern data protection. This well-established principle can still serve as a valuable framework for business and security decision-makers for enhancing their cyber infrastructure against contemporary data risks. In essence, the 3-2-1 backup rule advocates for maintaining three copies of data across two distinct storage media types, with one copy stored off-site. Data immutability, air gapping, security scanning, and proactive remediation are foundational capabilities for hedging against a worsening security and compliance threat landscape. The ultimate objective of a cloud-native backup solution is the peace of mind that comes from knowing that when (not if) a loss event occurs, your data is protected.
  • Cost: Often delivered within a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, cloud-native data protection solutions provide a similar pay-as-you-grow approach through which the organization can immediately reap the benefits of data protection while either owning the orchestration of managing the data protection infrastructure or transferring the difficulties to the software provider. Unlike traditional big iron deployments or virtualized software approaches, customers do not need to handle the costs associated with over-architecting monolithic solutions for corner case scenarios. Cloud-native data protection solutions offer a more agile and dynamic approach to selectively scaling and balancing innovation, maturity, use, and cost for its consumer base.

For this report, we focused on cloud-native data protection tools and did not include on-premises vendors previously covered in GigaOm’s Radar reports on hybrid cloud data protection (HCDP) for SMBs and large enterprises. Among the criteria for inclusion, we looked at both SaaS and pure-play software providers built with modern cloud principles (such as microservices or a serverless architecture) and using scalable storage paradigms. We also looked at each solution’s ability to predominantly protect SaaS, hyperscaler-native, and private cloud workloads while not abandoning traditional endpoint and enterprise workloads, ideally in multicloud scenarios. Finally, we also looked at solutions that offer seamless, cloud-like consumption models, offering pay-as-you-grow economics coupled with elastic scalability.

This is the second year that GigaOm has reported on the cloud-native data protection space in the context of our Sonar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Sonar report provides an overview of the market’s vendors and their available offerings, outlines the key characteristics that prospective buyers should consider when evaluating solutions, and equips IT decision-makers with the information they need to select the best solution for their business and use case requirements.

ABOUT THE GIGAOM SONAR REPORT

This GigaOm report focuses on emerging technologies and market segments. It helps organizations of all sizes to understand a new technology, its strengths and its weaknesses, and how it can fit into the overall IT strategy. The report is organized into five sections:

  • Overview: An overview of the technology, its major benefits, and possible use cases, as well as an exploration of product implementations already available in the market.
  • Considerations for Adoption: An analysis of the potential risks and benefits of introducing products based on this technology in an enterprise IT scenario. We look at table stakes and key differentiating features, as well as considerations for how to integrate the new product into the existing environment.
  • GigaOm Sonar Chart: A graphical representation of the market and its most important players, focused on their value proposition and their roadmap for the future.
  • Vendor Insights: A breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector, scored across key characteristics for enterprise adoption.
  • Near-Term Roadmap: 12- to 18-month forecast of the future development of the technology, its ecosystem, and major players in this market segment.