HYCU is part of a new vendor profile series featuring companies that are participating in Cloud Wars Expo, taking place June 28-30 in San Francisco.
Who They Are:
HYCU provides data protection and backup technology for all of the most widely used enterprise and public cloud platforms. The company launched in 2018 and has grown rapidly in response to the growing use of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments among enterprise customers.
HYCU’s data protection technology and management platform are designed to make it as easy for customers to manage data protection as it is to spin up and spin down cloud infrastructure — like a native cloud service.
HYCU, whose name is short for Hybrid Cloud Uptime, has 3,100 customers; it sells through an ecosystem of 400+ global partners. That partner approach is an important benefit to customers because of the complexity inherent in hybrid and multi-clouds, which require deep expertise in selecting, integrating and optimizing infrastructure and applications.
The company has a strong presence in industries where compliance considerations are a major factor, including federal government, healthcare, and financial services. It also has a growing presence in the service provider market.
Based in Boston, HYCU currently has about 300 employees and is backed by $87 million of venture capital funding. It does not disclose revenue but the company grew 150% in 2021 and expects to exceed that growth in 2022, says Simon Taylor, the company’s founder and CEO.
We saw 2 major issues when we launched the company: First, the consumerization of IT had taken place in every aspect of tech except data protection – there was no SaaS backup to speak of. Second, the real challenge we saw in hybrid and multi-cloud was the need to invent a new architectural paradigm to provide equivalency across each major cloud – on-premises, public, and SaaS.
Simon Taylor, founder and CEO, HYCU Inc.
What They Do:
HYCU delivers intelligent backup and recovery for enterprise cloud platforms VMWare and Nutanix, which are the No. 1 and No. 2 players, respectively, in hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) with approximately two-thirds of the market between them, so HYCU can address the most prevalent enterprise cloud use cases. HYCU automatically discovers where every application is running in these environments, initiates single-click backup, and automates application-specific recovery workflows.
In the public cloud realm, HYCU supports Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft Office 365.
In each cloud platform, HYCU’s Protege Multi-Cloud Data Protection management platform delivers a native, consistent experience (therefore requiring limited to no training) with full awareness of the applications and data that it protects. Application awareness is enabled by patented technology that looks inside of VMs, identifies the specific applications or databases they are supporting, and has the ability to move just apps, as opposed to migrating VMs, if that is the customer requirement
The process to implement and deploy data protection and backup in each of the public clouds is straightforward: a user or administrator selects the virtual machines that need to be protected, assigns a policy and desired service levels, and HYCU Protege manages from there.
HYCU provides native integration with Azure’s active directory and access management, giving users access only to allowed VMs and resources while also maintaining automated, 24X7 monitoring that eliminates most needs for user intervention.
For Google Cloud customers, HYCU natively integrates with Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM) so users have access only to allowed resources. Admins can monitor HYCU directly from their Google Cloud Platform Console.
In the AWS environment, HYCU provides granular recovery of desired files, folders, and VMs, with cross-platform recovery of on-premises or public cloud data to AWS.
Office 365 support protects the entire O365 installation (SharePoint, Teams, and more) from data corruption, deletion, and malware or ransomware attacks.
One critical benefit of HYCU is the flexibility to protect data on any of its supported platforms and restore data and applications to a different environment when necessary, with the system taking care of any required format conversions. Taylor refers to this disaster recovery orchestration capability as “resiliency as a service.”
Who They Have Impacted:
HYCU’s data protection technology receives high marks from Comair Limited, a commercial aviation provider that has been operating for more than 25 years. HYCU began working with Comair as the airline migrated its on-premises data center to Google Cloud.
Like many travel industry firms, Comair experienced major business disruptions at the onset of Covid-19. The company saw an opportunity to embark on a digital transformation strategy with these key elements:
- a technology infrastructure revamp that included moving to the cloud
- improving efficiency and financial performance
- driving great customer experiences for improved customer satisfaction
With HYCU, you don’t have to configure, you don’t have to worry about performance, and you don’t have to worry about maintenance. Everything just works.
Avsharn Bachoo, CIO, Comair Limited
Comair engaged HYCU partner Teraflow to assist with its cloud migration. Grant Oliff, Teraflow’s chief customer officer, noted that HYCU was an optimal fit for Comair due to its ease of deployment, visibility into the applications and data being protected, and support for the hybrid environments that are so common among customers.
The Results:
Since making the move to Google Cloud with HYCU data protection, Comair realized the following benefits:
- Simple, rapid deployment of data protection: The time to provision backup and protection with HYCU is dramatically faster than alternatives. “You see results in a matter of hours, instead of days or weeks usually required to provision a backup solution,” notes Avsharn Bachoo, chief information officer.
- Protection for all of its diverse workloads: Only HYCU’s technology was able to support Comair’s traditional on-premises workloads as well as containerized and microservices environments that were not backed up on a consistent basis before. “HYCU was the only company able to solve the problem for us,” Bachoo says.
- Flexibility in selecting storage targets: The airline can specify, at a granular level, a particular cloud storage bucket or a block storage bucket as a target for backup. That has allowed the company to not only restore data but further mine data that previously did not get utilized.
Comair is just one customer that has had strong success with HYCU; the company gets high marks across the board, boasting a Net Promoter Score of 91.
The Future:
HYCU predicts that 75% of its customer base will be operating true multi-cloud environments by the end of 2022, up from just under 60% today. That speaks to the massive potential to leverage the company’s core architecture to meet evolving customer needs.
Recent HYCU announcements show how the company is building upon the foundation of its backup and protection services with new ways to protect customer data.
The company recently rolled out an enhancement to Protege that addresses the growing problem of ransomware, as well as partner training and certification to help customers reduce the impact of ransomware attacks by collaborating with HYCU partners.
The company’s data protection technology is currently available in the Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud marketplaces, and HYCU is actively working to make it available in the AWS marketplace. A company spokesman noted that HYCU is frequently engaged with customers that operate in the AWS cloud, so being available in the AWS marketplace and providing the most robust integration is a further benefit to this vital customer segment.
Closing Thoughts:
Tech and business leaders are acutely aware of the need to maximize the reliability and availability of their corporate data so it can function as an always-available strategic resource to drive revenue, maximize business efficiency, and delight customers.
With its resiliency as a service concept, HYCU has a powerful role to play in helping customers capitalize on data: making it readily available, backed up seamlessly, and shielding them from the complexity inherent in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
As enterprise IT organizations look to deliver great customer experiences, they will benefit from the flexibility to maintain their focus on customers, while knowing their data is protected, backed up, and available regardless of where it resides.
For more in-depth insights on the categories that matter from top experts, register now for the Cloud Wars Expo.
