Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) provider HYCU, on Thursday, rolled out a free version of its Protégé data protection and recovery technology for Amazon AWS customers at the AWS Summit event in Anaheim, California.
As with its existing offerings, HYCU focuses on making backup and recovery operations as simple as spinning up and spinning down cloud infrastructure — like a native cloud service. The company offers backup and protection in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. In addition to AWS, its services are also available for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, as well as for major private clouds.
“HYCU is committed to creating solutions that make data backup and recovery more accessible, limiting the threat of ransomware attack and human error,” founder and CEO Simon Taylor said in the company’s announcement.
Free trial offers are commonplace in the cloud world — including among the hyperscale cloud providers. However, those offers tend to include capacity, time, or dollar-value limits, and many require submission of a credit card for billing purposes. HYCU is taking a different approach.
The company says customers of its Protégé for AWS, Free Tier, can use the functionality forever — with no capacity or time limits. Further, the company does not require a credit card to start using the Free Tier, and vows to not have salespeople pursuing customers to upgrade to its paid tier.
“We understand there will be a group of users that are going to use this for the rest of their lives” says Andy Fernandez, Director, Product Marketing for HYCU, which is based in Boston. “Unless you express an interest in paid features, we will never give you a sales call.”
What Free Tier Customers Get
In selecting the Free Tier capability, customers will get access to a live view of their data protection status at all times with granular file, folder, disk, or virtual machine (VM)-level restores. They’ll get cross-region disaster recovery, as well as daily notifications and proactive alerts. They retain complete ownership of their data, including backups.
“One of the best characteristics of HYCU in the cloud is we don’t store their data. They know they’re using their storage and they have native [AWS] snapshots,” says Subbiah Sundaram, Senior Vice President, Products for HYCU. “We’re simply providing the service around protection and recovery” of customers’ AWS Elastic Compute (EC2) workloads.
The Free Tier is designed to help cloud and DevOps professionals address operational data protection needs including accidental deletions, logical errors, and outages. For IT and backup professionals, it addresses risk management requirements including ransomware attacks, compliance, and long-term retention of data.
HYCU’s Free Tier aims to help customers who maintain a misperception that their data in the cloud is automatically protected. The Free Tier offer can help them get up and running with backup and protection quickly, without a big investment of developer or IT time. “Customers sometimes don’t realize the complexity involved,” Sundaram says. “And without the right tools, it’s hard to know if you’re fully protected.”
It’s important for customers to understand what they receive and don’t receive with the Free Tier, as compared to the paid tier:
The Free Tier includes:
- Snapshot management
- VM and file-level recovery
- Reports and notifications
- Cross-region recovery
- Community Support
Customers only pay for their AWS consumption.
The Paid Tier, by contrast, provides:
- Full backups and application protection
- Buckets and storage tiers
- Immutability
- Migration to lift and shift from on-premises or private cloud to public cloud
- 24×7 support from HYCU
Company officials said the signup process is a rapid one, allowing customers to subscribe and start protecting their workloads in a matter of minutes. It provides in-product tutorials and simplified workflows. “You can select an instance and assign a default policy,” Fernandez said.
The company is offering the Free Tier for AWS first because customer usage is the highest for that cloud service. Since it also offers its broader services for Azure and Google Cloud, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to see this free offer extended to those hyperscalers as well. We’ll provide an update if, or when, that happens.
HYCU is a fast-growing company that recently received a significant round of venture capital investment that increased its total funding to $140 million. It has 3,200 customers.
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