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AWS Has Helped Shape Druva’s Cloud Success: Pete Yamasaki

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Businesses today are looking to cloud as a viable, cost-effective alternative to protect against the pitfalls and inefficiencies of traditional backup and disaster recovery (DR). While there are several companies offering cloud data backup services, Druva, a fast-growing provider of data protection solutions for the enterprise claims to be a unique and ‘true’ platform on cloud, helping customers to secure and safeguard their data troves.

Founded in 2008 Druva offers data protection and management solutions for enterprise laptops, PCs, smartphones, and tablets. The company has its offices in Pune, India, the UK and the US. Its flagship product, inSync, is a highly scalable solution designed for backup, secure file sharing, and analytics for the enterprise mobile workforce. In a span of a decade, it has grown to support more than 4,000 companies and over 30 petabytes of data around the world.

In a recent interaction with CXOToday, Pete Yamasaki, Regional VP, APAC, Druva, explains that while most players in data protection and backup business do offer some sort of cloud, it’s only a cloud bundle, whereas Druva’s unique cloud-native architecture and innovative pay-as-you-consume Data Management-as-a-Service platform means that companies need not invest in additional hardware or special software.

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Yamasaki, who comes with over two decades of experience in leadership roles across sales, channel development, and product strategy at both startups and Fortune 500 companies, believes that unlike other solutions on the market, Druva Cloud Platform readily scales to accommodate terabytes or petabytes of data due to its cloud-based architecture. And all this was possible because of its strong tryst with Amazon Web Services (AWS), a partnership, where the latter played a big role in strengthening Druva’s image in the cloud-based backup and data protection market.

Yamasaki mentions that to expand its business and appeal to customers who want a cloud-based solution, Druva decided to offer a cloud version of the inSync platform.

“We needed a cloud service provider able to meet its business requirements while allowing us to stay focused on its core business. As Yamasaki explains, “Druva is a global enterprise and we needed a service provider with servers in multiple geographic locations. We wanted a platform that would support us as we grew while meeting our stringent requirements for enterprise-level security.”

This is when Druva’s tryst with AWS proved to be a turning point in its growth trajectory. “In 2011, we worked on a project with AWS to build a cloud version of a backup product for the enterprise. It was a hosting product based on platform and APIs and was launched in 2013 as InSync cloud,” says Yamasaki, adding that the on-premise version was already available in the market.

“The response to the new product was phenomenal, as in a span of less than two years, almost 98 percent of the new business acquired in India was all on the cloud model,” says Yamasaki.
Druva has scaled substantially since deploying on AWS, which has enabled over 100% per year growth of the company’s customer base over the past four years.

Today, Druva is an Advanced AWS Partner Network (APN) Technology Partner, a Storage Competency Partner, and an AWS GovCloud (US) Skill Technology Partner. The company has been able to build a cloud platform that offers multiple opportunities to plugin applications with the help of AWS. It harnesses the efficiencies, global reach, and native technologies of AWS.

Read more: Why AWS Is A Growth Engine For Indian Businesses

Yamasaki states, “Working with AWS has allowed Druva’s internal team to focus on what is core to its business and build a scalable, secure, market-differentiating service to customers across the globe rather than worrying about the day-to-day management of infrastructure.”

He also maintains that as AWS continues to add services and regions, which is a big gain for its partners, including Druva to have a global presence and add more and more differentiating functionality to it product portfolio.

“With AWS powering our cloud platform, we know we’re delivering the availability, security and accessibility that our customers need,” says Yamasaki, adding that the Druva team continues to work with AWS technical teams to enhance their product offering to deliver the best data protection possible for its customers.

To keep up with the digital enterprises, Druva leverages innovative technologies for better and more secured cloud data protection. As Yamasaki explains, “We will soon be working in the area of blockchain-backed cloud platforms to ensure that their data remains uncompromised even during a security breach.”

“Today blockchain technology has its usefulness in all domains, across all industries, owing to its security benefits coupled with increased transparency and decreased cost, and we are aiming to leverage on this strengths going ahead,” concludes Yamasaki.

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