Enhancements include new failback recovery capabilities, and recovery for cloud workloads with cross-region/account support.

Cloud data protection provider Druva has announced an update to their Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service [DRaaS] offering for enterprise workloads, which features enhanced one-click recovery capability on the AWS cloud. Using  AWS cloud architecture, the Druva service provides backup, disaster recovery, archive and analytics, with elastic scalability. The DRaaS enhancements impact both the native AWS services acquired from CloudRanger and which is integrated into the Phoenix service, as well as the core Phoenix service itself, which handles vSphere VMware workloads.

“This is aimed at the broad VMware install base that is looking to take that next evolution to the public cloud,” said Mike Palmer, Druva’s Chief Product Officer. “It is well suited for companies who are in the public cloud for the first time, and who need Druva plus AWS orchestration tools, or ones that have a separate siloed stack for DR. We replace that and embed it into our SaaS offering. It saves the customer costs, and they no longer have to patch and test a silo for DR exclusively.”

Palmer emphasized that Phoenix’s ability to perform elastic disaster recovery in AWS at scale significantly simplifies management and lowers costs.

“There is nobody else on the market that lets you provide disaster recovery to and from AWS with a single copy of the data,” he said. “Without that, you will incur the cost and management of migrating copies of data to the cloud. With Druva, your disaster recovery and data protection are all integrated so without replication, you get the same RTS and RPO at less cost.”

A key addition with this version is the enhancement of the one-click recovery process with features facilitating failback recovery, and recovery for cloud workloads with cross-region/account support.

“A couple of things are different,” Palmer said. “The hybrid workload failback to either the AWS cloud or on-prem is an addition, and is important for a seamless experience in recovery. Seeing environments together gives the ability to understand what an event outcome will look like.”

The other change is added support for cloud workloads through the ability to capture data within customers’ AWS account and clone it across regions for testing and compliance.

“They can move data this way in a manner that they couldn’t before,” Palmer indicated.

One feature which is not new but which Palmer said is growing in resonance is the offering’s strength against ransomware.

“A lot of customers are concerned about ransomware recovery,” he said. “The benefit of the Druva model is an effective airgap between the customer data copy and backup copy. The ransomware makers don’t have a way into the Druva account, so this supplies an answer to that.”

Druva originally sold direct, but in recent years has added a channel which has grown from single digit growth rate to providing a majority of new Druva customers.

“The channel has itself been finding its way to the cloud and building a subscription base of customers, which has been a big shift from their model,” Palmer said. “We continue to assist them by adding value services on top of core services in the cloud, so they can use this as a next value tier as they help customers move to the public cloud. Our commitment to the channel is that we will continue to add more services, like data governance and eDiscovery, and will further enhance the analytics’ ability to use data for business process purposes.”

The new Druva disaster recovery capabilities will be generally available in Q2 2019 as part of a flat dollar per VM fee.