Today, in conjunction with world backup day, HYCU, which makes native backup solutions for specific enterprise cloud platforms, is further expanding their portfolio. They are announcing the expansion of their HYCU Protégé multi-cloud platform with HYCU for Azure.

HYCU began as a brand of Comtrade Software, a long-established services-focused data protection company, and emerged at the Nutanix 2017 .NEXT event with a purpose-built backup solution for Nutanix, They spun out of Comtrade as a separate company a year later. Since then, along with expanding their Nutanix functionality, they added support for VMware, and last year launched a strategic partnership with Google Cloud Platform. The Google partnership became the launching part for Protégé, as HYCU began to build purpose-built solutions for each cloud hyperscaler that they worked with. The Protégé platform was formally rolled out in December.

“When we started, we were purpose built for Nutanix, and then we expanded to VMware, and Google,” said Subbiah Sundaram, VP Products at HYCU. “We are continuing the same philosophy of building purpose-built solutions onto Azure, and we now support it as a core platform, making native backup and recovery for Azure a core invisible service of the Protégé platform.”

Sundaram identified what HYCU sees as the four key target use cases for HYCU for Azure.

“They are migrating workloads to Azure, protecting workloads on Azure, leveraging Azure as a dedicated DR target where they have significant on-prem, but want this in case something goes wrong, and for mature customers typically, setting up DR on Azure for native workloads,” he said. “Those are the four core problems we address.”

Sundaram identified three specific points of value HYCU provides.

“Our goal is to simplify mobility as well provide data protection and disaster recovery,” he said. “We deliver as a service, deliver it natively on Azure and have over 20 years experience developing data protection.”

Sundaram called HYCU for Azure a true As-a-Service offering, emphasizing that they require no separate infrastructure to run in the cloud.

“As-a-service means no install and upgrade, and it means dynamic scaling,” he said. “Customers can start with as little as 1 VM and go to hundreds of thousands without changing anything on their side. The integrated Azure billing model is also a significant differentiator for us. Customers can subscribe from the Azure marketplace and our billing is part of their Azure bill.”

Sundaram also emphasized that because HYCU for Azure is purpose-built for Azure, it can fully leverage all parts of the Azure platform.

“We inherit all the multitenancy of Azure, fully leverage Active Directory, and automatically match the right class of Azure Blob object storage to the lowest cost for the customer’s SLA,” he said. Sundaram also emphasized that the solution is completely agentless, and leverages its own IP for Change Block Tracking to provide incremental backups forever.

HYCU for Azure is available immediately, and HYCU is making its data protection functionality available free of charge for the following three months. The data migration and disaster recovery functionality are slated to be generally available in the next 30 days.

So when might we expect HYCU for AWS? Sundaram was cautious with that one and gave the impression that it principally depends on AWS.

“We absolutely would love to expand our platform,” he said. “We do need to be very tight with the partner and be able to support all the capabilities that they deliver in the platform.”

Sundaram also noted that unlike when they expanded with the Google Cloud Platform, their partner base who are the company’s route to market is already well established with Azure.

“We started with many partners who were focused on Nutanix and VMware, and when we went to the cloud with Google, there were partners who specialized on Google and that’s it, and we brought some of those on board. The good thing about Microsoft is a lot of our current on-prem partners also have a footprint in the Microsoft space.”