Clumio is offering free support for operational recovery, which is typically used in DevTest environments, to highlight that it fits in to what they say is a more holistic data protection strategy than competitors.
Today, enterprise backup-as-a-service provider Clumio is expanding its native AWS protection, while also introducing a free offering designed to get the attention of the market. Clumio will offer the shortest term backup — operational snapshot-based recovery for free, to illustrate that they offer this common backup form as part of a comprehensive data protection strategy. They are also now providing support for Amazon RDS, the AWS Relational Database Service.
“This is an extension of what we have done and what we continue to do,” said Steve Siegel, Clumio’s Director of Products. “There are two major changes. One is our new support for RDS. The other is our shining a light on the part of the market that is not well served, operational recovery, and we are doing that by putting it out as a free tier.”
Siegel emphasized that Clumio is able to support all aspects of data protection, which is the message they are attempting to convey with this announcement.
“We cover operational recovery for a short-term glitch,” he said. “We cover normal data recovery. And we meet the requirements for long-term data retention. Snapshot managers are good for operational recovery but not for data recovery or long term. We have a more holistic approach.”
Clumio offers an enterprise-grade SaaS solution that allows a single policy to be created and then applied to any data source regardless of whether it comes from on-prem, cloud or SaaS sources.
“It’s a single service built on the cloud that handles snapshot-based operational recovery, data recovery and long term data recovery” [with the latter essentially being archiving in the cloud,” Siegel said. “We have a single holistic service with an airgapped capability that is immutable and protected by end to end encryption. Other vendors address this, but with complexity, including scripting across multiple accounts. We handle and manage all of that complexity.”
When Clumio launched, they initially supported VMware, and then AWS, adding support for AWS EBS late last year at the AWS Re:Invent event. A month ago, they added Microsoft 365 support.
The new addition of AWS RDS led Clumio to emphasize their capabilities in longer term storage, because RDS is considerably more expensive than AWS S3.
“RDS is 3x the cost of storage of S3, which is a huge cost if you need to keep it for seven years for compliance purposes,” Siegel said. “So we are highlighting that our single service provides full end to end data protection in a cost-effective manner.”
Clumio isn’t offering anything new in terms of the capabilities of core long term protection, or its operational or data recovery tiers. What they are doing is highlighting that they offer all three in the same service.
“We have been providing these all along but when we started looking at RDS we saw the opportunity to speak about it differently, because it draws out the distinction between how we do it and the ways others do it with tools they cobble together,” Siegel said.
The decision to offer the snapshot-based operational recovery tier for free is also designed to highlight the holistic nature of Clumio’s service. This is typically used in DevTest environments and provides 30 daily snapshots.
“We provide the same level of functionality as snapshot managers, but we fit into a better long term protection strategy,” Siegel said. “We are offering the operational recovery tier for free, because it shows that others only do part of the job. We can shave 50% of their storage costs in snapshots alone, as well as provide productivity benefits. As we shine the light on this, we think the market will respond favorably.”
“We are trying to be aggressive and to punch above our weight,” Siegel stressed. “That’s why we are going out there with free. We are trying to get people’s attention.”
