Clumio Discover, which is being offered as a free product, complements the core Clumio Protect offering, and is intended to steer non-Clumio customers to it.

Data protection vendor Clumio has announced the availability of Clumio Discover, which is designed to complement their Clumio Protect backup product. Clumio Discover is a cloud backup optimization engine that delivers enhanced reporting and deeper visibility into the current and historical status of AWS backups. It is designed to complement Clumio Protect, and to encourage customers who acquire it for its visibility that are not currently Protect customers to take a look at that product.

The introduction of this AWS-focused offering follows a key pivot in Clumio’s Go-to-Market strategy that took place in February. When the company launched in 2019 as a well-funded startup, their strategy was to focus on VMware on-prem environments and the AWS cloud, with the choice of AWS dictated by the fact that Clumio is built on AWS.

“In February, we refocused our attention on the public cloud, to focus on that  segment of the market that has the biggest growth, and isn’t as crowded,” said Suhas Nayak, Head of Product Marketing at Clumio. “We became laser focused on AWS, and refocused away from on-prem. We won’t be doing new development there, and will just be focusing on the public cloud only going forward.”

Clumio followed up this pivot by launching a SQL Server Backup and a Service for VMware cloud on AWS in March, and in April they launched Clumio Protect on the AWS Marketplace.

“Now we are launching Clumio Discover, a cloud backup optimization engine for AWS,” Nayak said. “Protect is our main backup and recovery solution that provides the air gapping and long-term data protection. Discover complements this with its cloud optimization engine with enhanced reporting for AWS. In the second half of this year, we will be adding an availability product for application- level consistency.”

Nayak said that both Protect and Discover share a common theme of eliminating complexity, which tends to be very heavy when just using AWS’s snapshot manager.

“There are multiple backup issues in the cloud,” he stated. “There is zero visibility into protection, including around compliance. AWS has no single pane of glass global visibility, so if data is spread cross multiple regions, you have to go through multiple windows for restores, which makes even operational recovery different. There is no real air gapped protection. Restores are really slow, taking hours and not minutes. There are also high costs because some costs are unknown, and  because there is minimal optimization for snapshot management. Discover tackles the first problem head on, the visibility issue that is completely missing in AWS and is the root of most of the problem. We want to add a ton of visibility into AWS, make it more secure, shorten recovery times and make it a more simple experience.”

Clumio Discover does this by providing a single pane of glass satellite view of a customer’s entire AWS asset and data protection footprint for Amazon EC2, EBS, RDS, and DynamoDB across all accounts and regions.  It highlights assets that are unprotected and vulnerable to potential data loss, including historical analysis and snapshot histograms. It provides reports of largest consumers and percentage change rate spikes, the latter of which has multiple uses, including warning of a potential threat. Users can also see the total monthly spend for AWS EC2/EBS Snapshots by account, region, or tag, as well as comparison analysis for cost reduction with Clumio Protect.

That latter point is important, because a key reason why Clumio Discover is being made widely available as a free product is to nudge customers towards Clumio Protect.

“Discover pairs well with Protect but can be used by non-Clumio customers – anyone who uses AWS Snapshot or a third-party solution,” Nayak said. “It’s a ‘land and expand’ product for us. The biggest challenge for many people who

move to the cloud is that they don’t understand all the challenges of data protection. We want to show how we can simplify the entire landscape for them, and let them know they can do much better than what they have today. Part of that is showing them what their costs would be for Clumio Protect, for a true airgapped solution.”

Clumio Discover is available now.