The 40 Coolest Data Recovery/Observability/Resiliency Vendors: The 2024 Storage 100
As part of CRN’s 2024 Storage 100, here are 40 data recovery/observability/resilience technology vendors taking their offerings to new heights.
This category of the Storage 100 was formed from the fact that data protection and recovery, data migration and other aspects of the management of data are increasingly intertwined. It gets harder and harder to find a vendor focusing on one aspect as vendors look to add value to their offerings and to their bottom lines by adding more and more capabilities.
This category, previously known as the 40 Coolest Data Protection/Management/Resilience Vendors, was renamed for 2024 to reflect real-world storage realities.
First, for end users, the focus on data protection is no longer as important as a focus on data recovery. It is easy to protect data by backing it up. The real difficulty is in safely recovering the data quickly and completely to minimize downtime in case of a loss of that data whether by accident or malicious activities.
Second, in order to manage data, it must first be discovered and turned into a manageable format. This is increasingly important as new technologies such as AI and generative AI require new ways to manage and migrate data to give users the greatest value.
Third, while storage vendors have traditionally developed ways to store, protect, and recover data in situations where the storage systems themselves have an issue or are attacked, the focus today has shifted to protecting stored data as the last line of defense against cybersecurity attacks. Vendors looking to protect data are increasingly relying on technologies to stop ransomware attacks from attacking data long after a cybersecurity event happens.
As part of CRN’s 2024 Storage 100, here are 40 data recovery/observability/resilience technology vendors taking their offerings to new heights.
Acronis
Ezequiel Steiner
CEO
Acronis provides natively integrated cybersecurity, data protection and endpoint management for MSPs, SMBs and enterprise IT departments. Its technology helps to identify, prevent, detect, respond, remediate and recover from modern cyberthreats with minimal downtime. Acronis focuses on bringing comprehensive security to MSPs and in the last year has introduced EDR, MDR and XDR technology.
Alcion
Niraj Tolia
Co-Founder, CEO
Alcion has developed an AI-driven technology aimed at backing up Microsoft 365 data. The company’s Backup as a Service protects against malware and ransomware, uses AI and predictive analytics to understand and intelligently protect data, and is SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR compliant. Alcion recently introduced a partner program specifically for MSPs.
Amazon Web Services
Andy Jassy
CEO
Public cloud hyperscaler giant AWS provides a wide range of storage services as part of its public cloud services, including its S3 scalable storage, S3 Glacier archiving, Elastic Block Store block storage, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and a number of file services including Amazon FSx for NetApp Ontap based on NetApp’s Ontap storage operating system.
Arcserve
Arcserve was one of the pioneers of the data protection industry and today offers a full range of data protection capabilities including the ability to protect cloud and on-premises workloads and protection against ransomware attacks. The company recently terminated sales of its Arcserve Cloud Services and Arcserve OneXafe Solo offerings as a way to control operating costs.
Asigra
Eric Simmons
President, CEO
Asigra brings data protection and data security together help keep data safe from attacks. The company develops software and hardware appliance technologies for protecting data in SaaS and on-premises environments and offers Backup as a Service with its pay-as-you-go Backup2Cloud offering for MSPs. Its Asigra Tigris technology adds anti-malware, encryption, authentication and obfuscation to backups.
AvePoint
Tianyi “TJ” Jiang
CEO
AvePoint provides technology to protect and manage data in SaaS environments such as Google, Salesforce and the entire Microsoft ecosystem. It offers capabilities including backup and restore, simplification of Microsoft 365 licensing, cloud governance, cloud management of security and configurations, automated privacy and governance, secure file sharing, deployment management and migration discovery.
Backblaze
Gleb Budman
Chairperson, CEO
Backblaze has made it its mission to make storing, using and protecting data easy. Its B2 Cloud Storage is an S3-compatible cloud with enterprise-ready security and compliance, and costs about 20 percent that of AWS S3, the company said. MSPs can also reserve a large chunk of capacity to sell storage capacity with predictable pricing.
Calamu Technologies
Paul Lewis
Founder, CEO
Calamu develops what it calls a data-first security platform, Calamu Protect. Calamu Protect fragments data across multiple separate storage locations to nullify the impact of a data breach or ransomware attack and adds resilience to data. The company says data from a hacked fragment is worthless to the attacker. The company also says the technology enables compliance with international laws and standards.
Cirrus Data
Wayne Lam
Chairman, CEO
Cirrus Migrate Cloud, the flagship product of Cirrus Data, is a cloud-native, as-a-service offering that provides flexibility for block storage environments. From on-premises to multi-cloud and every environment in between, Cirrus Migrate Cloud automates data migration and streamlines data mobility across all of a company’s block storage environments while providing continuous data protection.
Clumio
Poojan Kumar
Co-Founder, CEO
Data protection software developer Clumio provides air-gapped, immutable and encrypted protection by default for AWS data without the need to deploy agents or manage snapshots. Clumio early this year closed a funding round worth $75 million that brought the total investment in the company $261 million. For 2023, it saw a 4X growth in annual recurring revenue.
Cobalt Iron
Richard Spurlock
Founder, CEO
Cobalt Iron is the developer of the Compass unified data protection platform for protecting data sitting in on-premises, cloud, edge and hybrid infrastructures. Compass uses forensics analytics to automate cyberthreat detection and correction and help ensure safety against ransomware attacks. It is a native SaaS technology that automatically scales as requirements grow.
Cohesity
Sanjay Poonen
President, CEO
Cohesity is a pioneer in adding data security capabilities to its data protection technology. The AI-powered Cohesity Data Cloud provides unified security and management at enterprise scale with zero trust security and includes ransomware protection and recovery. Cohesity is in the process of a major expansion in scale with plans to acquire Veritas’ data protection business.
Collibra
Felix Van de Maele
Co-Founder, CEO
Collibra develops what it calls the Data Intelligence Platform, which uses active metadata to deliver trusted data for every use case across every source. Use cases include providing trusted data for AI governance, building an enterprise data catalog across all data sources, automating workflows to build data governance, and providing observability to detect and resolve data quality issues.
Commvault
Sanjay Mirchandani
President, CEO
Commvault has one of the longest track records in data protection and management and has leveraged that history to stay on the cutting edge of technology. Its flagship Commvault Cloud, provides ransomware protection with air-gapping and immutable backups, along with enterprise-grade data security, all with the company’s Metallic AI that provides early warning and rapid response.
Datadobi
Ian Leysen
Co-Founder, CEO
Datadobi focuses on unstructured data management in hybrid-cloud. The company late last year updated its flagship StorageMAP unstructured data management platform with the ability to analyze object data on any S3-compliant platform, as well as the ability to search for and consolidate files based on specific metadata criteria to prepare for analytics or AI processing.
Data Dynamics
Piyush Mehta
CEO
Data Dynamics provides enterprise data management solutions that aim to help organizations add structure to their unstructured data. The company’s Unified Unstructured Data Management Software has four modules—Data Analytics, Mobility, Security and Compliance—that help businesses unlock data-driven insight, secure data, ensure compliance and governance, and drive hybrid cloud data management.
Druva
Jaspreet Singh
Founder, CEO
Druva develops a SaaS platform for data. The company’s Druva Data Resiliency Cloud provides enterprise cloud backup and data management across edge, on-premises, and cloud workloads. Druva last year introduced Dru, an AI copilot for data protection.
Egnyte
Vineet Jain
CEO
Egnyte’s technology provides data security, data governance, cloud content collaboration and tools for IT managers. The company’s Content Intelligence Engine uses GenAI to take actions based on nontechnical user commands and to convert image, audio and visual content into text. Its AI also classifies content based on patterns to extract specific information and to identify unusual or suspicious behaviors.
Google Cloud
Thomas Kurian
CEO
As one of the top three public cloud hyperscalers, the Google Cloud Platform offers businesses a wide range of services including compute, storage, data warehousing, Kubernetes, AI and more. On the storage side, the company provides a managed service for storing unstructured data with standard, nearline, coldline and archive options with the ability to automatically transition to lower-cost services.
Hammerspace
David Flynn
CEO
Hammerspace delivers a global data environment spanning data centers, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google and edge environments. The Hammerspace software unifies and automates unstructured data orchestration across those environments to provide global file access across any storage from any vendor as a way to prevent the need for multiple copies of data for different environments.
HYCU
Simon Taylor
Founder, CEO
HYCU is developer of multi-cloud data protection. The company’s R-Cloud platform offers data protection as a service that extends to all data wherever it resides, including data from SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, and lets SaaS vendors build their own connections to the technology. HYCU’s R-Graph technology provides agentless visualization of all applications in an organization.
Hydrolix
Marty Kagan
Co-Founder, CEO
Hydrolix develops a cloud data platform combining stream processing, decoupled storage, advanced compression techniques and indexed search to deliver real-time query performance at terabyte-scale for a cost the company says is about four times lower than that of its competitors. The platform lets businesses keep all their data in long-term storage, and provides low-latency queries regardless of how old the data is.
Index Engines
Tim Williams
Founder, CEO
Index Engines delivers AI-powered data security technology via CyberSense, the company’s enterprise-class platform that provides comprehensive data integrity in support of management of unstructured files and emails in primary and backup storage environments. It provides a foundation for discovering, reporting and managing user-generated content in environments from terabytes to petabytes in capacity.
Komprise
Kumar Goswami
CEO
Komprise builds an unstructured data management and mobility SaaS platform that is storage-agnostic and looks across all data storage technologies to deliver analytics to help enterprise IT teams right-place unstructured data to help maximize cost savings. The company’s flagship Komprise Intelligent Data Management as a service lets businesses analyze, migrate, tier, archive, replicate and manage data at scale.
LucidLink
Peter Thompson
Co-Founder, CEO
LucidLink provides real-time global file collaboration for media and entertainment and other heavy data users. It helps teams work from anywhere via a simple shared workflow while eliminating the need to pass massive files back and forth between multiple content creators. Collaborators get direct access to data regardless of where it is stored and without the need for multiple copies.
Microsoft
Satya Nadella,
Chairman, CEO
Microsoft Azure provides businesses with a full suite of over 200 products and services including compute, storage, networking, analytics, AI, DevOps, virtual servers and desktops and SaaS applications. Its storage offerings include data protection, object storage management, appliances for data transfer, archive storage, cloud-native SAN, container storage and managed Lustre.
Morro Data
Paul Tien
Founder, CEO
Morro Data is focused on bringing NAS to cloud scale. The company’s Morro Global File System does this without the need for maintenance, worrying about running out of capacity, or endless backup and replication. The latest version, Morro Global CloudNAS 8.0, includes more flexible versioning and a new app for cloning data without the need for internet bandwidth.
MSP360
Brian Helwig
CEO
MSP360 develops data protection and IT management technologies for MSPs and IT departments. The company’s MSP360 platform combines the company’s MSP360 Managed Backup data protection technology, its MSP360 RMM (remote monitoring and management) to manage the IT infrastructure, and MSP360 Connect remote access technology, all under a single pane of glass.
Nakivo
Bruce Talley
Co-Founder, CEO
Nakivo provides data protection and replication across virtual, cloud, physical, SaaS, and NAS platforms. Its Nakivo Backup and Replication technology includes backup, replication and site recovery for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, and Amazon EC2 environments, along with backup of data for Microsoft SaaS applications including Teams, Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online.
Nasuni
Paul Flanagan
CEO
Nasuni was an early pioneer in the development of cloud-native global file systems. Its flagship offering, UniFS, scales to any level to unify isolated silos of file storage at multiple locations into a single cloud offering. It also eliminates the need for separate backup and disaster recovery for each silo, and offers access to all data from any location.
Object First
David Bennett
CEO
Object First was founded by the co-founders of Veeam who saw the opportunity to create a ransomware-proof and immutable out-of-the-box backup storage it calls Ootbi. Ootbi is a backup storage appliance based on a customized hardened Linux operating system designed to provide an immutable primary object storage target for backups using Veeam Software.
Own (previously known as OwnBackup)
Sam Gutmann
CEO
Own, which prior to 2023 was known as OwnBackup, provides cloud-based data protection for major SaaS environments including Salesforce, ServiceNow and Microsoft Dynamics 365. The company also provides applications to identify and reduce security risks for Salesforce data, seed data for training or testing in Salesforce and ServiceNow environments, archive Salesforce data and provide analytics on historical SaaS data.
Quest Software
Patrick Nichols
CEO
Quest Software provides cybersecurity, data performance, directory and identity, and modernization applications to help simplify enterprise IT management. They include NetVault Plus enterprise data protection software that creates immutable backups against cyberattacks; QoreStor software for optimizing secondary storage with compression, deduplication and ransomware protection; and vRanger for protecting virtual machine data.
Quobyte
Bjorn Kolbeck
Co-Founder, CEO
Quobyte helps customers build a reliable, scalable and flexible software-based distributed file system. The Quobyte software can be downloaded to any x86-based server to seamlessly combine file and object storage in the same name space with technology that scales performance and capacity as resources are added. It also provides security to data at-rest or in-flight against unauthorized access.
Rubrik
Bipul Sinha
Co-Founder, Chairman, CEO
Rubrik develops technology to help provide business resilience against cyberattacks, malicious insiders and operational disruptions by securing enterprise, cloud and SaaS data. The company’s Rubrik Security Cloud is a comprehensive data security platform built on a zero trust architecture using machine learning to help secure data, monitor data risks and quickly recover data.
Syniti
Kevin Campbell
CEO
Syniti develops software that uses AI and machine learning to provide automation and guidance for businesses’ data migration, data quality, analytics, management, metadata management and information governance via its Syniti Knowledge Platform. The company early this year acquired Proceed Group’s Rightsizer software, a tool for determining infrastructure sizing before starting an SAP S/4HANA transformation.
US Signal
Daniel Watts
CEO
US Signal provides a wide range of data center, cloud and managed services to customers via its own secure fiber network, including colocation, IT infrastructure, data management, disaster recovery and security. The company offers data backups, Disaster Recovery as a Service, cloud availability and replication for Veeam customers, and SLA-backed scalable cloud resources for Cohesity customers.
Veeam Software
Anand Eswaran
CEO
Veeam is a leading provider of data protection and ransomware recovery technology for cloud, virtual, physical and SaaS environments, as well as for specific applications by Microsoft, Oracle, SAP HANA and PostgreSQL. The company early this year launched Veeam Data Cloud, an all-in-one storage, cloud backup and ransomware recovery offering for Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365.
Veritas
Greg Hughes
CEO
Veritas, a leader in multi-cloud data management and data protection, counts among its customers 95 of the Fortune 100 businesses. It supports over 800 data sources, 100 operating systems, 1,400 storage targets and 60 clouds. Cohesity signed an agreement to acquire Veritas’ data protection business.
Wasabi
David Friend
Co-Founder, President, CEO
Wasabi is focused on disrupting the cloud storage business with technology it says costs one-fifth that of the competition while providing higher performance with no egress fees, API call charges or additional hidden fees. Wasabi provides just the cloud part of storage, leaving it up to others to provide the front-end storage and data protection technologies.