The 20 Coolest Cloud Storage Companies Of The 2021 Cloud 100

These 20 companies are tackling a cloud storage market that is growing increasingly complicated as businesses look for more out of their data protection vendors than data protection.

Cloud storage continues to grow increasingly complicated, as businesses look for more out of their data protection vendors than data protection.

Data is a very valuable resource, and the best data protection offerings not only ensure it is backed up and accessible in a disaster, but also can be managed across and migrated over on-premises and cloud infrastructures. With such capabilities now table stakes for both legacy and startup vendors, vendors in the past year have turned to more advanced offerings that include Kubernetes container data protection and application-aware data protection.

And those vendors haven’t been shy about making acquisitions, as was seen throughout the industry in 2020.

[RELATED: The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Companies Of 2021]

Acronis

Serguei Beloussov
Chairman, Executive Officer

Acronis develops data protection, disaster recovery and enterprise file sync and share technologies, and adds a helping of anti-ransomware protection on top of it all to help straddle the line between storage and security in physical, virtual, cloud and mobile environments. The company in 2020 expanded its move into cybersecurity with the acquisitions of CyberLynx and DeviceLock, and the additions of several new security tools.

Arcserve

Tom Signorello
CEO

Arcserve’s UDP, or Unified Data Protection, platform lets businesses protect data from multiple sites to public and private clouds. The company, which offers its technology as either software or integrated hardware appliances, in 2020 added new universal licensing to let customers pay based on data protected regardless of the number of devices, physical servers and workstations, virtual machines, cloud instances, workloads or users.

Axcient

David Bennett
President, CEO

Data protection technology vendor Axcient develops the x360 converged backup platform for MSPs combining Axcient‘s CloudFinder Office 365data protection technology, its Anchor file sync and share technology, and its Replibit business continuity and disaster recovery software. The company in 2020 added x360Recover Virtual Office to recover data temporarily to the Axcient cloud, and Direct to Cloud for no-hardware backup and disaster recovery.

Cloudian

Michael Tso
Co-Founder, CEO

Cloudian is the developer of the Cloudian HyperStore S3-compatible object storage platform and the Cloudian HyperFile object storage-based file offering to combine full enterprise-class NAS feature set and scale-out performance. The technologies scale from three nodes to hundreds of nodes. The company in 2020 unveiled Kubernetes S3 Operator for container-based applications, and a new flash-optimized object storage software.

Clumio

Poojan Kumar
Co-Founder, CEO

Clumio provides cloud-native data backups that provide real-time dashboards for monitoring status and compliance, automatic resource scaling to easily manage usage spikes, a single set of policies for on-premises and cloud virtual machines, and end-to-end encryption of data. The company in December launched air-gapped ransomware protection for public and private clouds and SaaS.

Cohesity

Mohit Aron
Founder, CEO

Cohesity develops a comprehensive multi-cloud platform for data management services that includes backup and recovery, file and object storage, disaster recovery, security and compliance, test and development, and analytics. Cohesity in 2020 unveiled a new partnership with AWS to help eliminate data silos and added automated disaster recovery capabilities.

Commvault

Sanjay Mirchandani
Director, President, CEO

Commvault was a pioneer in the development of data protection technology and has of late reinvented itself as a cloud-native data protection company, particularly with the introduction of Commvault Metallic, its enterprise-grade SaaS backup and recovery technology. The company most recently broadened its offering with the introduction of Metallic Backup as a Service for Kubernetes and the Metallic Cloud Storage Service.

Egnyte

Vineet Jain
Co-Founder, CEO

Egnyte develops a unified platform for content collaboration, data protection, compliance and threat prevention. The company’s Content Intelligence Engine provides data security, regulatory compliance, life-cycle management and platform APIs, and gives users identity-aware controlled access and sharing. Last year, Egnyte introduced new content governance tools aimed at secure work-from-anywhere users.

HYCU

Simon Taylor
CEO

HYCU is the developer of the HYCU Protege application-aware, lightweight cross-cloud migration and disaster recovery technology for enterprise applications. HYCU Protege provides application consistency, protected migration, single-click disaster recovery and consolidated multi-cloud data management. HYCU in 2020 unveiled a new cloud services provider program, and introduced SAP HANA Data Protection as a Service for Google Cloud.

NetApp

George Kurian
CEO

NetApp is a pioneer in seamlessly connecting on-premises storage to public clouds and in managing data across on-premises, private and public clouds, and the edge via its Data Fabric platform. NetApp in 2020 solidified its commitment to expanding its cloud capabilities with the hiring of 23-year Microsoft veteran executive Cesar Cernuda as president.

OwnBackup

Sam Gutmann
CEO

OwnBackup specializes in the secure, automated cloud-based backup, recovery, replication, archiving and management of data in the Salesforce environment, including data from Salesforce, nCino, Veeva and Sage, and counts Salesforce Ventures as one of its investors. OwnBackup in mid-2020 closed a new $50 million funding round that included the participation of Salesforce Ventures.

Panzura

Jill Stelfox
Executive Chairwoman, CEO

Panzura develops a global cloud file system that allows users across hundreds of offices to work as if they’re in the same room by giving distributed teams rapid, secure file access to a single, authoritative data source. It offers such capabilities as intelligent caching for local performance and scalable simultaneous bursting sync so every user has the same view of every file.

Pure Storage

Charles Giancarlo
Chairman, CEO

Pure Storage started as a pioneer developer of all-flash storage, but in the past two years has turned its attention to managing both on-premises and cloud-based data in the same fashion. The company in 2020 acquired Portworx, a leading Kubernetes container technology developer, and unveiled Pure-as-a-Service in the AWS Marketplace.

Rubrik

Bipul Sinha
Co-Founder, CEO

Rubrik develops a single software platform that delivers backup, instant recovery, archival, search, analytics, compliance and copy data management in one secure fabric across data centers and clouds. The vendor-agnostic cloud-scale platform provides instant searches, policy-driven management, self-service and orchestration, analytics and compliance. Rubrik’s technology is available as an appliance, edge software, cloud software or via third-party hardware.

StorageCraft

Matt Medeiros
Chairman, CEO

StorageCraft develops the ShadowXafe comprehensive, SLA-driven data protection management platform and the OneXafe scale-out storage platform for high-performance unstructured data and backup targets. The company in July introduced ShadowXafe 4.0, which includes Hyper-V, vCenter and ESXi support; seamless integration with business management platforms like ConnectWise Manage; and unified hardware and software management.

Veeam

William Largent
Chairman, CEO

Leading data protection software vendor Veeam provides a single platform for helping businesses modernize their data protection, secure data, and accelerate hybrid cloud development. It partners with the biggest names in storage as well as AWS and Microsoft Azure. The company in 2020 acquired Kasten to accelerate the protection of Kubernetes-native workloads across on-premises and multi-cloud environments.

Veritas

Greg Hughes
CEO

Data protection pioneer Veritas is a market leader with a strong focus on cloud-based data protection and data management. The company’s comprehensive approach to multi-cloud data management gives customers data protection, availability and insight wherever the data is. The company in September acquired Globanet, adding to its software portfolio of digital compliance and governance offerings.

Wasabi

David Friend
Co-Founder, President, CEO

Wasabi promises cloud storage that gives businesses six times faster performance than Amazon S3 with a cost that is 80 percent lower with no egress or API fees, all while providing 11 nines of data durability at only one-fifth of S3‘s cost. That has made Wasabi a go-to cloud storage partner to such storage vendors as BackupAssist, Datadobi, Tintri, Caringo, Veeam, Arcserve, FalconStor and more.

Weka.io

Liran Zvibel
Co-Founder, CEO

WekaIO develops a cloud-native parallel file system optimized for high-performance NVMe flash storage. Its technology seamlessly runs on-premises and in the cloud. Data is instantly backed up to the S3-compatible clouds for rapid recovery, and is protected with integrated encryption, key management, and access control. Investors in the company include leading storage vendors as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Nvidia, Seagate and Western Digital.

Zerto

Ziv Kedem
Co-Founder, CEO

Zerto is the developer of the IT Resilience Platform, an all-in-one converged disaster recovery and backup platform that helps businesses move forward on digital transformation, reduce downtime and data loss, and move workloads seamlessly across clouds or data centers. The company in 2020 launched backups to Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, and introduced the beta version of its Zerto for Kubernetes offering.