I recently attended Tech Field Day in Silicon Valley as one of the 12 delegates from around the world. One of the presentations I saw at the event was from Druva and I wanted to share my thoughts and observations in this blog post.
What is Tech Field Day?
If you haven’t attended or heard of Tech Field day, they are an independent series of tech events run by passionate people including Stephen Foskett, Ben Gage and Ken Nalbone. These events are well known in our industry with – Vendors like Zerto and Nimble Storage have been launched at one of these events. What is quite unique with this event, is that vendors present to independent industry influencers and experts and they are allowed to ask questions and challenge the technologies that have been presented.
What is Druva?
Druva is a 100% SaaS data protection solution for Cloud workloads, SaaS applications, Enterprise environments and Endpoints. It’s based on AWS cloud and when you subscribe to Druva they store your backups in an AWS account they manage for you.
"We are to backups what Salesforce is to CRM, Office 365 and G Suite to email" – @wcpreston – Very true! #TFD19
— Matt (@_vCallaway) June 27, 2019
5 Real benefits of Druva
I saw 5 key benefits of Druva that I wanted to share:
- You can be up and running very fast Curtis Preston shared in his presentation that going from setup to first backup is possible within 10 minutes.
- There is no maintenance required for backups which means they work without worry or stress.
- New features they will be available instantly.
- You automatically have three copies of everything.
- You can seed your on-premise data into Druva with the integrated feature: AWS Snowball Edge.
"people want their backups to just work" – @wcpreston @druvainc
If you start from this premise, backup as a service starts making sense right away. #TFD19
— Scott Driver @ #TFD19 (@VTsnowboarder42) June 27, 2019
I liked the simplicity, scalability and flexibility in all of the above features and I imagine my former job as a system administrator being much simpler when managing backups and testing Disaster Recovery plans.
Target customers
Druva does work with physical workloads but the real value is in virtualized environments (which in my opinion is the only way to go anyway)
Hyper-V and #VMware customers are the target for @druvainc SaaS backup for Endpoints, Datacenters and cloud #TFD19 @wcpreston pic.twitter.com/DdyOral86L
— Liselotte Foverskov (@LFoverskov) June 27, 2019
Questions and Challenges
As a former system administrator, I have been in chaotic situations with system breakdowns and impatient users. We really just want to be up and running again – right? I came away with a positive opinion but I do have a few more questions I want to investigate and look into before I would look into investing into Druva.
Real life Disaster Recovery situations
Everything you’ve been preparing for and protecting your company from will happen RIGHT there in a real life Disaster Recovery situation. This is not the time to to be asking questions or being caught by surprise.
One of the questions I instantly thought of at the presentation was what will be the cost in vulnerable situations when you need to get you data from the cloud and back on-prem?
Lock-in?
This is not a question for implementing Druva alone but is a question one has to ask whenever investing in a backup solution.
Will your have a vendor lock-in? How will you get your data and backups back or change backup product?
In the land of GDPR
At the event I had some questions regarding GDPR. This is a subject we can’t avoid, but no one seems to love talking about it. The ‘right to be forgotten’ is a challenge for any vendor and company. They do have some search functions and they recently had a case with a customer in UK where an applicant wanted the resume to be deleted. They did succeed in both finding and deleting the resume.
At the end
Thank you for a great presentation at #TFD19. I’m looking forward to following Druva completing their mission!
You can watch all the presentations from Tech Field Day on their website: https://techfieldday.com/companies/druva/
*Disclaimer: I was invited to participate as a Tech Field Day Delegate as a guest of Gestalt IT. I did not receive any compensation to write this post, nor was I requested to write this post. The above post is written of my opinion and not that of Gestalt IT.