With more data pouring into cloud services, the need to protect that data from being stolen or encrypted by a ransomware attack has never been higher. To help meet this demand, Veritas Technologies yesterday announced it has acquired HubStor. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
HubStor offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for backing up data stored in cloud services like Microsoft Office 365, Slack, and Box. Until now, HubStor has primarily focused its efforts on roughly 100 large enterprise customers. But the acquisition will allow its service to be sold by the much bigger Veritas entity, which has large enterprise sales team in place, HubStor CEO Geoff Bourgeois said. “We’ve been known as a scrappy startup,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat.
Veritas plans to offer the HubStor service alongside an existing portfolio of data protection tools that are already employed widely by enterprise IT organizations, Veritas VP Simon Jelley added.
More of those enterprise IT organizations are also starting to appreciate the fact that cloud service providers are not going to protect their data from, for example, a ransomware attack, Jelley noted. Under the shared responsibility models adopted by cloud service providers, Jelley said it has become clear that organizations are responsible for implementing their own data protection policies.
He said Veritas decided it would be simpler to acquire HubStor than to develop its own platform to address that requirement. “It was a build versus buy equation for us,” Jelley said.
Veritas is currently owned by the Carlyle Group, which acquired the company from Symantec in 2014 for $8 billion before relaunching it as Veritas Technologies in 2016. Since then, Veritas has been focused on a suite of data management tools that include data protection offerings.
Naturally, HubStor is not the only provider of data protection tools aimed at cloud services. Major data protection rivals include Dell Technologies, Commvault, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), Rubrik, Barracuda Networks, Cohesity, Veeam, Druva, and many others.
However, the company has built a SaaS platform for enterprise IT organizations that need to protect massive amounts of data residing in multiple cloud services. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the amount of data residing in these platforms has exponentially increased, as employees relied on them more to share files while working from home.
And the rise of ransomware has made enterprise IT organizations more cognizant of the need to protect that data. The only way to effectively combat a ransomware attack is to make sure a pristine unencrypted copy of data stored in a cloud service is readily available on another platform that has not been comprised.
With the arrival of each new type of IT platform, a different approach to backing up and recovering data has been required. Data protection startups have consequently sprung up each time a new IT platform gains traction. Eventually, incumbent vendors add support for the new platform, but not before the startup has attained long-term viability. The data protection category has thus proven itself to be fairly resistant to the consolidation trends that have impacted other IT sectors.
Source: https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/14/veritas-technologies-acquires-hubstor-to-protect-cloud-data/?&web_view=true
