Clumio Adds Microsoft 365 SaaS Data Protection

The new Microsoft 365 capability gives Clumio a cloud-native data protection platform that stretches across public cloud, private on-premises cloud, VMware and VMware Cloud on AWS, and SaaS environments, the company says.

Hot cloud-native data protection startup Clumio Wednesday expanded into Software-as-a-Service data protection with the unveiling of secure backup capabilities for Microsoft 365 data.

With the expansion, Clumio now offers cloud-native data protection across public clouds, private or on-premises clouds, and SaaS, said Chadd Kenney, vice president and chief technologist of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor.

The introduction of data protection for Microsoft 365, formerly known as Office 365, expands the number of platforms for which Clumio brings wide-ranging data protection capabilities to clients, including native protection of data in Amazon Web Services environments, support for VMware and VMware Cloud on AWS, and support for Elastic Block Storage on AWS, Kenney told CRN.

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"We believe we're the first to go across all three platforms," Kenny said.

While Microsoft 365 has some data protection functionality, Microsoft itself recommends businesses back up Microsoft 365 data using third-party applications and services, Kenney said.

While cloud providers support infrastructure and security for users, they do not offer customer data protection, he said.

“This leads to the exposure of customer data to attacks or accidental deletion," he said. "Our solution backs up data to outside the customer environment. We let customers browse through their email folders, and restore data to their mailbox or to new folders. And we provide over seven years of retention with predictable cost on a per-seat basis for compliance."

Clumio has come up with a key data protection offering for Microsoft 365 environments, said Dan Beeler, director of business development for modern infrastructure at CompuNet, a Meridian, Idaho-based solution provider that has worked with Clumio for the past six to eight months.

"It can quickly restore an entire mailbox or specific messages," Beeler told CRN. "It's the most easy to use of any offering. And it has interesting capabilities for MSPs. We're busy building out our MSP model."

Clumio's price at $500 per virtual machine per year with no other costs, including egress fees, makes it a good choice as part of a software-defined framework for cloud migration strategies, Beeler said.

It is also a platform that he expects to grow quickly with new SaaS-focused offerings, including versions for Salesforce.com, Workday and healthcare software provider Epic Systems.

Clumio focuses on AWS environments for now because it is the public cloud with the largest market share, Kenney said. However, he said, the company expects to expand to Microsoft Azure cloud environments in 2021, and consider Google Cloud Platform and other platforms going forward.

"We recently disaggregated our control plane and data plane," he said. "That gives customers the nirvana of being able to work across multiple cloud data platforms with a single-pane-of-glass view."

Clumio has done well in terms of funding. The company in November raised $135 million to boost innovation and channel support. That was only three months after Clumio launched from stealth with $51 million in funding.

The company has no strategic investors, but instead has received funding from private equity firms. However, it does count among its individual investors such well-known technology executives as Microsoft Chairman John Thompson, Splunk President and CEO Doug Merritt, and Pure Storage Chairman and CEO Charles Giancarlo.