Clumio Protect Expands to Microsoft SQL Server

‘Customers are moving to the cloud at a ridiculous pace. And when getting there, there’s a whole bunch of new services with them to play with.’ says Chadd Kenney, vice president of product for Clumio.

Clumio Inc. has expanded the availability of Clumio Protect for Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon Elastic Compute Cluster (Amazon EC2), providing even deeper protection against ransomware attacks.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based firm, which provides enterprise data backup and recovery-as-a-service, unveiled its platform focused on Amazon Web Services in October that provides ransomware protection through air-gap solutions.

The new platform, which is slated to launch in December, also provides the lowest Recovery Time Objective for business continuity, simplifies compliance reporting and optimizes Amazon S3 storage costs.

“Customers are moving to the cloud at a ridiculous pace,” Chadd Kenney, vice president of product for Clumio, told CRN. “And when getting there, there’s a whole bunch of new services with them to play with.”

The two database architectures for SQL Server are infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a -service offerings. Many are moving to this, Kenney said, because infrastructure overhead can be reduced from being on-prem as they get closer to the infinite compute of public cloud.

But it also brings a big gap around data protection and many people are now looking for more cloud native architectures to support.

The infrastructure-as-a-service offering looks very similar to a lift and shift model on-prem, he said. One of the big benefits is that customers can use their native tools they‘ve been using on-prem as well as third party tools that they’ve been using and bring their own licenses.

“Clumio has been a critical partner in providing air gap protection for our customers and we are excited to begin offering SQL Server support to our customers,” said Charlie Gautreaux, managing director of Defiance Digital, a MSP and Clumio partner. “Clumio solves a massively complex challenge for us, alleviating the need for us to develop our own solution. With Clumio Protect for Microsoft SQL Server, we can now provide our customers both data and ransomware protection with no performance impact and fast granular recovery for their mission critical databases.”

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“The values that this brings is that a user can get that DBA-like (database administrator) experience without really needing to be a DBA,” Kenney said. “They can get databases back to a point in time and can secure themselves from ransomware with our air-gapped backups outside the AWS accounts.”

Clumio provides a very low RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective) with very rapid recovery.

“We take 15-minute log backups to be able to get that granularity of recovery,” Kenney said. “We provide this in an agentless deployment model with near zero impact which allows you that great SaaS simplicity with no agents and reduces the vulnerability of security instances.”

It also reduces the overall cost of ownership.

“Before you had a copy that was running in your application, you had a copy and an appliance, another copy of another appliance and then a hard drive,” he said. “You can actually put operational recovery ransomware protection and long-term compliance in one single service which allows us to reduce the cost dramatically.”

All data is both at rest and encrypted, which can be encrypted by Clumio’s keys or the customers so that they could have full control.

“We provide multi-factor authentication with integrations with single sign-on vendors out there, provide access controls at the entity enroll base level and then we have no delete button,” he said.

Clumio Protect has no proprietary agent so users don‘t have to upgrade it or manage it. It doesn’t use any CPU processing time in the host. All the SQL Server aggregations are built in so there’s no need to build it out. There’s also no need to script it.

“We provide the ultimate flexibility with being able to recover to any AWS account instance to any point in time down to the second,” Kenney said.

All of this syncs up to evolving cloud trends Kenney is currently seeing in the market.

“Enterprises are really starting to go through digital transformation where they‘re landing mission critical databases into the public cloud for what we see in SQL and we’re trying to support that,” he said. “But we’re also seeing kind of the next evolution which is the re-platforming of those applications into cloud native services. Then even more, we’re starting to see some of the compute assets be re-platformed and then starting to use S3 as the core persistent storage device.”

He’s also seeing more analytics environments being built out.

“People are looking to consolidate datasets inside of S3 and run analytics on top of it in various forms or fashions,” he said. “People are starting to realize the criticality of S3 is becoming higher and higher and we‘ve been more focused on helping them protect that and classifying their data to make sure they’re protecting the right stuff.”