Cloudian Closes $60M Funding Round, Aims To Grow Hybrid Cloud Storage

‘When you have one infrastructure, you can control that infrastructure, your data your costs, and your access. Eventually we give all the benefits of a public cloud but under your control,’ says Cloudian CMO Jon Toor.

Hybrid cloud data management and storage technology vendor Cloudian Wednesday said it has closed a new $60 million round of funding that will be used to scale the company to meet an increasing number of use cases.

With the new funding round, which includes investments from multiple investment firms as well as from Intel Capital and other strategic investors, total funding in Cloudian has reached $233 million.

Cloudian provides hybrid cloud data management software including its HyperStore object storage platform that is compatible with the Amazon Web Services S3 object storage protocol, said Jon Toor, CMO of the San Mateo, Calif.-based company.

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“We provide geo-distribution and security of data,” Toor told CRN. “We try to emulate the cloud’s capacity on demand and security from ransomware, hackers and theft with software that can be deployed on any hardware.”

Using Cloudian’s software-defined storage technology, businesses get the capabilities of public cloud storage with a capital expenditure that is one-third the cost of operating expenditures, Toor said.

Cloudian also provides data sovereignty, which is needed by customers in highly regulated industries or in countries where data compliance is important, he said.

“And we provide control,” he said. “When you have one infrastructure, you can control that infrastructure, your data, your costs and your access. Eventually we give all the benefits of a public cloud but under your control.”

Cloudian, which derives about 95 percent of its revenue through its 760 channel partners worldwide, expects to use the new funding to help scale its growth in four use cases that have recently become significant, Toor said.

The first is data analytics where the past year has seen a lot of providers adopt AWS’ S3 object store protocol, Toor said. This includes several major data analytics providers that now partner with Cloudian, including Snowflake, Teradata, VMware Greenplum, Vertica and Microsoft SQL.

“All those data analytics platforms can now use Cloudian as back-end storage,” he said.

The second use case is hybrid clouds, or customer infrastructures combining public and private clouds, Toor said.

“Going into COVID, customers said they don’t want to deal with Capex,” he said. “Now customers are saying they want profitability. So they look at how to balance the two together. In some cases, they want to build something that mirrors what they do in the cloud, and in some cases they want to repatriate data from the cloud. Hybrid cloud is coming back with a vengeance.”

The other two big use cases are data sovereignty, particularly in Europe, as well as ransomware protection, Toor said.

“Ransomware protection tends to be a huge driver for our business,” he said. “We provide immutable storage. That’s not new, but it continues to drive conversations every day.”