The 20 Coolest Data Protection Companies: The 2021 Storage 100

The 20 coolest data protection vendors of the 2021 Storage 100 ensure data is backed up and archived, and is accessible should it need to be recovered.

Data protection is more than just backing data up to a cloud or another storage device.

The number and size of files continually grows even as new ways to lose or corrupt data, including malware and ransomware, become increasingly sophisticated.

As part of CRN’s 2021 Storage 100, here are 20 companies simplifying the process of data protection.

Acronis

Serguei Beloussov

Co-Founder, Chairman, CEO

Acronis provides integrated cyber-protection in physical, cloud and mobile environments with data protection, anti-ransomware, disaster recovery, cloud storage, and enterprise file sync and share offerings. Its product lines include the Acronis Cyber Cloud platform for MSPs and Acronis Cyber Protect to help with cybersecurity and data protection.

Amazon Web Services

Andy Jassy

CEO

AWS is one of the world’s largest storage providers, with Amazon S3 for object storage, Amazon Elastic Block Store for block storage and Amazon Elastic File System for storing and sharing file data. The company offers virtually unlimited storage capacity for a wide range of storage services including cloud data migration, backup and restore, and archiving.

Arcserve

Tom Signorello

CEO

Arcserve, an early developer of enterprise data protection technologies, early this year significantly expanded into the SMB market with its planned acquisition of StorageCraft. The combined company, under the Arcserve name, will provide partners and MSPs with a full range of data protection capabilities for on-premises and cloud environments.

Asigra

David Farajun

Founder, CEO

Asigra provides enterprise data protection for data in physical or virtual machines, in cloud-based platforms, or in SaaS-based applications. Asigra Cloud Backup allows setting of rules to deal with different data sources and workflows. The company last year introduced Asigra Cloud Backup with Deep MFA, which adds deep multifactor authentication.

Axcient

David Bennett

CEO

Axcient offers MSP-focused cloud-to-cloud backup, business continuity and disaster recovery, and secure sync and share via its Axcient x360 platform. Last year it introduced x360Recover Virtual Office aimed at keeping employees productive and IT systems running from anywhere, and early this year added private cloud options to its Direct-to-Cloud technology.

Backblaze

Gleb Budman

CEO

Backblaze focuses on cloud storage and data protection, with business-focused and personal data protection available in a yearly subscription. Its technology is also available for developers and IT professionals to build their own cloud storage offerings. Backblaze has served over 50 billion files and has over 1 exabyte of customer data stored using its technology.

Clumio

Poojan Kumar

Co-Founder, CEO

Clumio develops enterprise backup and recovery that takes advantage of public clouds. Its technology is offered as a service to let partners simplify management and administration of customers’ data protection. It simplifies billing with predictable costs, scales on demand, and provides audit-ready global compliance, all while securely protecting data.

Datto

Tim Weller

CEO

Datto is a leading provider of cloud-based software and technology purpose-built for the MSP community. The company, which went public in 2020 with the stock ticker “MSP” to reflect its customer base, offers unified continuity, networking and business management offerings to MSPs serving over 1 million businesses worldwide.

Google Cloud

Thomas Kurian

CEO

Google Cloud provides cloud storage, object storage, file-store file-based storage and persistent disk block storage for virtual machines. Google Cloud is the back-end cloud for multiple data protection vendors. It also offers Nearline, Coldline and Archive low-cost, highly available archival storage.

HYCU

Simon Taylor

CEO

HYCU is the developer of HYCU Protege, an application-aware, lightweight cross-cloud migration and disaster recovery technology for enterprise applications. HYCU Protege offers application consistency, protected migration, one-click disaster recovery and consolidated management across clouds.

Infrascale

Russell Reeder

CEO

Infrascale provides comprehensive, cloud-based data protection, including Disaster Recovery as a Service, ransomware mitigation, backup for servers and applications, data archiving, data security and encryption, and laptop and mobile device data protection. The in September overhauled its support methodologies for its MSP partners.

JetStream Software

Tom Critser

Co-Founder, CEO

JetStream develops cross-cloud software for virtualized computing. Its JetStream DR provides cloud-native disaster recovery and business continuity for VMware workloads, and JetStream Migrate allows seamless live migration of virtual machines from any on-premises VMware environment to any VMware environment in the cloud.

Microsoft

Satya Nadella

CEO

Microsoft Azure brings a full range of public cloud services to channel partners. On the storage side, that includes Azure Disk Storage for block storage, Azure Files for file storage and Azure Blob storage for unstructured data. For data protection, it provides Azure Backup for protecting data against loss or ransomware.

MSP360

Brian Helwig

CEO

MSP360 provides MSPs with a data protection service with monthly billing, no contract and the opportunity to add their own brand. MSP360 leverages public cloud services including AWS, Wasabi and Backblaze B2 and provides centralized monitoring and management of all backup and restore jobs, users, endpoints and storage.

Nakivo

Bruce Talley

Co-Founder, CEO

Nakivo Backup & Replication is used by over 16,000 businesses via over 4,000 channel partners, including hosting, managed and cloud service providers, to protect data in virtualized and hybrid environments. The technology backs up data from physical, virtual, cloud and application-specific environments and replicates data in VMware, Hyper-V and AWS EC2 environments.

OwnBackup

Sam Gutmann

CEO

OwnBackup develops technology for secure, automated cloud-based backup, recovery, replication, archiving and management of data in the Salesforce environment. Its technology protects data managed by such applications as Salesforce, nCino, Veeva and Sage.

Rubrik

Bipul Sinha

Co-Founder, CEO

Rubrik’s platform drives a consistent backup, archival and replication experience across on-premises, edge and cloud environments. It automates management across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with one programmable interface, provides rapid search and recovery of data, and safeguards against ransomware.

Unitrends, a Kaseya company

Fred Voccola

CEO

Unitrends, part of Kaseya, develops software and appliances for quick backup and recovery of data. It also offers Disaster Recovery as a Service, direct-to-cloud backups and protection of Office 365 data. Unitrends last year launched Unitrends Helix, an AI-powered self-healing SaaS remediation platform.

Wasabi

David Friend

CEO

Wasabi Hot Storage gives enterprises and small businesses data backup and recovery, archiving and content delivery. The company promises to provide cloud storage with significantly higher performance and lower cost than AWS and is the back-end storage cloud for many top data protection vendors.

Zoolz

Muayyad “Mo” Shehadeh

CEO

Zoolz provides affordable data backups to the cloud via its BigMing partner program. Data backed up using Zoolz sits on AWS where Zoolz protects it with 256-AES encryption. The company also provides compliance with GDPR, HIPAA and other frameworks.