How HYCU aims to reinvent SaaS data protection with new developer platform

by James · February 1, 2023

HYCU, the fast-growing provider of multi-cloud data protection and backup-as-a-service, today announced a development platform designed for SaaS providers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to add data protection services to their applications, which according to HYCU, are nearly completely unprotected today.

The strategy reflects challenging factors facing customers and backup managers, including HYCU:

The vast majority of the 17,000 SaaS applications in use do not provide built-in backup and recovery. And given how widespread these apps are—HYCU says customer engagements indicate the typical company has data stored in an astounding 212 data silos—they represent a significant risk of data loss.
Given the breadth and depth of unprotected applications, no single backup vendor can effectively target thousands of applications to integrate with; providing a development environment to the app vendors represents a more efficient and scalable way to put backup in place.
The best data protection companies, including HYCU, typically integrate with only a small number of these thousands of apps.

Goal: Simplify complex data areas

“The reason no one is protecting them is that we simply don’t have the process, the time or the ability to do it,” said HYCU founder and CEO Simon Taylor, so the company decided to “turn the data protection industry on its head” by to create a development platform that allows application and service providers to write their own data protection services that use HYCU Protégé’s technology CIOs and CISOs should benefit from a simplified approach to data protection as they look to overcome the complex data in place.

“If you’re a CIO, if you’re a VP of infrastructure, your data landscape has become so infinitely more complex than it was a few years ago. And we said how do we simplify management and protection?”

Simon Taylor, HYCU Founder and CEO

To that end, the company is rolling out R-Cloud, which it calls the world’s first low-code, purpose-built data protection development platform designed to add enterprise-class backup and recovery services to its users.

The platform provides a visualization of the entire data area and protection status via automatic discovery and mapping of all applications and services, including SaaS, PaaS, DBaaS, public clouds and private clouds.

The visualization “will illustrate to you every department in your business, and every single data silo that runs on it … and it will then tell you if that data is protected. If it’s not, you can simply click on it,” explains Taylor. “It pulls up our marketplace. You can add a backup and recovery integration, and you can secure your entire data area.” The HYCU Marketplace offers a library of SaaS, DBaaS and PaaS applications that are protected.

In addition to providing discovery, orchestration and policy management, the platform provides SaaS users with one-click backup and the ability to quickly restore granular items across all protected SaaS applications.

HYCU Marketplace provides access to supported backup and recovery integrations.

“Our customers look to SADA to provide world-class professional services and technical expertise to unleash the power of Google Cloud,” said Tony Safoian, president and CEO of cloud solutions and consulting company SADA. “R-Cloud is an innovative technological approach to scale and protect business-critical Google Cloud services. It provides a compelling way to protect and recover modern applications in Google Cloud, and we couldn’t be more excited about what R-Cloud can offer.”

Customer Push

Although it was developed for SaaS providers to help them bring data protection to market far faster than they could through in-house development, HYCU has also received strong interest from customers to use the platform, Taylor said. When HYCU began to inform customers of their plans, they indicated that they wanted to use the platform themselves and develop the services in-house.

“R-Cloud is an innovative technology approach to scale and protect business-critical Google Cloud services. It provides a compelling way to protect and recover modern applications in Google Cloud, and we couldn’t be more excited about what R-Cloud can offer.”

Tony Safoian, President and CEO, SADA

“We expected the SaaS vendors themselves to drive most of this initiative, but we have 3,600 customers, and when we let customers know about our cloud, the very first thing we got was a ton of requests” from those customers, he said.

The first SaaS-based applications, databases and services supported in R-Cloud will include Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Google Workspace, Google BigQuery, Salesforce, Atlassian Confluence, Jira Software and Atlassian Jira Service management and Microsoft 365.

New application integrations will be available through the HYCU Protégé Marketplace.