With today’s announcement of Protégé for AWS, HYCU now has in place support for the three main public cloud vendors – AWS, Azure and GCP. With on-premises support already available for Nutanix and VMware (plus support for Office 365 and Kubernetes), where does the company go next?
Background
HYCU, Inc. has now completed a journey that implements HYCU data protection across the three major public clouds. The announcement at AWS re:invent of support for AWS workloads completes the rollout which saw the GA of HYCU for Azure in April 2020 and Protégé for GCP in December 2019. We looked at how applications could be moved from on-premises to these cloud providers in a post from July 2020.
Kubernetes support was announced in May 2021 (we covered the details in this blog post). The first implementation addresses the Kubernetes service in GCP. Office 365 support was announced in February 2021.
As each new platform is subsumed, the look and feel is kept consistent, while the use of backup schedule terminology remains constant. A user wanting to implement data protection for an application running in AWS will, no doubt, have no challenge in defining the policies to match those already in place in other clouds.
AWS
With the latest announcement, HYCU will support AWS from early 2022. Amazon Web Services is the undisputed leader in the public cloud space, but also the toughest nut to crack. The AWS marketplace (echoing the Amazon retail marketplace) has allowed vendors to offer their products and services installed as virtual machines, but not always natively integrated into the AWS ecosystem. This stance is clearly evolving, as AWS has accepted native storage services in the form of the recently announced FSx for NetApp ONTAP (see this post for details) and support for VMware clusters.
Breadth
Data forms a common core for application deployment in the public cloud. While applications are relatively portable, data has inertia and requires specific focus to obtain practical mobility. Similarly, the protection process for data needs to be as portable, otherwise application portability is more complex and challenging. More important, if historical data needs restoring (for defence against a ransomware attack or for discovery or development purposes), business owners need to know where that data resided and what protected it.
To build a practical multi-cloud strategy, businesses need multi-cloud data protection that integrates well with the underlying platform and applications. Some vendors have implemented cross-platform support but lack the standardisation and consistent approach we discussed in this post from February 2019. We also covered some of the issues in a follow-up post (here).
HYCU now offers a breadth of support that spans on-premises environments, the three main public clouds and arguably, the leader in SaaS Office solutions. The portfolio continues to expand, but the work never stops. It’s all about integration, integration, integration.
Integration
HYCU needs to continue the process of deeper integration into the public cloud ecosystem with a wider support for native applications such as managed databases. The public cloud providers want greater “stickiness” to their platforms and to upsell the value of the infrastructure. All of these services need data protection in the same way as traditional applications running in virtual instances. The same rules of portability apply, even if the data is in a managed solution.
Integration
Then there’s the second level of integration – cross platform integration that enables data in one cloud to be restored to another. We’ve highlighted already the ability to backup/restore between on-premises and GCP. What about moving data between Kubernetes clusters on many cloud platforms or between regions from one provider? These requirements aren’t always about dynamic repositioning of production applications but could be about seeding development environments or moving data for offline processing by the best analytics tools.
Integration
Then there’s integration of the user interface. Today we have the look and feel in place, including consistent policy definitions. I’d like to see a single portal for all data protection across all solutions. This step is a “big ask” because vendors implement APIs differently. There’s also a challenge in understanding where the licensing sits; today marketplace solutions are generally billed by each cloud provider, making unified billing and management a little challenging.
Data Asset Management
Implementing cross-platform data protection alone is a huge task. However, once data is tracked and managed through a single portal, HYCU has the ability to deliver “value add” services that are implemented in the public cloud. The most obvious are those seen elsewhere, such as compliance validation and PII identification. SaaS backup provides a framework to implement value-add solutions without the customer needing to deploy new software. HYCU just needs to find the right solutions that resonate with the needs of their specific customer base.
The Architect’s View™
The “journey” metaphor is one that we hear many times in IT. However, no one vendor can meet all requirements from day one. AWS itself is a good example of this, with a constant evolution of new services and solutions announced every year. HYCU Inc. must continue to widen the breadth and depth of the HYCU and Protégé portfolio, both from a platform/application support perspective and through adding new features. I have no doubt that this is exactly what we’ll see in 2022 onwards.
Copyright (c) 2007-2021 – Post #10ee – Brookend Ltd, first published on https://www.architecting.it/blog, do not reproduce without permission. Disclaimer: HYCU, Inc. is a client of Brookend Ltd. Brookend Ltd is a customer of HYCU.