Commvault announced that it is acquiring Clumio for $47 million on September 24. On its surface, the acquisition doesn’t bring a significant number of customers, and it doesn’t expand Commvault’s overall data protection coverage significantly. So what does this acquisition mean to one of the leaders in the enterprise data resilience market?
Commvault And Clumio Users: What It Means To You
Commvault can abstract data protection across multiple cloud environments, and it relies on traditional architecture that uses compute and data movers. Clumio dedicated itself to the protection of AWS services. Its architecture takes advantage of native cloud infrastructure like AWS serverless Lambda functions for ephemeral compute needs. The acquisition gives Commvault additional depth and expertise on AWS and should be viewed alongside its relatively recent purchase of Appranix, a cloud resilience and recovery company.
Commvault customers leverage Clumio’s efficient, cloud-native data protection with Appranix’s runbook capabilities to build a high-performance cloud resilience platform that handles fast rebuild of application and infrastructure and then automatically attaches it to protected data in a way that scales to meet almost any resilience RTO (recovery time objective). For enterprise clients, this acquisition should improve their overall resilience.
Is This New?
Commvault is not the first company to pursue the strategy of building deep data protection and recovery capacity in the public cloud. It is emulating a playbook from Druva in terms of exploiting the functionality of AWS to accelerate cloud resilience, though Druva’s capabilities are less pronounced in recovery runbook management.
In the greater data resilience market, almost all long-standing players are expanding their capabilities for backing up and restoring hyperscaler offerings but not just cloud VMs — storage, database, Kubernetes, and other services are part of this, as well. Single hyperscaler-focused companies like Clumio have found it harder to compete as traditional players add more cloud capabilities. We expect that every enterprise backup player will make similar moves to address enterprise needs, especially as hybrid cloud adoption continues to expand.
Expect Increasing Cloud Usage And Little Repatriation
We can learn a lot about the enterprise tech stack by observing the actions and the portfolio of the backup companies that support them. Many vendors claim a resurgence of repatriation, but the actions of both the hyperscalers and the data protection companies like Commvault tell us that enterprises are learning to use cloud environments more effectively and that they are moving beyond cloud VMs, like EC2, into serverless and container-based compute. Additionally, these businesses are separating application infrastructure from data to allow for new resilience patterns such as those enumerated in the report, How To Design Your Cloud-Native Patterns For Resilience. And although many companies have repatriated an app or two, the general trend is increased cloud usage both in terms of percentage of your infrastructure and in sophistication of its usage.
