Dora the Explorer was a cash cow for Nickelodeon. Now, data management and protection scale-up HYCU is exploring a different Dora, to make more money for its growing partner base.
Pre-Covid, HYCU had around 500 customers for its on-premise and cloud data management service, but now it has 4,200, so it must be doing something right. And it’s partner base has steadily grown to over 440 worldwide as its market reach has extended.
At this week’s IT Press Tour of Boston and Massachusetts, Simon Taylor (pictured), founder and CEO of HYCU, said: “What we promise, we are delivering, and that’s complete protection across the tech stack.”
When it comes to the increasingly important SaaS data protection arena, HYCU can certainly point to some success. It launched its R-Cloud Platform last year to address the fact that most customers believed, and still do, that their data in Salesforce, Microsoft Teams/365, Google Workspace, and AWS, for instance, was automatically being backed up and protected by those vendors. It’s not, of course, and customers need separate protection for it.
“The SaaS protection market generally focuses on nine major vendors or services, but we protect over 80, and counting, with the integrations we have with R-Cloud,” said Taylor. That figure includes specific SaaS applications, and parts of the web infrastructure and management stack offered by the big cloud service players and used by customers, including customer developer code.
There are, of course, tens of thousands of apps in the market, and HYCU wants to protect many more. But Taylor realises HYCU can’t be the only one making greater efforts in the field. “It can’t just be us, it takes time to do the app integration using APIs, which is why, that in the future, there will be more automation with the help of AI to do it.”
While many apps will remain niche, and only used by relatively small numbers of users or organisations - sometimes by only one firm in an industry vertical - there are compliance and protection laws that demand immediate action. And DORA (the Digital Operational Resilience Act), which comes into force in January 2025, is one of those.
DORA is a European Union law that covers financial services firms, from banks and insurance companies to crypto firms, as well as data centres and service providers that support them with data services.
The potential sweet spot for companies like HYCU, is that Article 12 of the Act demands that financial services customers must have data backup and restoration systems that are separate from their main ICT systems, so if there is a serious cyber attack or outage, operational and customer data is safe.
The problem for some SaaS providers and their customers though, even in financial services, is that the data is not automatically backed up at the SaaS vendor end. Customers are usually storing backups locally or on systems closely integrated with main IT systems that could be attacked, with no air gap.
Under DORA, that will have to change, and backed up data will have to be stored on a completely separate on-premise system and/or an extra cloud, which is where companies like HYCU and its partners come in. Bearing in mind the European Union’s NIS2 Directive also came into play this month, which also covers many service providers, compliance is certainly creating new opportunities for data services providers.
“SaaS and cloud service vendors are going to have to change, as customers are going to be asking ‘can we get a full copy of our data’, and questions are now going to be asked at procurement,” said Taylor.
