SaaS data protection vendor Keepit is on a big partner recruitment drive as it scales up its sales footprint.
The partner-only firm is exploiting gradually increasing demand for SaaS protection, as companies begin to realise they are responsible for backing up their SaaS data, not the SaaS providers – like Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and the many thousands of other SaaS software providers.
It’s a market that is also targeted by the likes of cloud data management vendor Veeam – which offers protection for Salesforce and Microsoft 365 data – and cloud data backup player HYCU, which last year commercially launched a new SaaS backup service, and started evangelising among partners and end users around the need to backup SaaS workloads.
The Keepit leadership team attended the Technology Live! event in Munich this week, which is a regular European vendor showcase for press and analysts.
The company has been building up its own data centre capacity over the last 18 months to support customers’ SaaS data backups and access to them when customers need them. Six of the seven data centres the company runs involve capacity it rents in Equinix data barns, across the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland, and organisations can stipulate their data stays in their region, to address data sovereignty requirements.
The service is aimed at companies of all sizes and charged per user, with no extra charges for putting in or taking out data from the Keepit backup infrastructure. The cost is around €3 a month for each user, with the average cost coming down for enterprises with large numbers of users.
Michael Heuer (pictured), VP of the Keepit DACH region, said: “All data storage is covered in the cost, so customers have simplicity and total cost control.
“We only sell through partners, such as Bechtle, and they help customers to integrate their SaaS protection with their other business continuity platforms.”
All data is stored on disks and is deemed as “hot”, so customers can get immediate access to it when needed. More expensive flash systems are not seen as “viable” for the service that Keepit provides, and there is no room for tape either, as none of the data is regarded as “cold”. The company is a dedicated user of Dell Technologies hardware in its data centres.
Heuer said: “Unlike other services, we do not run the protection in the public cloud, we run it on our infrastructure and are masters in our own home.
“We are rarely beaten on price because of the investments in our own infrastructure. Where the competition is in the public cloud, they have to pay for it, and they will often limit how much data you can store as a result – we don’t have to.”
As Heuer points out, over 90% of Microsoft 365 customers, for instance, don’t have backup, “so there is huge potential”, he says. “We are looking for more partners, and it’s not a case of them having to push someone else out of the way, as there’s usually no one else providing the backup service already.”
He added: “We already have MSP partners and are targeting more of them, and the GSIs (global system integrators) will soon see our way of doing things is much easier and better for them, instead of getting their own staff to manually set up backup systems for customers.”
