Start-up Druva has landed in the UK and unveiled its enterprise laptop backup software that claims to be faster and less obtrusive than other products on the market.
The firm was founded in 2007 by ex Veritas employees and is headquartered in Pune, India and has office in Santa Monica, California and now London.
Druva inSync 4.0, the first product it has brought to market, is aimed at backing up data that resides on corporate laptops. Jaspreet Singh, founder and CEO of Druva, told CBR that this is a market the backup industry has to some extent ignored. Mobile workers tend to connect to a corporate network infrequently so backup opportunities are rare.
Druva’s own research suggests that as much as 38% of corporate data is held on laptops but 67% of organisations are unable to backup their laptop fleet. Singh suggested that many companies had tried laptop backup but found the process slow and obtrusive for the end-user. Mobile workers are also much more likely to hop between networks, which makes the backup process more complicated, Singh added.
Singh said that inSync 4.0 introduces a number of features that can combat these traditional backup issues. It uses what he calls continuous data protection, meaning that the backup is timeline-based so any changes to the laptop will be fed back whenever the device is connected to the Internet.
It also uses application aware data deduplication, so if multiple users have a copy of the same file it will only be backed up once. Singh says that this offers ten times faster backups and a 90% reduction in storage and bandwidth requirements.
IT admin staff can set how much bandwidth and CPU the backup process uses, which Druva says can reduce impact on the end-user and enables them to continue their work while the backup is running. Singh said that the biggest concern for end-users is that laptop performance is not impacted while it is being backed up.
Druva inSync 4.0 is available for Windows and Linux with an iPad and iPhone version coming later this year. It costs about £55 per end-user licence.
