Question It: Is Your Vendor Partnering to Patch their Data Protection Gaps? 

Data protection is a team sport. We pride ourselves on our alliance and technology partner community, and there is no question that partnering to provide more deeply integrated and effective solutions adds value for our customers.

But one thing we don’t do (unlike some we could name….) and that is to partner to fill and hide gaps and then position it as a benefit to customers.

There’s no integration, no added value, just PR and additional complexity… And it’s the customer who suffers.

What does that mean for the customer?

Let’s be honest, most vendors in the backup market are good at a limited or select set of things:  Good at VM backup, good at big backup appliances, good at protecting Salesforce, good at protecting M365, or Oracle or Kubernetes, but rarely are they good at LOTS of things…which leaves them with gaps in their solution capabilities, a few bricks shy of a load, lacking cohesion, or just plain green with envy – take your pick on the saying that applies.

This problem really rears itself when customers find themselves and their business has evolved to need new data protection capabilities such as protection of Azure Active Directory, Oracle Cloud, or more proactive data security. 

Not every vendor has the vision to anticipate these innovations and changing business needs and incorporate them into their solutions, meaning they’ll be left trying to catch up or be left behind.  This forces, the vendor to look in the mirror at their own technology stack (or tech debt) and realize the change is too big or will take too long for them to deliver it on their own, and in that case they have to either give up on addressing that need or go in search of someone they can buy or partner with to bolt-on that functionality.  

Despite the marketecture, at the end of the day you are left with two or more completely different solutions, with little to no integrations between them, supported by multiple account teams, and ultimately get more of what you don’t want in your environment:  Cost, complexity, friction, and risk. 

Now you’re faced with more questions:

• Who do you even call if something breaks?
• How can you consolidate or automate when you keep adding more pieces into the puzzle?

So what is “THE WAY”?

We can agree that more products = more cost = more complexity = more risk, right?

Well, fixing that is something pretty obvious – and much simpler:  Tackle data protection with a single unified solution.  Multicloud, on-prem, SaaS, hybrid — One solution to rule your data! 

[Commvault enters the chat]

Rather than rely on others to do the work for us, we’ve built the Commvault platform from the ground up, which has allowed us to easily grow the solution to meet new challenges and demands such as data governance, transformation, and multi/hybrid cloud evolutions in customer environments.   

We’ve been listening to our customers and anticipating their needs for a long time. 

Just to name off a few examples:

Owning the Code

OWNING the code also makes it easy for us to pivot and expand the services of the platform to encompass new workloads such as cloud, DBaaS, SaaS and allows us to leverage the latest infrastructure innovations like object storage, containers, and cloud compute/storage technologies (e.g.: AWS Graviton) to efficiently deliver those services how you need to consume them.   

This unified approach also enables a higher degree of automation across the environment and provides greater observability to potential risks and threats to the data.  Automate. Secure. Respond.  These all get easier when you can consolidate and reduce the friction by reducing the tools and touch points needed to manage your diversifying data landscape.

So, if your environment was all virtual and physical systems yesterday – Commvault has you covered.  And you added cloud and M365 into it today – Commvault has you covered.  And then when you need to add containers, new cloud-native apps, and more in tomorrow, guess what?  Commvault still has you covered.  No need to reinvent the wheel or bolt on more point products to cover the changes in YOUR data needs – you can trust Commvault to provide that consistent data protection across whatever your data is and wherever it lives.

In Conclusion

QUESTION IT – When you’re digging into HOW a vendor or vendor(s) are actually going to deliver their solution and meet your business needs, to see if it’s all just more talk or if it can really do everything it says it can. 

Ask yourself: Should you really be using a data protection provider that can’t protect your SaaS data?”