01732 759725 32 DATA PROTECTION Pedal to the metal With new research highlighting the failure of enterprise disaster recovery strategies to keep up with SaaS adoption, James Goulding talks to Jerry Mumford, VP UK, I & MEA at Keepit, about the cloud backup and recovery platform’s growing UK presence At the start of the year, cloud backup and recovery platform Keepit opened UK&I regional headquarters in the City of London with the intention of accelerating its growth in the UK – or, in the words of Jerry Mumford, VP for UK, I & MEA, of putting ‘the pedal to the metal’. Keepit’s growing international presence is mirrored by a broadening of its services offering from its initial focus on M365 to provide backup for another seven SaaS applications, with more in the pipeline through ongoing API development. This, says Mumford, is enabling Keepit to address a bigger part of a growing market. “There’s a stat that the average number of SaaS applications in use in any business is 115. When Keepit’s founders were building the product, the market was still predominantly local delivery of applications from a server and local storage but now everything is SaaS, so the market has shifted very much in our favour.” Mumford would not be drawn on actual growth figures, but he did say that the headcount in its UK operation, which has risen from three in November 2023 to 10 today, gives a good indication of revenue growth on the basis that Keepit does not spend money it hasn’t earned. Keepit strengths The market for M365 backup is crowded, but Mumford says there are several factors that set Keepit apart, notably its ability to offer full guarantees around data sovereignty and immutability. “Microsoft have what they call a shared responsibility model, where they deliver the application and the customer is responsible for the data. That’s fairly common knowledge now and there are quite a few products in the market for backing up M365 data, typically to another public cloud. “Where Keepit differs is, first, we backup your data to our own cloud – we have two data centres in every region in which we operate and we retain two copies of your data in both data centres, effectively giving you four copies – and, second, we back up everything to primary storage. Everything is retained on one tier of disk drive, in a blockchain-like schema, and it’s all completely immutable.” In addition to Keepit’s resilience and ability to restore quickly from primary storage, having its own cloud in the UK, run from data centres powered by Equinix, enables Keepit to meet the data sovereignty requirements of UK customers. These range from small businesses with 50 seats up to enterprises with many thousands of seats, including one large construction company with more than 100,000. This, Mumford suggests, is a growing requirement not just in the UK and EU but across the world. “Data sovereignty is critically important because if you have your data in another country, EU or non-EU, there are regulations in that country you may not be fluent in. We recently opened our Swiss data centre and, as you can probably guess, for the Swiss that was critical. Not having data sovereignty would have been a barrier to entry, and I believe it will become a barrier to entry in the UK too.” Another selling point, as mentioned earlier, is Keepit’s ability to back up seven other SaaS products, including Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), a cloud identity and access management solution for apps and devices from Microsoft and third parties. “For any large organisation, Entra ID is like the combination to the safe. If you retrieve your data, you will also need everyone’s identifications. If you’re a large organisation and you can’t get that back, you’re in as much trouble as if you can’t get your email back. Keepit offers the ability to back up Entra ID, as well as other applications like Power BI, Azure DevOps, Dynamics 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce and Zendesk.” With the development of additional APIs, this year Mumford expects Keepit to be able to back up another 150 or so SaaS applications. A third differential cited by Mumford is Keepit’s pricing model. Instead of charging customers for the storage they use, as many competitors do, Keepit charges on a per user, per month basis, with a flat fee covering unlimited data storage, ingress/egress and retention (with the option to retain data for up to 99 years). This, he says, simplifies budgeting and makes it easier, from a financial planning perspective, for growing (or acquiring) businesses to scale their use of the product. “From the outside we look similar to others, but peel back one layer of the proverbial onion and we’re very different commercially and technically.” Technical expertise As well as selling its solutions through a network of resellers, Keepit has OEM agreements with several other vendors, which Mumford cites as validation of Jerry Mumford
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