32 01732 759725 DISASTER RECOVERY With new research highlighting the failure of enterprise disaster recovery strategies to keep up with SaaS adoption (see box), Technology Reseller talks to Jerry Mumford, VP UK, I & MEA at Keepit, about the cloud backup and recovery platform’s growing UK presence 2023 to 10 today, gives a good indication as the ethos at cash-positive Keepit is to spend only money it has earned. Keepit strengths Clearly the market for M365 backup is crowded, but Mumford says there are several factors that set Keepit apart, notably the 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 – AWS, Google or whoever it might be. “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. Predictable pricing 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.” Mumford adds that for resellers, there are other advantages. “Technically, it’s a very good product – it’s very, very easy for their customers to use or for them to co-manage; there are great margin opportunities; and, as a product, it’s unique. Lots of companies do more or less the same thing. There are very, very few backup vendors that backup M365 and Entra ID to an independent cloud. So we’re giving partners the chance to really differentiate themselves in a crowded At the start of the year, as part of its ongoing international expansion, cloud backup and recovery platform Keepit opened UK&I regional headquarters in the City of London. Alongside its growing geographical presence, the Danish company has also been expanding its services capability. When Technology Reseller spoke to Jerry Mumford, Keepit VP for UK, I & MEA, in March, the platform, which had started out focussing on M365, was already supporting another seven SaaS applications, with more in the pipeline through ongoing API development. As Mumford explains, this is enabling Keepit and its partners 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 when we spoke, but he did say that the headcount in its UK operation, which has risen from three in November Pedal to the metal Jerry Mumford
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=