Cloud data protection and management company Druva has launched the “industry’s first” cloud-based backup service for network attached storage (NAS) devices.

While NAS devices serve as a great way to create local backups of important data, it’s traditionally not been possible to make an additional backup of that data on the cloud using a dedicated system.

Druva’s system claims to improve backup performance by more than five times, and introduces a feature dubbed intelligent cold-storage tiering. This is in addition to the capacity to diffuse storage growth with integrated storage insights.

The direct-to-cloud architecture also eliminates redundant copies of backed-up files, and the infrastructure allows businesses to safeguard the value of unstructured data and manage their information in a much simpler way than traditional methods.

“Traditional backup providers have treated NAS as an afterthought, at the expense of reliability, security, and cost-efficiency,” said Druva’s chief technologist, Stephen Manley.

“Now, IT teams can augment their data management strategy with a simple and resilient NAS-optimized protection solution that requires no on-premises storage and no cloud management. By reducing data copies and redundant data centrally with our patent global source-side deduplication, Druva’s new offering eliminates storage management headaches while delivering the built-in ransomware protection today’s businesses need.”

The company’s system is targeted at unstructured data, which Druva claims accounts for more than 80% of the total data stored in enterprise storage systems. Managing this quantity of data, however, is becoming increasingly complex and difficult.

Organisations routinely maintain multiple copies of a dataset, the company adds, including versions for short-term recovery and off-site copies for resiliency, long-term retention, compliance and more. This increases the overall cost of storing and managing data. 

Druva’s platform comes as a solution to this conundrum, with the direct-to-cloud nature of the architecture seamlessly backing-up and archiving unstructured data without the need for configuration, integration or managing cloud storage tiers.

The cloud backup and archiving capabilities are already generally available, while infrequent access tier is in early release, with general availability expected in the first half of 2021.