SaaS (software as a service) is not a new term and has shown continued adoption and growth year on year since the term first appeared fifteen years ago, with its commonality and mass adoption only growing over time. With its innate scalability and flexibility, SaaS took advantage of the new public cloud market. Today we find ourselves at a time where SaaS is taking over the cloud computing market and according to Bloomberg, public cloud platforms, business services, and applications (SaaS) will all grow at a 9% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) between 2020 and 2023.

COVID has accelerated this mindset: we witnessed an enforced change when remote flexibility and agility moved to the top of the urgency list. Look at the lightning speed of adoption of Zoom, MS Teams and Google Hangouts; the traditional barriers of time, procurement and lengthy evaluations went out of the window.

As a cloud advocate myself, I have been closely working with a wide range of clients of varying sizes and industry sectors over the past fifteen years and have seen the challenges faced when attempting to standardise and bring consistency to their technology estate. Typically, a SaaS offering fits certain needs, but commonly falls short where traditional on-network needs apply. Thus, organisations compromise by either mixing solutions to meet the objective or through living with limitations of the chosen vendor, be they on premise or SaaS.

For example, in the sphere of data protection, a SaaS solution fits well for distributed data instances such as cloud systems, but for a large on premises database you could be facing a longer restore time – not ideal for those all-important RPO (Recovery Point Objective) or RTO (Recovery Time Objectives) numbers.

We are on an already-proven journey encompassing a hybrid and multi cloud world. Organisations are on a journey of transformation with applications and data residing in a mixed local device, centralised on network and in the cloud environment – combining new tech with an existing stack. The decision for a new data protection solution today needs to acknowledge and encompass all of these options effectively.

Vendors who acknowledge and support customers in this journey rather than addressing singular camps will become go-to partners, and essential solutions.

From the edge, to the cloud, to the data centre…

It is this understanding and customer focus that has led to Commvault’s recent innovations (and some might say reinvention) in the data protection space. Commvault was one of the first vendors to understand that the market is moving towards SaaS, (IDC now reports that DPaaS is the fastest growing segment in the market) as they launched their SaaS data protection portfolio Metallic in 2019. In the last 12 months, Metallic’s pace of innovation and geographical expansion has accelerated – the benefits of being part of a company that has been a leader in data protection for the past 25 years.

Customers benefit from what Commvault calls “the power of AND”. This meaning a solution set that addresses the data spread in existence at most organisations from cloud applications, remote devices and importantly addressing the need to encompass legacy on premise data, even in volume! So, you can opt for one vendor that enables you to manage and protect your data stores across all the key variants in the most appropriate manner for each, whilst retaining one holistic, unified view.

An enterprise is now able to backup large on-premise data stores alongside in the cloud data from a flexible delivery model offered from appliance with Hyperscale X, Metallic SaaS or as a managed service gives the customer the best of all worlds. Metallic’s unique architecture provides all the benefits of SaaS, but by leveraging an on-premises storage target to back up and recover from, it eliminates any issues of poor performance – flexibility at scale.

Commvault’s close partnership with Microsoft leverages a powerful message to the market, with broad singular coverage for your data in Office 365, wmail, MS Teams, OneDrive, Project, Exchange, SharePoint, SQL and Active Directory. Adding to this is their announced further expansion of the Metallic SaaS portfolio to include all new Metallic Dynamics 365 Backup. With Metallic Dynamics 365 Backup, the Metallic portfolio now supports all three Microsoft clouds: Dynamics, Office 365, and Azure. All on top of wider support including Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft and SAP data stores. Commvault is accelerating its innovation, delivering enterprise-grade software-as-a-service (SaaS) to customers of all sizes across their core data platforms.

Editor’s note: Ian Moyse is an influencer for Commvault.

Photo by Stephanie Klepacki on Unsplash

Want to find out more about topics like this from industry thought leaders? The Cloud Transformation Congress, taking place on 13 July 2021, is a virtual event and conference focusing on how to enable digital transformation with the power of cloud.