The 20 Coolest Cloud Storage Vendors Of The 2015 Cloud 100

Coolest Cloud Storage Vendors For 2015

On-premise storage for mission-critical applications is far from heading to the chopping block in favor of the cloud. However, customers are increasingly turning toward cloud storage for a wide range of services that traditionally were within the purview of on-premise storage, including data protection, disaster recovery, archiving, temporary capacity increases, and other functions where there is less value to high-speed access to data.

That will change as mission-critical data also starts moving toward the cloud. And that means solution providers that have not yet made cloud storage a part of their practice risk being left behind.

Acronis

Serguei Beloussov

CEO

Acronis spent 2014 beefing up its cloud storage and disaster recovery solutions with such capabilities as high-speed provisioning and high-speed search of NAS environments. The company also made a couple of key acquisitions including nScaled for disaster-recovery-as-a-service and BackupAgent for service provider solutions.

Asigra

David Farajun

CEO

The past 12 months have seen Asigra advance cloud data protection for Office 365 and introduce what it calls the first enterprise backup and recovery solution to support Docker containers. Also new was a big push for cloud-to-cloud backups in Microsoft and VMware environments.

Attunity

Shimon Alon

Chairman, CEO

Attunity, which develops software for accessing, managing, sharing and distributing data across enterprises and the cloud, signaled a big push into the big data market with a new Amazon Web Services relationship and with last year’s acquisition of BIReady, which designs, generates and populates enterprise data warehouses.

Avere Systems

Ron Bianchini

President, CEO

Avere’s technology lets enterprises leverage public and private cloud resources without impacting performance or availability, and in 2014 expanded its capabilities with virtual edge NAS filers for the cloud. Avere has also become a major high-performance storage tech provider to the film industry.

Barracuda Networks

William ’BJ’ Jenkins

President, CEO

Security, application delivery, and storage and data protection provider Barracuda in 2014 significantly expanded its cloud storage capabilities with new application delivery for Amazon Web Services clouds and email management and cloud migration for Microsoft Azure. Its latest Barracuda Backup application helps SMBs connect cloud and on-premise data.

Carbonite

Mohamad Ali

President, CEO

While not fighting acquisition attempts by investment firm j2 Global, cloud and hybrid data protection technology provider Carbonite in 2014 introduced its first hybrid cloud backup appliance for small businesses, acquired email archiving technology provider MailStore, and found a new company president.

Ctera Networks

Liran Eshel

Co-founder, CEO

Ctera lets customers leverage their cloud of choice for ROBO (remote office and branch office) storage and file sync and share, and in 2014 provided tools to sync any number of folders with any project or folder in the cloud.

Datacastle

Ron Faith

President, CEO

The Datacastle RED application for protecting enterprises from endpoint data loss in on-premise, private cloud, and private cloud deployments got a major facelift in 2014 with version 7, which brought enhanced hybrid cloud deployment on Microsoft Azure and support for eDiscovery and legal holds.

eFolder

Kevin Hoffman

CEO

Cloud data protection and file sync solution provider eFolder made a big play in 2014 for the MSP, cloud services provider and solution provider business with the acquisition of Cloudfinder, a provider of backup, instant full-text search, data restore, and reporting technology.

EMC

Joseph Tucci

Chairman, CEO

EMC continues to be at the forefront of hybrid storage cloud and software-defined storage thanks to investments in cloud, big data and storage via the EMC Federation. The company in 2014 signaled plans to act like a cloud startup with a string of small acquisitions.

Infrascale

Ken Shaw

CEO, CTO

White-label cloud-based data protection technology developer Infrascale in 2014 significantly enhanced its enterprise business with the introduction of its first cloud-integrated data protection appliances following its acquisition of Eversync, a developer of appliances for data protection, disaster recovery and compliance.

Intronis

Rick Faulk

Chairman, CEO

The Intronis Echoplatform for small businesses lets MSPs deliver physical and virtual data protection for a fixed price with unlimited local and cloud storage. 2014 saw the company expand Echoplatform with cloud-based file sync and collaboration and automated bare metal recovery.

Morpheus Data

Ashish Mohindroo

General Manager

Morpheus Data develops BitCan, a cloud-based database backup and restore solution for MySQL, MongoDB, and Linux and Windows servers that requires no plug-in or install and does not impact client performance. Launched in June, BitCan is available as software and as a virtual appliance.

Nakivo

Bruce Talley

Co-founder, CEO

The Nakivo Backup & Replication suite brings SMBs and enterprises data protection for their VMware environments via service providers. October saw the release of Nakivo Backup & Replication v5 featuring Flash VM Boot to run VMware VMs directly from compressed and deduplicated VM backups.

Nasuni

Andres Rodriguez

Founder, CEO

Nasuni offers a combination of on-premise hardware and cloud storage to provide local performance with a scalable storage service. Its new enterprise Nasuni Service 6.0 and a new mobile application suite let customers access files and collaborate via the cloud from anywhere.

Panzura

Randy Chou

Co-founder, CEO

The Panzura Global Cloud Storage System creates a unified global file system for centralized management while providing easy data access and collaboration from anywhere. In 2014, the company partnered with Microsoft Azure to develop a globally distributed NAS, and introduced file locking for safe enterprise-level collaboration.

StorageCraft Technology

Jeff Shreeve

President, CEO

StorageCraft teams with MSPs and software partners to provide local and cloud-based data protection and migration solutions, and late last year signaled a new focus on virtualized environments with the release of plug-ins specific to VMware and Microsoft System Center.

Vembu

Sekar Vembu

CEO

Vembu provides SMB cloud data protection, disaster recovery, and file sharing via MSPs and traditional solution providers. The company over the past year has added a cloud disaster-recovery-as-a service that lets failed systems or virtual machines boot directly on a cloud or USB disk.

Zetta.net

Ali Jenab

CEO

Zetta delivers enterprise-grade online server backup solutions for SMBs and distributed enterprises. The company in August said it was the first with a SaaS-based service to provide complete cloud backup and disaster recovery directly to the cloud with integrated WAN acceleration for improved performance.

Zimbra

Patrick Brandt

Chairman, CEO

Zimbra provides an open-source collaboration suite, and in July acquired on-premise and cloud-based file share and storage provider Mezeo Software. 2014 also saw the company release Zimbra Collaboration 8.5, which added unified collaboration support via new community and social network tools.