The 20 Coolest Cloud Storage Companies Of The 2026 Cloud 100

The term “cloud storage” is fast evolving as the emphasis of the business continues to evolve from the mere storing of data to the importance of migrating and managing it to adding resilience and now to making it available for AI applications, as seen in the 20 companies highlighted here.

The term “cloud storage” is applied rather liberally to a part of the storage industry having to do with how data is handled in the cloud. While the term may conjure up images of places where vast amounts of data are being stored, that doesn’t even begin to describe what vendors are doing.

Data is not a static asset. When it goes to the cloud, it becomes a valuable, ever-changing asset as vendors introduce new ways to migrate it to where it is needed, manage it to reduce costs and improve efficiencies, and add cyber resilience capabilities that go far beyond traditional data protection techniques to protect it from cyberattacks and ransomware attempts.

Indeed, over the last couple of years, cyber resilience has become a key part of how companies are dealing with cloud-based data. While just a couple years ago only a handful of startups such as Cohesity and Rubrik were talking about cyber resiliency, today it is a key part of the latest versions of storage technology from nearly all major storage-focused software—and even hardware—vendors.

For solution providers, the shifting focus of data stored in the cloud has become a key area for adding value to their customers’ IT infrastructure, as they look to tie on-premises and cloud data storage into manageable pools of data and improve how that data is protected against cyber threats.

CRN continuously explores the changing data storage industry and how changes in managing and protecting data in the cloud impact both the vendor community and their solution providers.

As part of CRN’s 2026 Cloud 100, here are 20 cloud storage companies to watch as the year unfolds.

Arcserve

Chris Babel

CEO

Arcserve, founded over 40 years ago, is one of the pioneers of the data protection industry and has made early moves to become a cloud-focused provider of data protection and cyber resilience. Arcserve in 2025 introduced Arcserve Cyber Resilient Storage, a new immutable backup storage technology for cloud or on-premises workloads, and in late 2025 unveiled AI-powered cyber resilience capabilities for mid-market and SMB ransomware protection.

Cohesity

Sanjay Poonen

President, CEO

Cohesity, which started as a data protection-focused technology developer, helped define the data resilience category with technology aimed at protecting cloud-based data from cyberattacks. The company in late 2024 acquired the enterprise business of Veritas and has since continued to expand its cloud data protection and resilience capabilities across all the major hyperscalers.

Commvault

Sanjay Mirchandani

President, CEO

Commvault develops data protection and resiliency technologies for on-premises and cloud environments. The company late last year unveiled its Commvault Cloud Unity Platform, which it said unifies data security, cyber resilience and identity resilience across cloud, SaaS, on-premises and hybrid environments. Commvault also unveiled new technologies that expand end-to-end identity resilience, cloud-native data protection and synthetic recovery, using AI to automatically determine threats in backed-up data to remove them during the recovery process.

DataCore

Dave Zabrowski

CEO

DataCore was a pioneer developer of software-defined storage that turned industry-standard servers into advanced storage systems and eventually evolved its technology to run natively in the cloud. The company expanded its cloud storage capabilities in 2025 with two acquisitions: the parallel file system business of Arcastream and edge, remote office and SMB-focused hyperconverged infrastructure technology developer StarWind.

DDN

Alex Bourzari

Co-Founder, CEO

DDN for years has been known as the developer of some of the highest-performance storage devices for AI and high-performance computing environments. The company’s DDN EXAScaler Cloud targets AI, high-performance computing and data-intensive workloads with a high-performance parallel file system the company says is optimized for cloud scalability. It is used by Google as that company’s first-party Lustre file system.

Hammerspace

David Flynn

Co-Founder, CEO

Hammerspace develops a data platform targeting AI acceleration on customers’ existing infrastructure. The company’s hybrid cloud data plane unifies data silos into a single global namespace and orchestrates automated data delivery to GPUs and AI models. That hybrid data plane works across on-premises and cloud storage to help make data AI-ready without the need to re-platform it.

HYCU

Simon Taylor

Founder, CEO

HYCU targets the challenge of providing data protection and recovery across on-premises, public cloud and SaaS workloads as a way to eliminate data silos and protect multi-cloud workloads. The company last year introduced its R-Shield, or Resiliency Shield, a new cyber resilience fabric for its HYCU Data Resiliency Cloud, or R-Cloud. R-Shield provides multi-cloud environments always-on detection and recovery capabilities aimed at thwarting cyberattacks on fragmented IT environments.

Komprise

Kumar Goswami

Founder, CEO

Komprise’s technology aims to help enterprises that are overwhelmed by unstructured data growth and increasing storage costs with an open, storage-agnostic platform that analyzes and classifies petabytes of unstructured data across NAS, cloud and SaaS silos to help reduce risks and costs. Its Komprise Intelligent Data Management platform was designed for massive scale to provide a fully managed global metadatabase it says is proven at over 100 petabytes of data.

MinIO

Anand Babu “AB” Periasamy, Garima Kapoor

Co-Founders, Co-CEOs

MinIO focuses on technology aimed at simplifying the management of object storage in the cloud. The company’s flagship AIStor platform targets large-scale data infrastructure, including those supporting AI workloads, with such key capabilities as data replication, data encryption, object immutability, identity and access management, information life cycle, versioning and more.

MSP360

MSP360 develops data protection software supporting a wide range of platforms including Windows, macOS, Linux, SQL Server, Hyper-V and VMware. Businesses and MSPs can choose to send data to a wide range of cloud storage options including Amazon S3, Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, Backblaze B2, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, or to local infrastructure. The company also offers its own cloud, MSP360 Storage, powered by AWS or Wasabi.

NetApp

George Kurian

CEO

While the rest of the storage industry was wringing its collective hands over the growth of the cloud, NetApp was the first to bring its on-premises storage technology to the cloud and is now cloud-native across the big three hyperscalers. Every NetApp on-premises technology has its cloud-based counterpart, and several of its key innovations are in use by key public cloud providers.

Object First

David Bennett

CEO

Object First is unique in that it was founded with one other company in mind: providing resiliency and data immutability to data stored using Veeam Software’s cloud-based data protection and management technology. Object First’s Ootbi, or out-of-the-box immutability, provides ransomware-proof object storage for Veeam and was designed with support from Veeam’s founders.

Panzura

Dan Waldschmidt

CEO

Panzura tackles the thorny issues around providing command and control, resiliency and immediacy to unstructured data. The company’s Panzura Symphony provides any-to-any data management with discovery, compliance and orchestration across cloud-based and SaaS data, while its Panzura Cloud FS features a real-time global file locking system to provide immutable storage with AI-powered threat detection.

Pure Storage

Charles Giancarlo

Chairman, CEO

Pure Storage may have started out with a 100 percent focus on high-performance all-flash storage but has since built a storage platform that brings its technology to a single pool of data regardless of where it exists. Its Enterprise Data Cloud manages data with a single operating model for control, mobility, security and automation across the entire estate, including on-premises, public cloud, sovereign, hosted and edge data without rearchitecting every time the venue changes.

Quantum

Hugues Meyrath

CEO

Quantum provides an end-to-end AI-driven platform aimed at helping enterprises store, manage, protect and archive unstructured data across their entire organization for high-speed data capture, real-time collaboration and immutable backups across scalable private and hybrid cloud storage platforms. The company’s Quantum Object Storage Services provides as-a-service capabilities for active and cold data archiving compatible with S3 and S3 Glacier storage.

Quest Software

Tim Page

CEO

Quest Software provides a wide range of data management, cybersecurity and platform modernization capabilities. This includes technology for moving, managing and securing Office 365 data; modernizing and managing data across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Database Cloud; and simplifying the migration and protection of on-premises and cloud data.

Rubrik

Bipul Sinha

Co-Founder, Chairman, CEO

Rubrik is a pioneer in bringing cyber resiliency to data instead of merely protecting it. The company’s Rubrik Security Cloud technology provides capabilities for securing data, monitoring for data risks, and quickly recovering data to help businesses achieve resilience against cyberattacks, malicious insiders and operational disruption across on-premises, cloud and SaaS environments.

Vast Data

Rene Hallak

Founder, CEO

Vast Data has built what it calls the AI Operating System, a global data platform it says empowers intelligent agents to store, think, communicate and act. The AI Operating System natively unifies and orchestrates storage, database and compute to enable businesses to take advantage of agentic computing and data-intensive applications., bringing together data from disparate sources and making it available for AI use.

Veeam Software

Anand Eswaran

CEO

Veeam was the pioneer in virtual machine-based data protection, having made that its focus since it was founded 20 years ago. The company has since become a leading provider of technology for securing data and extracting intelligent data from it as well as providing resiliency to protect that data from ransomware attacks, cyber threats and other types of data disruptions. The company’s Veeam Data Cloud provides a unified platform for providing protection and resilience across cloud and SaaS environments.

Wasabi

David Friend

Co-Founder, President, CEO

When Wasabi burst on the scene, its claim to fame was that it provided cloud storage at a fraction of the price of Amazon Web Services with no egress fees. While that is still part of the company’s mantra, Wasabi has expanded its reach with partnerships with dozens of storage technology vendors that feature it as the cloud behind their offerings, and introduced such capabilities as Covert Copy, which is an “invisible” and indestructible copy of data to increase security, as well as new high-performance storage classes for workloads like AI.