The 40 Coolest Data Protection/Management/Resilience Vendors: The 2023 Storage 100

As part of CRN’s 2023 Storage 100, here are 40 vendors taking their data protection offerings to new heights.

The line between data protection, data management, and data security or resilience is becoming more blurry over time as storage software and cloud vendors increasingly integrate technologies from two or all three of these previously isolated technologies into their offerings.

And that integration makes sense as these technologies all look to add value to the same set of data, and so meet the increasing need to gain more capabilities from fewer vendors.

As part of CRN’s 2023 Storage 100, here are 40 vendors taking their offerings to new heights.

Acronis

Patrick Pulvermueller

CEO

Acronis’ flagship Cyber Protect Cloud delivers data backup, disaster recovery, cybersecurity and endpoint management in a single integrated offering. Also included are file sync and share, email security and automation. Acronis also sells Cyber Protect in versions for businesses and home-office users.

Amazon Web Services

Adam Selipsky

CEO

AWS delivers on-demand computing, storage, analytics and other resources businesses can use to develop cloud services using the Amazon public cloud. On the storage side, AWS provides scalable S3 object storage, low-cost Glacier archive storage, Elastic Block Store, Elastic File System and capabilities around open-source Lustre and OpenZFS, NetApp Ontap and more.

Arcserve

Brannon Lacey

CEO

Arcserve was one of the pioneers of data backup technology but has become a leading provider of data protection software and appliances, SaaS data protection, Disaster Recovery as a Service, Backup as a Service, immutable storage appliances and cloud-based management tools. The company expanded its offerings significantly with its 2021 acquisition of StorageCraft.

Asigra

Eric Simmons

President, CEO

Asigra provides a range of data protection and management technologies, including a backup appliance that combines its software with a TrueNAS NAS system. Its technologies provide businesses with enterprise data management, business continuity, ransomware protection and compliance management for critical cloud-based data.

AvePoint

Tianyi “TJ” Jiang

CEO

AvePoint develops a platform for simplifying the management of and collaboration with Microsoft 365 apps. It is also a leading provider of cloud data backup, archiving, compliance, license management, governance, intelligence and migration technologies for Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Dynamics 365, Azure Active Directory, Azure virtual machines and Google Workspace.

Aparavi

Adrian Knapp

Founder, CEO

Aparavi develops a cloud-based platform with deep intelligence to find, automate, govern and consolidate distributed data. The platform provides enterprise-level search and discovery of data via a cloud-based user portal and automatically classifies and organizes data sets via custom policies or 140-plus preconfigured policies.

Axcient

Rod Mathews

President, CEO

Axcient provides data protection and business continuity technology aimed squarely at MSPs. The Axcient x360 platform offers three integrated applications: X360Cloud provides cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery, x360Recover provides business continuity and disaster recovery, and x360Sync provides secure sync and share capabilities.

Backblaze

Gleb Budman

Chairperson, CEO

Backblaze hosts, manages, protects and archives data on its Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, an S3-compatible object storage cloud the company said provides capacity at a fraction of AWS’ cost. Backblaze on top of that provides data backup and recovery and an active media archive to share content.

Calamu Technologies

Paul Lewis

Founder, CEO

Calamu adds resilience to data protection via its Calamu Protect software by automatically fragmenting data across multiple separate storage locations. This protects against breaches or ransomware by ensuring the data fragments individually have no value. And should an attack hit part of the data, Calamu Protect provides automatic self-healing.

Cirrus Data

Wayne Lam

Chairman, CEO

Cirrus Data’s Cirrus Migrate Cloud provides Migration as a Service to migrate block-level data to, between and within clouds with little or no downtime. The company also provides an appliance to migrate block-level data between on-premises infrastructures or to the cloud, as well as software for heterogeneous data protection.

Clumio

Poojan Kumar

Co-Founder, CEO

Cloud data protection technology developer Clumio helps customers reduce the chance of and impact from accidental data loss, ransomware, cyberthreats and compliance issues. Its tools support users with data in the AWS cloud—including S3, EC2, EBS, DynamoDB, RDS, and VMware and SQL on AWS—as well as all Microsoft 365 data.

Cobalt Iron

Richard Spurlock

Founder, CEO

Cobalt Iron develops SaaS-based enterprise data protection technology. Using analytics and automation, Cobalt Iron’s Compass software platform helps enterprises transform and optimize legacy backup offerings into a more simple cloud-based architecture with built-in cybersecurity. The company says it is processing over 8 million jobs each month for customers in 44 countries.

Cohesity

Sanjay Poonen

President, CEO

Cohesity brings data security and management into a single platform it calls the Cohesity Data Cloud. It includes DataProtect data protection, FortKnox cloud-based cyber vaulting to increase resiliency against ransomware, DataHawk for quick recovery from ransomware, SmartFiles to manage file and object storage, and SiteContinuity for automated disaster recovery.

Collibra

Felix Van de Maele

Co-Founder, CEO

Collibra develops a data intelligence cloud platform to deliver accurate data for every use across every source. The platform provides automated real-time finding of data issues, automated data governance, visibility into how data is transformed as it flows, and comprehensive protection and privacy for sensitive data.

Commvault

Sanjay Mirchandani

President, CEO

Commvault is a major player in cloud-based data protection and management. Its line card includes data protection, security, compliance, governance, transformation and insight via software and its HyperScale X appliances or validated reference design. Commvault ’s Metallic also provides Data Management as a Service for SaaS application data.

Datadobi

Ian Leysen

Co-Founder, CEO

Datadobi provides unstructured data management to bring order to heterogeneous unstructured storage and hybrid cloud environments via its StorageMAP technology. It provides data assessment and classification to help migrate, move, replicate, sync or delete data. The latest version adds the ability to copy file data to any S3-compatible object storage system.

Data Dynamics

Piyush Mehta

CEO

The Data Dynamics Unified Unstructured Data Management Platform includes StorageX dynamic data life-cycle management, Insight AnalytiX AI and machine learning technologies to transform unstructured data into structured data, and ControlX to help mitigate the risk of sensitive data access and misuse.

Delphix

Jedidiah Yueh

Founder, CEO

The Delphix DevOps Data Platform combines enterprise-wide data coverage with data compliance to help enable modern CI/CD workflows. It automates data for fast software releases, cloud adoption and data security by sourcing multi-cloud application data, adding data protection and ransomware protection, and delivering it via APIs.

Diamanti

Chris Hickey

CEO

Diamanti’s Kubernetes Platform is a unified multi-cluster storage, networking and orchestration platform to help enterprises build, run, manage, secure and monitor Kubernetes on-premises or in hybrid multi-cloud environments. The platform deploys as a scale-out hyperconverged x86- based appliance.

Druva

Jaspreet Singh

Founder, CEO

Druva’s SaaS platform, the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, aims to ensure data protection across the most common risks, all backed by a $10 million guarantee. It provides a single unified console to manage all data resiliency services across physical and virtual workloads and cloud-native and SaaS applications, and adds ransomware protection and disaster recovery.

Egnyte

Vineet Jain

Co-Founder, CEO

Egnyte’s all-in-one platform aims to simplify the management and control of a full spectrum of content risks, including accidental data deletion, data exfiltration, privacy compliance and more. It offers file sharing and collaboration, data life-cycle management, access governance, ransomware detection and threat management.

Google Cloud

Thomas Kurian

CEO

Google Cloud Platform helps businesses digitally transform their organization via a wide range of cloud services, including compute, security, analytics, AI and DevOps. On the storage side, GCP provides unstructured data management and object data life-cycle management, SLA-backed replication and high-speed data transfer service.

Hammerspace

David Flynn

Co-Founder, CEO

A global data environment spanning data centers and AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud infrastructures is what Hammerspace delivers. The company’s software connects global users with their data and applications by providing data orchestration and services across multivendor silos to make data a global resource.

HYCU

Simon Taylor

Founder, CEO

HYCU provides multi-cloud data protection. Its HYCU Protégé provides unified Data Protection as a Service that scales to work with all of an organization’s data, including data for as-a-service applications and cloud services. Last year it released R-Cloud, a development platform providing SaaS vendors a low-code way to easily add data protection to their applications.

Komprise

Kumar Goswami

CEO

Komprise develops a single platform that manages unstructured data across on-premises NAS and cloud object storage environments, including environments based on platforms from such partners as NetApp, Dell EMC Isilon, Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure and IBM to make data management work seamlessly wherever it resides.

LucidLink

Peter Thompson

Co-Founder, CEO

LucidLink aims to transform the cloud into local storage with a system that streams data directly from the cloud. This is done via LucidLink’s file system that the company said is specifically built for modern cloud computing environments, letting any application, process or workflow benefit from lower costs and elastic storage.

Microsoft

Satya Nadella

Chairman, CEO

The Azure public cloud provides a wide range of cloud services, including virtual machines and desktops, Kubernetes, cognitive services, SQL and even quantum computing. On the storage side, businesses can take advantage of block or file storage, scalable object “Blob” storage, archiving, data lake storage and enterprise file shares powered natively by NetApp.

Morro Data

Paul Tien

Founder, CEO

Morro Data develops CloudNAS, a global file system that provides a real-time file sync to let users access files in any location through a single namespace. Morro Data’s web-based management console provides a central global management for file systems, devices, users and permissions, and analytics to deliver versioning, file locking and multi-cloud redundancy.

MSP360

Brian Helwig

CEO

MSP360, formerly CloudBerry Lab, provides data protection and IT management aimed at MSPs. It offers MSP360 for customers looking to leverage public clouds for data protection, remote connectivity and remote monitoring and management, and CloudBerry for on-premises data protection, local storage management and mounting cloud storage as a network drive.

Nakivo

Bruce Talley

Co-Founder, CEO

Nakivo develops comprehensive data backup and disaster recovery technologies for SMBs and enterprises. The Nakivo Backup & Replication offering supports data on virtual environments including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, Amazon EC2, Windows and Linux physical environments, and a host of SaaS environments.

Nasuni

Paul Flanagan

CEO

Nasuni developed the first cloud-native global file system, which it calls UniFS, and it can scale to any level. With UniFS, businesses can consolidate NAS and file server silos, backups, disaster recovery and collaboration into a single system to provide fast file access and global project collaboration, and can eliminate separate backup and disaster recovery operations.

Object First

David Bennett

CEO

Object First was founded by the co-founders of Veeam and in early 2023 entered the market with Ootbi, short for out of the box immutability. Ootbi provides data protection and ransomware protection specifically for Veeam v12. Its storage buckets are immutable by default and synchronize with Veeam v12 direct-to-object storage configuration.

OwnBackup

Sam Gutmann

Co-Founder, CEO

OwnBackup provides a SaaS data protection and data management platform for some of the largest SaaS ecosystems in the world, including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and ServiceNow. It offers data security, backup and recovery, archiving and compliance to protect businesses’ mission-critical data.

Quest Software

Patrick Nichols

CEO

Quest provides data protection and management software, including applications to protect Microsoft Active Directory. Its NetVault backup and recovery software protects on-premises and cloud-based enterprise applications and data, QoreStor accelerates backup performance, and vRanger protects physical and virtual server environments.

Quobyte

Bjorn Kolbeck

Co-Founder, CEO

Quobyte provides software-defined storage that can be downloaded and installed on any x86 server or in the cloud. The fault-tolerant software combines file and object in the same namespace while providing linear scalability so that performance and flash or disk capacity increase whenever resources are added to let a storage cluster grow based on demand.

Rubrik

Bipul Sinha

Co-Founder, Chairman, CEO

Rubrik takes data protection to a deeper level with the Rubrik Security Cloud, which helps protect data wherever it exists against ransomware and other cyberattacks, monitor data risk, and recover data and applications. Services are architected with a logical air gap, native immutability, encryption and access controls.

Snowflake

Frank Slootman

Chairman, CEO

Snowflake aims to provide seamless collaboration with a single copy of data across any scale with its Snowflake Data Cloud. The Data Cloud optimizes performance for any workload for instant and near-unlimited scale to support a virtually unlimited number of concurrent users and both interactive and batch workloads.

Veeam Software

Anand Eswaran

CEO

Veeam this year expanded its capabilities with the introduction of the Veeam Data Platform, which marries its Veeam Backup & Replication with new capabilities such as direct-to-object storage backups, enhanced immutability and new anti-ransomware functionality to bring data security, recovery and close cloud compatibility into a single offering.

Veritas Technologies

Greg Hughes

CEO

Veritas has a strong presence in data protection and management, including in multi-cloud environments. The company provides eDiscovery, availability optimization and protection against cyberattacks like ransomware at scale. Its technology offers support for 800-plus data sources, 100-plus operating systems, 1,400-plus storage targets and 60-plus clouds.

Wasabi Technologies

David Friend

Co-Founder, President, CEO

Wasabi develops Hot Cloud Storage, a one-size-fits-all cloud storage technology the company said is faster than its public cloud competitors but costs only one-fifth of their price with no egress fees, API call charges or additional hidden fees. The company’s cloud-based storage capacity is available on a pay-as-you-go basis or reserved in advance.