The 20 Coolest Cloud Storage Vendors Of The 2018 Cloud 100

20 Coolest Cloud Storage Vendors For 2018

Cloud storage can cover anything from a simple online destination for storing and sharing personal photos to a complete offering encompassing backup and recovery, archiving, disaster recovery, business continuity, and file sync and share with both an on-premises and an online component.

The vendors in the vibrant cloud storage space deliver to businesses anything but homogeneous cookie-cutter offerings.

Acronis

Serguei Beloussov, Chairman, CEO

Headquarters: Schaffhausen, Switzerland

Acronis provides hybrid cloud IT data protection through its backup, ransomware protection, disaster recovery, and secure file sync and share offerings. The company in November introduced Acronis Backup 12.5 to protect all workloads in over 20 different environments, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, VMware, Red Hat, Citrix, Oracle and mobile operating systems.

Arcserve

Tom Signorello, CEO

Headquarters: Eden Prairie, Minn.

Arcserve, which started at Cheyenne Software in 1990 and then spent 18 years as part of CA Technologies until going independent in 2014, offers software and hardware technology for protection cloud, virtual, and physical environments. It expanded its capabilities last year with the acquisition of Zetta, a developer of cloud-first disaster recovery technology.

Asigra

David Farajun, CEO

Headquarters: Toronto, Ontario

Asigra provides enterprise-class data protection, cloud SaaS protection, business continuity, ransomware protection, and compliance management technology primarily through MSPs. The company in December unveiled the Partner Acceleration Program, a.k.a. the "Half Of" program, that lets partners guarantee to customers a 50 percent reduction in what they are currently paying for their on-premises or cloud-based data protection.

Box

Aaron Levie, Chairman and CEO

Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.

Box provides a cloud-based enterprise content management platform that covers sharing and accessing files on mobile devices to business processes including data governance and retention. The company in October introduced Box Skills, a new framework for applying state-of-the-art machine-learning tools such as computer vision, video indexing, and sentiment analysis to content stored in Box.

Carbonite

Mohamad Ali, President, CEO

Headquarters: Boston

Carbonite, which originally started as a provider of cloud-based backup technology to consumers but is now focused on MSPs and solution providers looking to protect and manage SMB data, expanded its capabilities early last year with the acquisition of Double-Take to bring partners new offerings related to high availability and data migration.

Cloudian

Michael Tso, CEO

Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.

Cloudian developed object storage technology that allowed on-premises storage systems to work with AWS S3-compatible data, but early this year introduced HyperStore 7, which included the ability to span S3-compatible object and file data across on-premises and cloud environments, including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform via a common API.

Commvault

N. Robert Hammer, Chairman, President, CEO

Headquarters: Tinton Falls, N.J.

Commvault provides data protection, infrastructure management, and data retention and compliance software for a wide range of on-premises and cloud environments. The company expanded its multi-cloud offerings to channel partners in 2017 with the introduction of new GDPR analytics and endpoint Backup-as-a-Service as well as a combined offering to protect Cisco UCS data.

Datos IO

Tharun Thakur, CEO

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.

Datos IO provides a cloud-scale, application-centric data management platform to protect, mobilize, and monetize application data across private, hybrid and public cloud environments. The company in October partnered with Cloudera to provide data protection for big data and with Cloudian and Igneous Systems to protect object storage data, and in November introduced advanced recovery capabilities.

Datto

Austin McChord, CEO

Headquarters: Norwalk, Conn.

Datto started 2017 as a leading provider of cloud-based data protection, disaster recovery and ransomware detection technology for managed service providers, but in June expanded its reach into the networking market. The company capped the year off with a merger with Autotask, making it an indispensable part of the managed services market.

Dropbox

Drew Houston, CEO

Headquarters: San Francisco

While Dropbox started as a way for consumers to use the cloud to store and share data, and still does, it has morphed into a cloud-based data protection and enterprise file sync and share service with over 200,000 businesses and organizations counted as customers. It unveiled a suite of APIs and tools for developers in September.

eFolder

Matt Nachtrab, CEO

Headquarters: Denver

eFolder has morphed from a small solution provider to become a leading provider of cloud backup, disaster recovery, business continuity, and file sync services for IT channel partners. The company in May launched a line of flash storage-based data protection appliances, and in July merged with Axcient, a provider of disaster recovery as a service.

Egnyte

Vineet Jain, CEO

Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.

Egnyte brings cloud-based secure file sharing, desktop and mobile collaboration, web collaboration, and content governance technology to solution providers and MSPs. Egnyte Protect offering, first introduced in June, collects, analyzes, and classifies any content residing in any cloud or on–premises environments, while its GDPR compliance technology works across all 28 EU countries.

Panzura

Patrick Harr, CEO

Headquarters: Campbell, Calif.

Panzura is trying to get enterprises to replace their cloud-based NAS systems with its enterprise-scale Panzura Freedom family based on its CloudFS file system. Freedom was purpose-built for the cloud and provides complete cloud data protection and high availability with no single point of failure. It manages unstructured data while providing global collaboration.

StorageCraft

Matt Medeiros, CEO

Headquarters: Draper, Utah

StorageCraft, developer of the ShadowProtect data protection technology, has a strong cloud-based focus with technology for protecting data in Office 365 and Google G Suite environments. StorageCraft also offers its own massive storage cloud for protecting on-premises data. The company early 2017 made its first foray into primary storage with its acquisition of Exablox.

SwiftStack

Don Jaworski, CEO

Headquarters: San Francisco

SwiftStack offers hybrid cloud storage software for customers that require universal access to petabytes of unstructured data in a single namespace. Media and entertainment companies, life sciences companies and web-based businesses are among SwiftStack;s customers. The company last year released two upgrades to its software to improve automation and multi-cloud management.

Veeam

Peter McKay, President, Co-CEO

Headquarteers: Baar, Switzerland

Veeam technology helps businesses meet recovery time and point objectives of under 15 minutes for any application, any data, on any cloud. The Veeam Availability Suite leverages virtualization, storage and cloud technologies. The company, which has worked with Microsoft Azure, IBM and VMware clouds, in January added AWS cloud-native capabilities when it acquired N2WS.

Veritas

Greg Hughes, CEO

Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.

Since its 2015 spinoff from Symantec, Veritas has become a nimble provider of cloud-based backup and recovery, business continuity, and data governance, as well as multi-cloud data management and software-defined storage. It has a strong focus on GDPR.

Wasabi

David Friend, CEO

Headquarters: Boston

Wasabi Technologies provides a cloud storage service that is 100 percent compatible with the Amazon S3 API, and touts the service as being six times faster than AWS S3 at one-fifth the cost. Wasabi also trumpets the data protection capabilities of its service against accidental or malicious destruction, and against theft by hackers.

Zadara

Nelson Nahum, CEO

Headquarters: Irvine, Calif.

Zadara Storage provides high-performance, highly available enterprise file and block Storage-as-a-Service in a pay-as-you-go model for on-premises deployments, hybrid infrastructures, and public clouds including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and others, all with predictable quality of service. The company also provides its own Zadara Storage Cloud and its software-defined VPSA storage arrays for elastic, multi-tenant requirements.

Zerto

Ziv Kedem, CEO

Headquarters: Boston

Zerto provides enterprise-class disaster recovery and business continuity software for virtualized and cloud environments with automated offerings for vSphere, Hyper-V, Microsoft Azure and AWS. Zerto Virtual Replication creates recovery points of seconds and recovery times of minutes with continuous replication, all while users have access to critical applications without any downtime or delay.