Druva has expanded its business presence in India, with the Druva team physically present in major metros such as Delhi NCR, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, as well as through a channel ecosystem that is enabled across the country.
The Pandemic has forced businesses to shift to online operations and there has been a massive migration to the cloud. This has thrown open the wider gates of opportunities for Cloud Vendors as well as Distributors. As we usher into 2023, it’s time to look back and take stock of the channel performance of leading cloud vendors and distributors, and their key channel achievements. More than this, it’s pivotal to get a hang of the key cloud predictions for the Channel Market for the year 2023.
While the industry is agog over to know what all technologies would majorly impact the cloud market, we would take you through the cloudscape to listen directly from the horse’s mouth as to what the top vendors and distributors are thinking and reflecting, what are their premonitions about the shape of things to come in 2023 and their plans to turbocharge the Partner ecosystem.
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“From a product standpoint, we have released cyber resilience features such as ransomware recovery features that are currently very useful on the market. Overall, we are prepared to capitalise on market opportunities because we have products that fit and cover the market.”
Bakshish Dutta,
Country Manager – India & SAARC,
Druva
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In a series of interactions with the poster-boys of the cloud industry, SME Channels embarks upon understanding the cloud dynamics; what drives the cloud growth engine; the key milestones for 2023 set from the channel perspective; key mega trends in the cloud market in 2023, predictions for the New Year; direction for channel partners and the growth roadmap of the cloud players for 2023.
We spoke to leading cloud player Druva to get a sneak peek into its performance in the cloud Industry. Here, Bakshish Dutta Country Manager – India & SAARC, Druva, reveals his company’s key Cloud Predictions for 2023, major achievements and the unique matrixes that design his seminal vision for the Partner Ecosystem. Edited Excerpts:
With the announcement of a slew of measures that call for massive and rapid application of cloud solutions in the country in the digital-friendly budget, how do you plan to leverage the immense market opportunity created in the country?
Cloud computing is gaining popularity. According to a Gartner report, 85% of infrastructure strategies will incorporate cloud delivery by 2025. This demonstrates how cloud computing is becoming more prevalent in our society and how it affects both small and large businesses. We have expanded our presence in India, with the Druva team physically present in major metros such as Delhi NCR, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, as well as a channel ecosystem that is enabled across the country. From a product standpoint, we have released cyber resilience features such as ransomware recovery features that are currently very useful on the market. Overall, we are prepared to capitalise on market opportunities because we have products that fit and cover the market.
As a major Cloud player, what market trends would you forecast in 2023?
Digitally, businesses are reinventing themselves. A growing number of applications are migrating to the cloud. This trend is expected to accelerate in 2023. According to IDC, 70% of production-grade applications will be cloud-native by 2024. Businesses are rethinking their infrastructure strategies and incorporating cloud delivery as a result. Enterprises are also feeling increased pressure on their data and are revising their data protection policies as a result. Legacy on-premise data protection solutions are no longer very relevant to enterprises as applications migrate to the cloud. Data governance and compliance are critical use cases for enterprises when it comes to data. Enterprises are looking for a unified solution that provides data protection, governance, and compliance capabilities. Ransomware protection and recovery have taken on increased importance for businesses, and the expectation from the data protection solution is not only to keep the secondary copy of data safe, but also to orchestrate recovery in the aftermath of a ransomware incident.
How are your Cloud offerings enhanced to cater to changing business requirements?
Ransomware resilience capabilities were recently added. When it comes to ransomware and other cyber threats, modern IT professionals face numerous challenges. Unfortunately, most backup providers are incapable of dealing with today’s ransomware attacks. Druva’s air-gapped, immutable backups are complemented by its malware-resistant architecture, zero-trust security (including MFA, RBAC, and delayed deletion protocols). Druva ensures that you always have safe backup data available for recovery. Druva’s SaaS solution provides fully-managed security operations 24x7x365, including pen testing, vulnerability scans, automatic patches, and upgrades, ensuring that you are always on the most recent and secure version. We also provide continuous security monitoring and will contact you proactively if we notice unusual activity in your backup environment, such as excessive deletion, so that we can assist you in restoring data after an accident or an attack. When an attack occurs, recovery can take weeks. In the first half of this year, the average downtime following an attack was 23 days. Current backup solutions lack well-planned, built-in recovery mechanisms, resulting in manual recovery processes, reinfection as a result of restoring contaminated data, and incomplete data recovery. Druva offers the orchestration and automation tools and recovery services you need to avoid reinfection and recover clean, comprehensive data sets automatically.
What all a channel partner needs to have to adopt Cloud business and what are the steps to start Cloud practice?
Dedicated teams that focus on and build capabilities around cloud infrastructure and applications.
What kind of Partner training programs are run by your company to upskill your partners.
Druva’s Channel team, in collaboration with our distributors in Tier 1 cities across India, offer online resources like Partner Academy as well as in-person technical and business enablement sessions. Partners progress from authorised to elite based on their performance and credentials obtained through our Partner Academy programme.
Navigating global data privacy and sovereignty laws has become a big issue for global companies. How do you look at the issue?
The key capabilities required from data protection solutions are data privacy and sovereignty. This is non-negotiable today. Druva, being a fully cloud-native offering, adheres to the Data Privacy and Sovereignty regulations and keeps data in accordance with the regulations. As a cloud native offering available from almost all AWS availability zones, we provide enterprises with the flexibility to choose the AWS location where they want to keep their data in order to comply with data sovereignty and privacy regulations such as GDPR.
