With ransomware attacks and cyber threats dramatically on the rise in 2020, air-gapped backups are gaining more and more traction as we’ve notably seen during Tech Field Day 22.
On the 16th of December 2020, it was DataDobi and Wasabi’s turn to announce a Technology Alliance Partnership. This partnership is about DataDobi’s products DobiMigrate and DobiProtect, both having been tested and validated to integrate with Wasabi’s cloud storage solution.
Wasabi is a cloud storage provider which claims to offer S3 compatible storage that is up to 80% cheaper than their competition, which consists primarily of AWS S3. DobiMigrate allows end users, partners or MSPs to migrate data to the cloud in an efficient fashion, but where the story gets interesting is that combined with DobiProtect, Wasabi can also be used as “a bunker site to store and protect golden copies of business-critical data”.
This partnership seems to extend DataDobi’s data management and data protection capabilities to the cloud, and there is a Wasabi page dedicated to this partnership as well as a solutions brief available.
TECHunplugged’s Opinion
Due to heavy work load, TECHunplugged has been unable to attend a customized briefing around this announcement to gain more insights on these news, but we consider the news to be worthy of publication for a few reasons.
First of all, as we stated previously, air gapped backups are a hot topic due to the sheer amounts of devastation that a ransomware attack can cause. We have seen this over and over again this year, not only at Garmin but also with other institutions globally.
Secondly, unstructured data management is also a hot topic, cloud storage for offload copies is a reality and organizations need to be aware of choices in the public cloud. We do not have first-hand experience with Wasabi, but we consider a competitive environment to be safe and healthy for customers, and the massive centralization of data on Amazon S3 can have negative effects. We also believe that a world where customers can work with trusted partners is more desirable than one where giant corporations undercut the many IT professionals working in the channel
Thirdly and lastly, this has been an interesting week in the data management market. An ailing company, Igneous, was purchased by Rubrik, making one less solution available in the market, perhaps not in the short term, but depending on how integration will go on it may cause some Igneous customers to look elsewhere. This leaves DataDobi one of the handful of independent companies in the data management / data protection market whose core business is truly data management.
This has two implications for DataDobi – they may see more clients coming to them, and it may also mark them as a desirable acquisition target for the bigger storage / data protection companies around who still haven’t made the decisive jump into acquiring a true data management company.