Disasters can take many forms from weather events to database corruptions. CloudEndure, a cloud-based disaster recovery service, announced a $7 million investment today led by Indian consulting firm Infosys and previous investor Magma Venture Partners.
Today’s investment brings the total to just over $12 million.
At first blush, Infosys may seem like an odd partner, a traditional consulting firm investing in a cloud service provider, but the company was looking for a couple of different investors for this round, CloudEndure’s VP of business development, Gonen Stein told TechCrunch.
First of all, it wanted a traditional VC so it went back to its earlier investor Magma, but it also wanted to have one of its strategic partners involved, and in more than just in business sense. “We were looking for a player that could benefit from both sides — as an investor and user of the technology.” With Infosys, they got that, a company that can provide funding, but also promote the product with its large client base.
And the CloudEndure service should appeal to the Indian consulting giant’s large enterprise customers as it helps in a couple of ways. First of all, it provides a cheaper and easier form of disaster recovery in the cloud that works whether your infrastructure is on-prem, in the cloud or a mix of the two, Stein explained.
The other thing the company does is help a customer migrate to the cloud from an on-prem data center or from one cloud service to another, something that has proven challenging for companies in the past.
Traditionally, enterprise disaster recovery has been an expensive undertaking requiring companies to set up duplicate equipment, software and license structure, Stein said.
With CloudEndure, a company uses a small percentage of the original compute, storage and memory resources. It also sits in an unused state until needed, so it removes the need for duplicate licensing. Stein claims his company’s system can create a back up of a Linux server in 1-2 minutes. A Windows machine takes 10-15 minutes.
Once that initial backup process is complete, the company monitors the customer system moving blocks of data to the recovery platform in near real time. Customers can test the disaster recovery system as often as they like from the CloudEndure dashboard view.
CloudEndure Dashboard. Photo Credit: CloudEndure
If disaster strikes such as a flood, hacker attack or even a database corruption, customers just log in to the Cloud Endure management console and select the machines they want to spin up in the cloud — individual machines or the entire data center.
“Click a button, and it takes the selections and starts to spin up that environment in a state that can be used in a cloud of the customer’s choice,” Stein explained.
That ability to be able to choose a cloud infrastructure provider also helps with its other business use case, migrating to a cloud service such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.
CloudEndure launched in 2012. The company currently has 20 employees, but using the money from this round, it hopes to double that in 2016. Stein didn’t give an exact number of customers, but he did say it was in the hundreds.