Data resiliency guarantees offer new kind of assurance
Data management vendors Druva, AvePoint and Rubrik have begun offering guarantees that will recoup the costs of data that cannot be recovered, although analysts advise customers do their due diligence when signing up.
Customers of such vendors can often choose to add a data resiliency guarantee as part of a larger cloud security offering. Many of these guarantees cover data loss due to incidents including ransomware, personnel error or application failure, and they are often free with the purchase of or subscription to a service. If a customer experiences data loss as defined by the agreement, the vendor will make a payout based on recovery incident expenses.
Guarantees range from AvePoint’s $1 million up to Druva’s $10 million. Infinidat and Rubrik also offer similar guarantees, and Dell plans to roll out its own in January. Druva has reported customers in the double digits since it began offering the agreement in August.
Phil Goodwin, research vice president at IDC, said these guarantees have become a differentiator in cyber recovery offerings.
“Cyber recovery and cyber attacks are such big concerns now that IT organizations are looking for anything and everything that can help them in their defense against those kinds of attacks,” Goodwin said.
But analysts also sounded a word of caution about such guarantees, saying that for customers to reap any benefit, they need to read the fine print.
More than half (58%) of the IT and cybersecurity professionals surveyed reported that data recovery testing is part of their ransomware plan, according to research from TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group. In addition, nearly 9 in 10 organizations are concerned that their backup copies could be corrupted by ransomware attacks, with 43% reporting that they are very concerned. Data resiliency guarantees provide another way in which disaster recovery and data backup vendors are addressing those concerns. AvePoint’s agreement launched earlier this year as part of its Ransomware Protection Toolkit. A customer must purchase AvePoint’s Ransomware Warranty as part of a subscription to its AvePoint Cloud Backup service. Customers pay a price for the guarantee, but the vendor declined to disclose the amount. There are services customers can purchase to prevent a ransomware attack, but they should also consider options such as guarantees if these services fail, according to John Hodges, senior vice president of product strategy at AvePoint. “This comes from ransomware where encryption takes place, not all of a sudden and having one big attack, but something that takes time,” he said. To be eligible for Rubrik’s data protection warranty, customers must purchase a subscription to Rubrik’s Enterprise Edition, the company’s ransomware remediation offering, or be using Rubrik Cloud Vault, its fully managed cloud service. Customers also need a subscription to Rubrik’s Customer Experience Manager (CEM) service.
