Druva has raised a $25 million Series C investment from Sequoia Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and Tenaya Capital for its backup and file sharing platform that safeguards a company’s data across mobile devices and desktops. The company will use the funds to extend its new cloud services offering. To date, Druva has raised a total of $52 million.
With smartphones reaching enterprise ubiquity the demand for security technologies is becoming a bonanza for companies like Druva which has customers such as NASA and the University of California at Berkeley.
The Druva technology is designed for integration on commodity servers either on-premise or through Amazon Web Services. It offers a single data store for backup and file sharing, which allows for a more simple deployment and manageability. It also offers an object-sharing storage model, which is much easier than traditional file-based storage. Amazon S3 is an object-storage service that has more than a trillion data objects. it stores all the data in a flat distributed system that uses keys to access data. Each object has its own unique key so it can be retrieved when needed. Traditional storage uses file-based hierarchy directories which requires more metadata to be stored in order to access files.
With its objects-storage technology, Druva takes the metadata, the information about the data object, and separates it from the data itself. With the lighter loads, Druva can provide increased scalability and built-in redundancy, as well as allow IT departments to use inexpensive commodity hardware and manage the storage infrastructure from a single console. Separating the metadata and data provides flexibility into how the data can be used. It helps solve for multiple use cases, meaning it can handle different workloads. IT gets tools to protect the data while end users are able to access their data on-demand from any device.
Druva competes with a host of file-sharing and backup services. Its security technology is praised for how it can protect devices with top-tier encryption technology but its file-sharing is not as robust as from providers such as Egnyte and Box.