Clumio has added Microsoft 365 to its secure backup as a service to fill a data protection gap and reduce ransomware risks for Microsoft 365 users.

Businesses that standardize on Microsoft 365 need to protect and ensure compliance of their email data, Clumio said. As the data owner, these organizations are responsible for data protection and backup.

Bill Danz is Clumio’s director of channel. The addition of Microsoft 365 on Clumio’s backup as a service is a “great opportunity” for partners, he said.

Clumio’s Bill Danz

“Greater than 60% of enterprise customers use Microsoft, yet many of them don’t realize that they themselves are responsible for the protection of data in email, not Microsoft,” he said.

Danz says this is a challenging problem for Microsoft users. It’s also an area where partners can add a lot of value “by offering a solution that can protect not only Microsoft 365, but also data that they have in public and private cloud, all with a secure service built on a single platform.”

Clumio is the first data protection vendor to deliver a private, public and SaaS data protection service on a single platform, Danz said.

“Data protection can be a huge barrier to enterprise initiatives designed to help them get to cloud faster,” he said. “The complexity and cost of data protection in the cloud is exponentially harder than in the data center.”

Clumio touts a single service for a wide variety of hybrid cloud, public cloud and SaaS use cases.

“This will be much more competitive in the market relative to other channel players that partner with vendors with point solutions. You need four or five of them to equal what Clumio does with one service,” said Danz.

Multiple COVID-19-related email scams have been documented. Some provide links to fake Microsoft 365 login screens that capture user credentials.

Ransomware & Backup

By 2021, ransomware will cause $20 billion in damage globally. A business will become a ransomware victim every 11 seconds, Clumio said, citing Cybersecurity Ventures research.

“There has been a significant increase in ransomware attacks because the security posture of the enterprise changed drastically when the attack surface rapidly expanded due to employees and students working and learning from home,” Danz said. “Clumio has a security-first focus and its cloud-native design ensures data is securely backed up in the cloud.”

Clumio says security credentials are separate from Microsoft 365 production credentials. And during backups, data is written to an S3 object store and can’t be changed. This creates an air-gapped security layer.

“This provides additional peace of mind for a sound recovery in the case of a data breach or ransomware attack resulting in data deletion within production mailboxes and email accounts,” said Danz.

Clumio is investing more in product development since announcing $135 million in Series C funding last November. It plans to invest more in backup-as-a-service products in the coming months.

“Clumio will continue to protect additional workloads in the private cloud, public cloud and SaaS,” Danz said. “Because we are delivered as SaaS, we rapidly innovate and push new releases to customers regularly so that they can quickly take advantage of new capabilities … each of which presents another selling opportunity for the partner, but always as extension of the platform that they are already familiar with and have sold to their customer base.”

“As enterprises continue to make oversight, protection and control of their data a priority, leaders must also solidify their backup strategy for Microsoft 365,” said Archana Venkatraman, IDC’s associate research director for cloud data management. “Without data protection that also encompasses SaaS, companies are exposing themselves to data loss, security issues and compliance risks.”