Druva eyes data protection for IoT workloads

Cloud data protection software supplier Druva is setting its sights on protecting data generated by the internet of things (IoT) and edge devices, according to its founder and CEO Jaspreet Singh.

Speaking to Computer Weekly in an exclusive interview in Singapore, Singh said Druva is looking to solve the challenges in protecting event and sensor data that is being created at scale as IoT adoption increases.

“Massive amounts of data are being created, not only from genomic sequencing but in large-scale agriculture, where there could be geospatial, image, video or log data,” Singh said.

Although Druva’s platform is well-poised to handle the “data explosion”, given its ability to map and manage data at scale, Singh said there is a need for more targeted offerings to address industry-specific IoT use cases.

“There are multiple things we’re looking at and we’re not close yet,” Singh said. “But we’re looking at the market very actively to see what’s our role there to help customers process, retain and give access to their IoT data while meeting governance and compliance requirements.”

In July 2019, Druva acquired CloudLanes, a hybrid cloud data protection and migration firm that specialises in moving data from on-premise systems to the cloud.

This came on the heels of an earlier partnership with AWS in November 2018 to make Druva’s software available on AWS Snowball Edge, a data migration and edge computing device that comes with 100TB of storage, along with support for computing tasks via built-in Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda serverless functions and AWS Greengrass capabilities.  

Almost one year on, Singh said Druva is still assessing how Snowball Edge is being used in the market. “Are AWS customers using Greengrass, Amazon S3 or the NAS capabilities? Depending on how they use those services, we’ll start to build a comprehensive IoT platform around it,” he said.

For now, Singh sees Snowball Edge being used more to move data from the edge to the cloud, noting that the price and performance of the device have not reached a “point of persistence” for mainstream adoption.

Meanwhile, Druva is working with AWS to see how it can attach its services to AWS’s event handler to collect data from the edge, even as AWS Outposts, the on-premise storage rack bundled with AWS services, is slated to debut later this year.

“We’re waiting for a persistent architecture and see how we can attach to it.” Singh said. “The lack of standardisation in IoT makes it very hard to develop a ‘clean’ solution, but if one of these platforms takes off, we will go very far because we have a cloud architecture and policy engine for data movement to capture it all.”

According to IDC, there will be 41.6 billion connected IoT devices, generating 79.4 zettabytes of data in 2025. Some of this data is small and bursty, indicating a single metric of a machine’s health, while large amounts of data can be generated by video surveillance cameras using computer vision to analyse crowds of people, for example.