Geocaching is Fun. Finding Cloud-Based Data Sources is Not.

I’ve always been tempted to give geo-caching a try.

 It looks like an awesome weekend activity where you get to use some technology - in the form of compasses, GPS, cell phones, maps, etc. - you get to apply your smarts and intelligence, and you bring up your heart rate and walk around in nature looking for that smartly hidden treasure.  

For many reasons, I’ve never started a geo-caching excursion. In the end, it’s a lot of time and energy for something that has no immediate value or benefit even though it sounds fun.  The weekend is always already full of either doing chores, or spending time with friends and/or family, even though I know it’d be good for my body and longer-term mental stability and body health.

Since I started at HYCU and talked to many of our customers, I have noticed parallels to my geo-caching dilemma.  People like the Heads of IT organizations, CIOs, and/or CISOs – those that eventually are responsible for the resilience of the backbone of their infrastructure – are more than occupied with making sure that their infrastructure is running and up to date to support the main business functions. Their days are full keeping up their data centers, upgrading software, and ensuring that ransomware can’t get to their precious data and infrastructure. Heck, most of them are lucky that they have something in place for backup and recovery of the workloads in their data centers.

These teams do not have the time or energy to think about everything that is happening outside of their immediate ‘kingdom’. The usage of IT services has dramatically evolved over the last 20 years, going from a very centrally managed model to a very distributed, open approach where departments and individuals within an organization start using online services to help with their job, also known as shadow IT. In a way, this forces those responsible to go on their own treasure hunt.

Cloud-based services like ServiceNow, Salesforce, OKTA, Dropbox, and Workday are used in every organization, and the spread of such online services is only accelerating.

 In 2022, the average mid-sized company in the US used 200+ SaaS services across their organization, with only 23% of those managed by the central IT team.

And there, I think I’ve landed on the crux of this analogy: IT teams that manage the central infrastructure typically have a sound data protection and DR strategy for the workloads within their purview.  Recovering from an outage or (accidental or targeted) data deletion event quickly and efficiently helps the entire organization to be resilient. Still, now with over 75% of data sources outside of their data center (that they might not even know about!), they have a huge issue to 1. identify these sources and 2. extend their data protection strategies to cover these data sources.  

With HYCU’s recent announcement of the R-Cloud development platform, SaaS companies, ISVs, partners, and even customers can now quickly build modules that plug into HYCU’s data protection as a service, HYCU Protégé, and provide backup and recovery capabilities for their cloud-based applications. And HYCU customers can now set up data protection for their as-a-Service apps and cloud services in just a few clicks.  

With HYCU’s recent announcement to extend its protection for DBaaS, PaaS, and SaaS applications, and the integration with organizations’ OKTA or AD deployments, the IT leadership team can now discover cloud-based data sources that do not comply with their organization’s data resiliency policies with HYCU’s patent-pending R-Graph technology. With just a few clicks, customers can connect to their organization’s OKTA and/or AD deployments to scan for the usage of cloud-based services.

Once discovered, HYCU Protégé will generate dashboards and reports that allow CI(S)Os to visualize the sprawl of applications and data across their IT estate (from on-premises to cloud and as-a-Service) and set up backup for these sources using HYCU’s intuitive data protection capabilities in just a few seconds.  

In short, rather than going on a chaotic Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-style hunt, HYCU R-Graph is the treasure map that automatically discovers hidden treasures (data sources) within the organization and allows IT leaders to protect these treasures, i.e., set up backup and recovery policies for these sources, in no time.  

Please check out our comprehensive R-Graph demo video, or request to set up some time with one of our channel partners to organize an actual treasure hunt in your organization’s data estate.

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Author: Mark Nijmeijer, Senior Director of Product Management

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