Dell Technologies' 2-year-old PowerProtect data protection platform continues to evolve with the debuted of a cloud-based data protection offering powered by Druva called Dell EMC PowerProtect Backup Service.

The new product brings software-as-a-service (SaaS) application protection into the Dell Technologies PowerProtect portfolio for Google Workspace, Salesforce, and Microsoft 365, as well as endpoint devices and hybrid workloads. It essentially packs Druva’s cloud-based backup platform that includes disaster recovery (DR), archiving, analytics, and visibility across environments. This eliminates redundant copies and infrastructure to better protect, manage, and maximize the value of data. 

Customers can choose their own backup software, use Dell’s, or they can purchase an integrated system.

Laura Dubois, VP of product management and data protection at Dell, explained in a blog post that the update tackles the data protection gap in popular cloud-based application platforms.

“There’s a common misconception that these apps provide native data protection services, however, they do not, which exposes companies to catastrophic data and financial loss,” Dubois writes.

Businesses on average manage nearly 40% more data than they were a year ago, while the estimated total cost of data loss has increased to more than $1 million per organization, according to Dell Technologies‘ Global Data Protection Index 2020 Snapshot. 

To that end, organizations can extend PowerProtect Backup Service to endpoint protection for devices like desktop and laptops, “enabling organizations to leverage the flexibility and economies-of-scale of cloud-based backup and long-term retention to protect critical data at the edge – especially important in remote work scenarios,” Dubois writes.

“The reliance on endpoints has probably never been greater than it has been after the last year that has gone by,” Rob Emsley, director of marketing at Dell EMC, said.

Additionally, “the concept of hybrid cloud is really the reality of most customers that we deal with,” Emsley said. “Their world is hybrid.” The cloud-based data protection service provides support for on-premises backups, which “is something that we believe will be very appealing ... to customers that maybe have a modest data center on premises,” he added. 

And with PowerProtect Backup Service being itself a SaaS platform, infrastructure management falls on Dell and Druva. Updates are done centrally and new capabilities that are introduced become automatically available to customers “so as their environment changes whether or not they add new SaaS applications that maybe they weren't using before, as long as those are available via PowerProtect Backup Service, the ability to protect those is very easy,” Emsley explained.

Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager, which is its software-defined offering that provides a single interface to protect, manage, and recover data in on-premises, virtualized, and cloud deployments, also picked up support for Google Cloud. With the update it now protect workloads across all of the cloud-based Kubernetes services, whether that’s Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), or Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).