With new research highlighting the failure of enterprise disaster recovery strategies to keep up with SaaS adoption (see box), Technology Reseller talks to Jerry Mumford, VP UK, I & MEA at Keepit, about the cloud backup and recovery platform’s growing UK presence
At the start of the year, as part of its ongoing international expansion, cloud backup and recovery platform Keepit opened UK&I regional headquarters in the City of London. Alongside its growing geographical presence, the Danish company has also been expanding its services capability.
When Technology Reseller spoke to Jerry Mumford, Keepit VP for UK, I & MEA, in March, the platform, which had started out focussing on M365, was already supporting another seven SaaS applications, with more in the pipeline through ongoing API development.
As Mumford explains, this is enabling Keepit and its partners to address a bigger part of a growing market.
“There’s a stat that the average number of SaaS applications in use in any business is 115. When Keepit’s founders were building the product, the market was still predominantly local delivery
of applications from a server and local storage but now everything is SaaS, so the market has shifted very much in our favour.”
Mumford would not be drawn on actual growth figures when we spoke, but he did say that the headcount in its UK operation, which has risen from three in November 2023 to 10 today, gives a good indication as the ethos at cash-positive Keepit is to spend only money it has earned.
Keepit strengths
Clearly the market for M365 backup is crowded, but Mumford says there are several factors that set Keepit apart, notably the ability to offer full guarantees around data sovereignty and immutability.
“Microsoft have what they call a shared responsibility model, where they deliver the application and the customer is responsible for the data. That’s fairly common knowledge now and there
are quite a few products in the market for backing up M365 data, typically to another public cloud – AWS, Google or whoever it might be.
“Where Keepit differs is, first, we backup your data to our own cloud – we have two data centres in every region in which we operate and we retain two copies of your data in both data centres, effectively giving you four copies – and, second, we back up everything to primary storage. Everything is retained on one tier of disk drive, in a blockchain-like schema, and it’s all completely immutable.”
In addition to Keepit’s resilience and ability to restore quickly from primary storage, having its own cloud in the UK, run from data centres powered by Equinix, enables Keepit to meet the data sovereignty requirements of UK customers. These range from small businesses with 50 seats up to enterprises with many thousands of seats, including one large construction company with more than 100,000.
This, Mumford suggests, is a growing requirement not just in the UK and EU but across the world.
“Data sovereignty is critically important, because if you have your data in another country, EU or non-EU, there are regulations in that country you may not be fluent in. We recently opened our Swiss data centre and, as you can probably guess, for the Swiss that was critical. Not having data sovereignty would have been a barrier to entry, and I believe it will become a barrier to entry in the UK too.”
Another selling point, as mentioned earlier, is Keepit’s ability to back up seven other SaaS products, including Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), a cloud identity and access management solution for apps and devices from Microsoft and third parties.
“For any large organisation, Entra ID is like the combination to the safe. If you retrieve your data, you will also need everyone’s identifications. If you’re a large organisation and you can’t get that back, you’re in as much trouble as if you can’t get your email back. Keepit offers the ability to back up Entra ID, as well as other applications like Power BI, Azure DevOps, Dynamics 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce and Zendesk.”
With the development of additional APIs, this year Mumford expects Keepit to be able to back up another 150 or so SaaS applications.
Predictable pricing
A third differential cited by Mumford is Keepit’s pricing model. Instead of charging customers for the storage they use, as many competitors do, Keepit charges on a per user, per month basis, with a flat fee covering unlimited data storage, ingress/ egress and retention (with the option to retain data for up to 99 years). This, he says, simplifies budgeting and makes it easier, from a financial planning perspective, for growing (or acquiring) businesses to scale their use of the product.
“From the outside we look similar to others, but peel back one layer of the proverbial onion and we’re very different commercially and technically.”
Mumford adds that for resellers, there are other advantages.
“Technically, it’s a very good product – it’s very, very easy for their customers to use or for them to co-manage; there are great margin opportunities; and, as a product, it’s unique. Lots of companies do more or less the same thing. There are very, very few backup vendors that backup M365 and Entra ID to an independent cloud. So we’re giving partners the chance to really differentiate themselves in a crowded market, to add a lot of value to customers and to make margin in the world of Microsoft, where it’s harder to make margin.”
MSP programme
Soon, Keepit will be introducing a programme for MSPs supporting a true consumption model rather than the term- contracts traditionally sold by resellers.
“This model will enable an MSP to consume 10 licences today, 20 licences next month, then go back to 10 and have complete flexibility in their consumption with zero commitment – switching on and off as their customers switch on and off. We don’t have that mechanism built back- end yet. We do have MSP customers who commit to a yearly term and then deploy it their customers and can co-manage it with their users, but we don’t have that consumption mechanism. That, to us, is a true MSP programme.”
For now, Keepit continues to address the needs of MSPs through Connectwise, a provider of software and services to the MSP community – one of a handful of OEM agreements that Keepit has struck with other vendors. It also has relationships with Arcserve, giving customers unified data protection and recovery across on- premises and off-premises workloads, and HPE Zerto.
“HPE Zerto is a really important relationship for us,” says Mumford. “We started the relationship with Zerto pre-HPE. After HPE bought Zerto, they did due diligence on us as an OEM partner for SaaS data protection and now the whole of HPE can sell our product. That’s great validation for a smaller vendor.”
UK growth
After opening its UK headquarters and appointing Jerry Mumford as VP for UK, I & MEA, Keepit is planning to accelerate its growth in the UK – or as Mumford says “put the pedal to the metal”.
For a company that is 100% channel and doesn’t sell anything direct (with the exception of some legacy relationships in Denmark), partner recruitment will have a big role to play in Keepit’s ongoing UK growth.
“We’ve hired another regional partner manager and an EMEA distribution lead and we’re now going to tier our partner network. We have really a good partnership with Phoenix and trade fairly heavily with Softcat and CDW and are looking to add a couple more partners in that Platnium tier. Then we’ll really grow a longer commercial and SMB tail within our partner networks.”
With businesses of all sizes struggling to incorporate SaaS solutions into their disaster recovery strategies (see box), there is clearly plenty of scope for Keepit to continue to expand and still not spend money it hasn’t earned.
Data protection forgotten in cloud and AI expansion
Enterprise disaster recovery strategies, traditionally designed for on-premises IT infrastructures, are lagging behind the surge in cloud application usage and the integration of AI technologies, warns Keepit.
Its caution follows a survey of IT decision-makers published by Foundry, highlighting patchy data protection strategies in companies with 1,000+ employees, and its own study, The great balancing act: Cybersecurity leaders tackle rising pressures, based on interviews with CISOs and CIOs.
While 70% of respondents surveyed by Foundry report that their financial applications are covered by data protection strategies, only 50% say the same of their E-commerce and HR management systems. Under half say it about their CRM systems (48%) and ERP systems (42%).
The report, Can data protection keep pace with the shifting landscape?, reveals that only between one third and one quarter of other systems are properly covered, including critical transaction-based systems, custom applications and collaboration and productivity tools.
Moreover, only half of organisations have incorporated cloud- stored SaaS data into their disaster recovery plans – although an additional 40% are planning to address this gap soon.
A participant in a recent Keepit CISO roundtable said: “We solved many of these challenges 10 to 15 years ago, but with the move to cloud, it’s like we’re starting from scratch again.”
Compliance is a top concern for 73% of survey respondents, with data governance (53%) and enterprise backup and recovery (45%) also ranking highly at a time of greater regulatory scrutiny and increased cybersecurity risk.
Keepit CISO Kim Larsen adds that AI presents another data protection challenge: “Good data
protection is essentially ‘data classification plus good recovery capabilities’. If you understand
your data and can recover uncorrupted versions of it fast, you have a solid foundation to ensure business continuity, compliance and recovery. But this is easier said than done. The complexity of implementing new initiatives, such as governance over data used by large language models (LLMs) and the need to balance conflicting IT demands, pose additional challenges.”
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