Druva Guarantees Your Data Is Safe From Ransomware

Druva has announced a set of guarantees that its cloud-based data protection systems will keep your data safe if you get hit by ransomware.

There are five elements to the new guarantee:

• 100% confidentiality (no customer data will be compromised)
• 100% immutability (last successful backup will be recoverable)
• 99% reliability (backups will happen)
• 99.999% durability (backed up data will be recoverable)
• 99.5% availability (per reporting period)

If Druva fails to live up to its promises, customers can claim up to $10 million in compensation. The actual amount of compensation on offer varies based on how much the customer spends with Druva, but Druva says the new guarantee has been designed so that the vast majority of customers will be eligible, provided they turn on the features Druva needs them to be using to keep the data protected.

Druva claims that it is able to cover more areas than competitor guarantees because of its SaaS-driven approach.

“What I think is important is that we’re guaranteeing the reliability and the durability and availability of the system,” said W. Curtis Preston, chief technical evangelist at Druva. “That’s a big aspect of this, which is something not present in in most other systems because they’re not SaaS.”

Running as SaaS means more components of the data protection stack are under Druva’s control, and they can therefore have more confidence that they’re operated effectively. Few vendors are happy to guarantee the uptime of a backup server that is being operated by a customer, for example.

This guarantee builds on Druva’s recent announcement of upgraded security features in its stack. It’s designed to encourage customers to make use of some of these features to better protect themselves from ransomware, and other attacks.

This might seem a bit self-serving, but it’s difficult for any company to protect data if customers don’t enable the features that make the protection possible. Customers would scream if any vendor attempted to auto-enable features that cost money without customer consent, and rightly so. Hence vendors need to entice customers with incentives to get them to enable these features.

Of course, the large print giveth and the small print taketh away, so it’s wise to check out the details of the terms and conditions rather than assuming you’re covered by the guarantee when you might not be. To Druva’s credit, the T&Cs are available online so you can check them out in your own time, or your lawyers’.

The best outcome for everyone is that no customer ever needs Druva to pay out.