In this era of digital adoption, enterprises are embarking on “cloud first” and “digital first” journeys as part of their efforts to stay relevant in a competitive market. As enterprises have navigated the digital transformation journey, the IT landscape of most enterprises has expanded and transfigured into a spaghetti-like assemblage of technologies and processes. Companies are migrating workloads to the cloud and building or sourcing a wide range of services to enable smoother business transactions. In response, tech companies have been bolstering their cloud businesses, namely by inorganic acquisition. The recent takeover by Amazon Web Services (AWS) of CloudEndure, which enables live workload migration, disaster recovery and continuous backup, is a prime example.
Estimated at around $250 million, the acquisition of CloudEndure is strategically aligned with AWS’ service offerings in cloud transformation. CloudEndure offers disaster recovery, live migration and continuous backup with near-zero downtime to cloud customers. The deal fits well with AWS’ commitment to empower enterprise clients with the cutting-edge tools needed for live workload migration and continuous backup and to realize the strategic benefits of a global, trusted live-migration tool. With enterprises largely using a multi-cloud strategy, the acquisition will potentially help AWS double its revenue by adding these services. This makes it important to understand AWS’ roadmap in the disaster recovery, migration and backup space.
The Disaster Recovery, Live Migration and Continuous Backup Market
One of the key questions from the deal is AWS’ future support for Microsoft’s cloud Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which are both existing CloudEndure customers. In light of GCP’s acquisition of Israel-based cloud migration software maker Velostrata for mass migration and Microsoft Azure’s offering of the Azure Migration Center, the CloudEndure acquisition is not likely to roil the market. However, it will be important for Azure and GCP to strengthen their migration and continuous backup services to stay competitive.
It will be interesting to keep an eye on how AWS will introduce and differentiate its existing service offering from CloudEndure’s services. There are two potential possible areas where AWS could leverage CloudEndure: 1) Cross-selling products for live migration, disaster recovery and continuous backup and 2) integrating CloudEndure with AWS Outposts, a technology that extends Amazon’s cloud capabilities to on-premises systems.
Cloud Service Providers Map Their Future
AWS’ innovation roadmap, physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-physical migration offerings and disaster recovery solution still remain to be seen following the acquisition. The Amazon subsidiary expects CloudEndure to complement its existing product offering and allow it to bring in on-premises AWS Outpost and backup-centric services to the market. Though the acquisition aligns well in strengthening its cloud services, it is critical for AWS to leverage CloudEndure technologies in a phased manner that will retain the trust of existing CloudEndure customers.
ISG helps companies create a strategy and sourcing roadmap for disaster recovery, live migration and continuous backup to meet their business objectives. Contact us to discuss how we can help.
