HYCU, Inc., a pioneering enterprise software company specializing in data backup, recovery and monitoring for multi-cloud environments, announced HYCU for Azure, its latest purpose-built data protection solution by expanding HYCU Protégé. With the addition of purpose-built support for Azure Cloud, HYCU Protégé now provides tightly integrated data protection, migration and disaster recovery for Azure users broadening the capability for companies to leverage their cloud of choice for their data the way they would want to control it.

In celebration of World Backup Day, and to address the growing need for companies to handle the overwhelming impact of the rise in remote and at-home working in light of the COVID-19 Novel Coronavirus pandemic, HYCU is making its HYCU for Azure data protection functionality available free of charge for the following three months.

"Our strategy has always been to select leading platforms, be they enterprise clouds or public cloud, and to deliver purpose-built solutions for each platform to give a true native service and value experience for the customer," said Simon Taylor, CEO, HYCU, Inc. "We have now introduced a purpose-built cloud data management solution for Azure. With HYCU for Azure, customers will be able to migrate data from on-prem to the cloud, protect the data on Azure, make Azure a DR target for both applications and VMs running on-prem and also have a simplified DR solution for their applications on Azure. I couldn't be prouder of our engineering team for continuing to set the bar high in what companies should expect from their cloud-native data management solutions."

With 60 percent of business running applications on Azure, Azure has experienced strong growth in particular with early stage cloud-adopters. In a recent informal survey of HYCU customers, more than 70 percent were running applications on Azure.

Highlights of HYCU for Azure include:

• True as a Service Offering: As opposed to legacy backup solutions that require a separate infrastructure to run in the cloud, HYCU for Azure runs as a native service, available via subscription directly from Azure Marketplace and billed as part of the Azure bill.
• Extends and Leverages the Power of the Azure Platform: Using native snapshots and integration with Microsoft's Active Directory, HYCU for Azure is built on native APIs, supports all BLOB storage classes and auto selects the right class of Azure BLOB storage for the policy the customer chooses.
• Simplified, Impact-free, Enterprise Class Data Protection of VMs/Apps on Azure: Agentless, HYCU for Azure provides flexible backup policies to meet different SLAs as well as 1-click view of protected and unprotected Apps/VMs. Easy to perform granular recovery, HYCU for Azure also leverages its own IP for Change Block Tracking to provide incremental backups forever for extremely efficient storage consumption.
• 1-click, App Consistent Migration from On-Premises on to Azure and Back: As both application aware and consistent, HYCU provides 1-click migration with no worries about network constraints. Delivered as a true self-service, even for migration and Test/Dev, HYCU for Azure requires zero compute resources on the cloud during migration.
• 1-click App Consistent DR for Customers Who Want to Use Azure as a DR target: With simplified failover and failback, no limitations with network constraints and no additional compute required on the cloud, HYCU for Azure is an extremely efficient and cost-efficient DR service for users that need that capability.

"HYCU continues to evolve its solutions for both on-prem and public cloud," said Christophe Bertrand, Data Protection Senior Analyst at ESG. "While Microsoft provides native backup service for customers who want protection for infrequent individual VMs/Apps, for customers that need systematic backup and recovery for business-critical applications, HYCU now offers a cloud-native and flexible solution. It's not just an interesting solution to protect workloads between on-prem to Azure and back, but it also allows to leverage the power of Azure as and when customers may need it. As I have said before, much as HYCU has done for Nutanix, VMware and GCP, they are delivering an innovative "natively-developed" solution that will be of interest to the growing number of Azure users."

Pricing and Availability:

HYCU for Azure is available immediately with data migration and disaster recovery functionality generally available in 30 days. HYCU for Azure is available on Azure Marketplace and through authorized AZURE Provider partners. Subscription and billing are handled through Azure Marketplace. Pricing is determined by the amount of data being protected and the frequency of backup.