During the 64th edition of The IT Press Tour, HYCU took the briefing stage with a series of announcements that should make enterprise IT teams sit up and pay attention. The company used this gathering of global technology journalists to showcase how it’s addressing some of the thorniest problems facing data protection teams today: fragmented cloud backups, AI workload protection, and the growing attack surface presented by SaaS applications.
What became clear during the briefing wasn’t just that HYCU has been busy. It’s that they’ve been thinking differently about the entire data protection problem.
The Dell Deal That Changes Everything
Let’s start with the elephant in the room – or rather, the very large hardware vendor (who wasn’t actually) in the room. HYCU announced earlier this year that it’s now part of Dell Technologies’ Etc program, which means Dell can directly sell HYCU products through its extensive channel network.
For those keeping score at home, Dell has roughly 60,000 channel partners globally. That’s not a typo.
But this isn’t just about market reach. The technical integration tells a more interesting story. HYCU now functions as what Sathya Sankaran, Head of Cloud Products, calls an “intelligent data mover” for Dell’s Data Domain platform. Using DD Boost technology, HYCU can push data from over 90 different connectors into Data Domain with deduplication ratios reaching 40:1 in real-world deployments.
Brian Babineau, HYCU’s Chief Customer Officer, explained the Dell relationship from a use case perspective: “Dell has a substantial install base of Microsoft 365 running on Dell infrastructure. Secondarily, cloud has become one where customers had either shipped it off of a Dell solution and removed it, or they want to get more value out of it.”
The partnership is already bearing fruit globally. HYCU is being pulled into opportunities across Australia, the Middle East, France, and other regions where Dell has presence but HYCU hasn’t traditionally had strong footholds. One of the first post-signature deals? A Middle East customer protecting Fortune 100-scale workloads.
Here’s what makes this technically interesting: Dell’s Data Domain Virtual Edition (DDVE) can now sit as a gateway between applications and cloud storage, performing deduplication before data ever hits expensive egress charges. For customers dealing with petabyte-scale data lakes, this isn’t just convenient – it’s financially necessary.
SaaS Protection: Broader and Deeper
The SaaS protection story HYCU told reveals something most enterprises haven’t fully grasped yet: their SaaS adoption has wildly outpaced their protection strategy.
Subbiah Sundaram, SVP of Product, shared research findings that painted a sobering picture. The average organization now runs 139 SaaS applications. Organizations that experienced a data breach? They’re running an average of 160 SaaS apps. And here’s the kicker: 65 percent of respondents experienced at least one breach in the last 12 months, with business disruption costing an average of $400,000 per day.
When you multiply that by the average five-day outage duration, you’re looking at a minimum $2 million impact per incident.
HYCU’s response has been to expand coverage aggressively, adding 25 new integrations in just over a year. The list now includes enterprise-heavy applications like iManage (used by 80 percent of the top 100 law firms), Atlassian’s full portfolio, GitHub, and Microsoft services.
The iManage Story Deserves Special Attention
iManage represents exactly the kind of vertical-specific challenge that requires deep integration work. One global law firm used iManage to manage 25 terabytes across 3 million documents – and that was just for their initial proof of concept. Their full estate, spanning operations in 93 countries outside the United States, contains vastly more.
The application stores cases, documents, filings, images, and evidence. It’s not just large in volume; it’s the operational backbone of legal practice. When HYCU and iManage jointly developed the integration, they didn’t just enable backups – they built in library-level recovery, workspace restoration, and document-level granularity.
And they did it with customer-owned storage, meaning law firms can keep data within their own S3 buckets with full sovereignty and control.
The AI Data Protection Problem Nobody’s Really Solving
This is where HYCU’s briefing got even more interesting. While most backup vendors are bolting AI features onto existing products, HYCU is asking a different question: how do you protect the data that AI workloads depend on?
Sankaran walked through the AI data pipeline, which includes ingestion (files, objects, databases, data lakes, and streams), enrichment (ETL, feature engineering, vector embeddings), training, serving, and prediction stages. At each point, you’re creating new data sets that need protection.
In Google Cloud, for example, this might mean protecting BigQuery datasets, Cloud Storage buckets, Artifact Registry models, Firestore metadata, and Vertex AI workbooks-all of which contain different pieces of the AI puzzle.
The emergence of data lakehouse platforms (BigQuery, Databricks, Snowflake) as the new system of record compounds this challenge. Databricks alone is a $3.2 billion ARR business growing at over 50 percent year-over-year. These platforms now handle trillions of SQL queries monthly and store exabytes of data in open formats like Parquet, Delta, and Iceberg.
Yet traditional backup approaches fall flat. Most cloud services only offer seven-day retention with no incremental backup capabilities. If you’re generating 100 terabytes of data daily and want 30-day retention, you’re looking at massive egress costs just to move data between cloud providers for off-site copies.
The Financial Services Reality Check
Sankaran also shared an example of a financial services customer generating 100 terabytes daily across core banking, cards, digital channels, and real-time trading feeds. With multi-month retention requirements and no efficient incremental backup mechanism, the cost of cross-cloud protection became prohibitive at roughly five times the storage cost due to egress charges.
HYCU’s approach leverages Data Domain’s deduplication to reduce that 100TB daily change rate down to less than 5TB actually transferred, enabling cross-cloud resilience without the egress tax. For a customer potentially looking at moving multiple petabytes monthly, the economics shift dramatically.
There’s also the data recreation problem. Many AI datasets come from streaming sources-social media feeds for sentiment analysis, IoT data streams, real-time market data. If you lose that data, there’s no going back to get it. X (the artist formerly known as Twitter) charges $500,000 annually just to search 50,000 tweets. Losing months of training data isn’t just inconvenient; it’s potentially unrecoverable.
R-Shield: Security Without Surrendering Control
The cyber resilience portion of HYCU’s story centers on what they’ve called R-Shield, which isn’t a separate product but rather integrated capabilities across the platform.
This design philosophy matters. While competitors sell scanning and security as add-ons, HYCU built these capabilities into the core platform. The result is anomaly detection and malware scanning that works consistently across VMs, file shares, SaaS applications, and cloud services.
Near-Source Scanning Changes the Game
Most backup vendors handle malware scanning by backing up data first, then restoring it to a separate environment for analysis. If you have a petabyte of data, that means recovering a petabyte daily just to scan it. The optimization most vendors make? Randomly sample files and scan those instead.
HYCU took a different approach. They perform scanning at or near the source using existing snapshots – the same snapshots they’re already leveraging for backup. On Nutanix, for example, HYCU uses native snapshots for both backup and scanning, making the process far more efficient than moving data around.
Babineau emphasized the architectural advantage: “Taking advantage of the snapshot is half the story. How it executes is the other part. You don’t actually have to send the data for the analysis outside the environment.”
This also addresses a sovereignty concern. Some vendors ship metadata to cloud services for analysis, which means customer data leaves their control. HYCU’s scanning happens within the customer’s environment, analyzing full datasets rather than just metadata samples.
The Immutability Story Gets Interesting for SaaS
HYCU’s R-Lock feature provides immutable, object-locked backups across all workloads – including SaaS applications. This might not sound remarkable until you realize most SaaS backup vendors can’t actually provide true immutability.
Why? Because if they lock the data and you decide to switch vendors next year, who pays for the remaining retention period? SaaS vendors typically offer “soft locks” that look similar but don’t provide the same guarantee.
HYCU sidesteps this by storing data in customer-owned cloud accounts. The customer controls the storage, manages the lock, and can keep data as long as needed without vendor dependencies. Combined with efficient incremental backups, this makes long-term retention economically feasible.
The Use Cases That Demonstrate Platform Maturity
Several customer examples from the briefing illustrate how enterprises are actually using these capabilities:
The Federal Agency Migration: A large U.S. Armed Forces organization needed to migrate from an on-premises VMware environment to a hybrid model spanning Azure Government Cloud, Azure Stack HCI (formerly Azure local), AWS GovCloud, and some workloads remaining on-premises. HYCU became the common protection layer enabling workload mobility across all these environments from a single console.
The Law Firm’s Crown Jewels: When a global law firm evaluated iManage protection, they didn’t just need backup-they needed multiple copies in different clouds, plus an on-premises copy, with the ability to continue working even if iManage itself went down. The offline recovery capability means they can export and access case data even during a supply chain incident.
The Investment Firm’s Box Dependency: A large investment firm with 3,000 employees stores everything in Box. If Box goes down, the entire operation stops. They required the ability to get data out and accessible elsewhere during an outage, especially during active transactions. HYCU’s offline recovery provides readable access to data even when the SaaS platform is unavailable.
The Insurance Company’s Object Storage: A financial services insurance company stores massive volumes of signed documents in object storage-every policy document, every signature, every compliance record. Despite object storage’s eleven nines of durability, they needed protection against account deletion, ransomware, and compliance requirements. They’re now protecting petabytes of object storage data as tier-one production workloads.
The Platform Play Behind the Products
What HYCU demonstrated in this briefing was less about individual features and more about platform maturity. The iManage integration, for example, wasn’t built entirely by HYCU developers. It was jointly developed with iManage using HYCU’s platform APIs.
This matters because the pace of application change far exceeds what any single vendor can address. By enabling partners and application vendors to build integrations, HYCU can expand coverage faster than competitors who rely solely on internal development.
Sundaram noted that Gartner Magic Quadrant vendors have added only five new SaaS applications in the last two years combined (two through acquisitions). HYCU added 25 in roughly the same period.
The platform also enables consistent policy management across disparate workloads. A single backup policy can define retention, replication, scanning, and immutability across on-premises VMs, cloud databases, and SaaS applications. The alternatives typically require multiple tools with separate interfaces and policies.
Where This All Leads
HYCU is making a bet that enterprises want three things: comprehensive coverage across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, sovereignty over their data and protection infrastructure, and a platform approach rather than a collection of point products.
The Dell partnership validates the technical architecture – you don’t integrate DD Boost support across 90+ data sources if the platform isn’t solid. The expansion into AI/ML workload protection positions them ahead of a curve most enterprises haven’t fully navigated yet. And the focus on customer-owned storage and near-source processing addresses sovereignty concerns that will only grow more pressing.
For enterprises drowning in SaaS applications, juggling multi-cloud strategies, and starting to deploy AI workloads at scale, HYCU’s story is worth paying attention to. Not because they have all the answers, but because they’re asking some of the right questions about where data protection needs to go.
And in a market that’s been dominated by legacy vendors and newer players focused primarily on ransomware recovery, that different perspective might be exactly what IT teams need.
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