Denmark-based SaaS backup provider Keepit is adding to functionality in June and July that includes support for Atlassian dev workflow tools Jira and Confluence, as well as Okta’s access management tool that’s used in Google Workspace.
These come quickly on the heels of anomaly detection capability in backups added in April and sit alongside longer term roadmap items that include development of a threat library that can be scanned alongside backup jobs and automated intelligent restores built around customer RPOs and RTOs.
Keepit is working on expanding its footprint among SaaS applications with the addition of backup support for Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence products. These are, respectively, enterprise development workflow and tracking and corporate wiki software.
Anomaly detection functionality added last month uses insight it can gain from holding large amounts of data from a customer and comparing it over time for anomalies, said Michael Amsinck, chief product officer with Keepit.
“We can look at the data in a very unique way, to say, ‘Can we see any trends happening with your data?’. One of the biggest things is, of course, if snapshot one compared to snapshot two has decreased by X amount of gigabytes, that could be a first red flag that something is going on in your organisation,” said Amsinck. “In the very infancy of anomaly detection, it’s actually all about data size. It could be how many objects are there or types of objects that we know are harmful that we can flag early on.”
Key challenges for Keepit when developing new functionality include determining the criticality of workloads. “When you ask 10 different companies, they will give you most likely nine different answers,” said Amsinck. “But there are some common points among the customer base. They’ll be on Microsoft or Google, Entra ID or Okta access management. Then maybe they’re using Teams or Slack.”
Keepit already has Entra ID integration. Okta will come in July.
Longer term, Amsinck talked about development of a threat library, in partnership with a third party. So, for example, as backups are run, the threat library is scanned for potential multiple external factors that could result in disruption.
“I wouldn’t call it a roadmap item yet. It’s sort of like a discovery point,” said Amsinck, who expanded on the potential complexity of SaaS deployments as a vulnerability to organisations. “It’s very easy to acquire a SaaS tool. You just go in, swipe your credit card and now you have a SaaS tool.
“And, it’s equally easy to connect that SaaS tool with some other SaaS tool that is within your stack. So, all of a sudden you could intentionally and unintentionally have a very big cobweb of SaaS applications that are tied together, which means that a potential bad actor now has different attack vectors. So, there are different threats that could occur other than the classic ransomware that you would have to be aware of.”
Here, said Amsinck, Keepit would look to partner with someone with threat expertise to develop a threat library that runs whenever a backup runs.
Another big item on the horizon for Keepit is to add more intelligent automation to restores. That’s likely to appear “probably within this year”, but with no firm timeline yet, said Amsinck.
Here the aim is to allow a company to restore data in a way that best suits their recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs).
“If the expectation is, ‘I’m just going to restore everything at once’, that’s not going to be very useful because a customer could have one drive that’s many, many terabytes,” said Amsinck. “Instead, it could say, who are the most important people in the company and what amount of data do we need? So rather than saying, I want all five years-worth of data, I need the last month’s-worth of data to get us back on track.”
Setting that up would start when a customer begins their backup journey with Keepit. So, when they design and orchestrate their backup they also reverse engineer that for restores, said Amsinck: “So, we would go in and ask a few questions such as, ‘Select the top 10 people, what’s the retention rate you want?’. It’s in the early stages of sort of design flows and doing these things currently.”
Keepit is one of a number of SaaS cloud-to-cloud backup products and services that have arisen to fill the gap left by cloud providers not offering real backup natively for SaaS apps.
A key feature of Keepit is that it runs its own datacentre capacity, so all backups are independently held away from where source SaaS applications reside.
Keepit has regions based around datacentre capacity in Copenhagen, Frankfurt, London, Zurich, Sydney, Toronto and Washington DC. Each region is treated as a sovereign availability zone with no data moved between them unless approved by the customer. Each region has two active-active datacentres with full-site failover between them. Keepit does not charge for ingress, egress or capacity, but charges by the seat.
Keepit backup is designed to run one or two times a day on an incremental forever schema. It is possible to see individual files and preview them, but that depends on the workload.
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