Why Your Cloud Backups Are Quietly Failing You: The Hidden Crisis in Data Protection
The cloud was supposed to simplify everything. No more tape drives, no more backup windows, no more worrying about whether your data would survive a disaster. Just set it and forget it, right?
Not quite.
During HYCU's recent presentation at the 64th IT Press Tour, the company's leaders painted a picture that should concern anyone responsible for protecting data in modern cloud environments. The problem isn't that cloud backups don't work—it's that they're suffering from what HYCU Chief Customer Officer Brian Babineau calls "lifestyle diseases."
The Lifestyle Disease Analogy That Actually Makes Sense
Sathya Sankaran, HYCU's Head of Cloud Products, borrowed a medical metaphor to describe what's happening with cloud data protection: "What my doctor calls lifestyle diseases—you don't notice them every day, but there are problems."
Storage obesity. Your backup data is bloating because every cloud backup is a full export, not an incremental. You're storing massive amounts of redundant data and paying premium prices for it.
Hyperattention. You're dealing with too many consoles, too many APIs, too many third-party services just to protect your data across different platforms.
Numbness. You don't realize you have blind spots in your protection strategy until you actually need to recover something—and discover you can't.
The comparison works because, like lifestyle diseases, these problems build slowly. You don't notice them until you're facing a crisis.
The Real Cost of Cloud Data Loss
HYCU's State of SaaS Resilience Report 2025 revealed some numbers that should worry IT leaders:
- 65% of organizations experienced a SaaS-related breach in the past year. Not "might experience" or "are at risk of"—they actually had one.
- Organizations with more SaaS applications get breached more often. Companies running 201+ SaaS apps saw a 77% breach rate, compared to 60% for those with fewer apps.
-The average daily cost of SaaS downtime is $405,770. With recovery typically taking five working days, that's $2.3 million per incident.
But here's what struck me most during the presentation: these aren't hypothetical scenarios. HYCU shared real examples:
- A financial institution managing thousands of GitHub repositories
with high change rates, needing scalable backups with granular
recovery.
- A manufacturer storing critical componentry data in Jira, requiring
guaranteed recovery of 50+ objects and configurations per item for
compliance.
- A European law firm transitioning 25TB of document data from
on-premises iManage to the cloud, starting with 3 million documents.
These aren't edge cases. This is how businesses actually operate now.
The AI Workload Problem Nobody's Talking About
One of the most interesting parts of the presentation focused on something that's not getting enough attention in the backup world: AI and machine learning workloads.
As companies rush to implement enterprise AI—not just ChatGPT integrations, but training models on their own data—they're creating massive new datasets that need protection. And here's the problem: traditional backup vendors aren't following the data.
Sankaran walked through a typical AI stack in Google Cloud. You've got training data stored in one service, feature data in another (like AlloyDB), model artifacts in Google Artifact Registry, and metadata scattered across additional services.
HYCU claims to be the only vendor that can protect this entire stack—from your code to your models to your training data—in a single platform.
Why does this matter? Some companies actually want to prove they didn't use copyrighted data to train their models. When regulators come asking questions, they need to show the provenance of their training data. If you can't recover that data, you can't prove anything.
The BigQuery Story: Where Data Gravity Has Shifted
Here's a stat that caught my attention: BigQuery is a $4 billion business unit for Google, growing at double-digit rates. Databricks, which serves a similar function for Azure, is at $3.2 billion ARR and growing at over 50% year-over-year.
These "data lakehouse" platforms are becoming the new systems of record for businesses. When Google's CEO says "AI" in a keynote, what he's really saying is that the data lives in BigQuery.
And according to the presentation, customers are dealing with petabyte-scale datasets in these environments. One customer mentioned 20 petabytes sitting in BigQuery. Another had six petabytes in Azure Database.
The problem? Native cloud backup solutions don't deduplicate. Every backup is a full export. The storage costs balloon. One financial customer HYCU described generates 100TB of new data daily. With a 30-day retention policy—not even particularly aggressive—the costs add up fast.
HYCU's solution involves using Dell's Data Domain technology with DD Boost, which they claim can achieve 40:1 deduplication ratios. That means 40 petabytes of data stored as one petabyte. When you're moving data across cloud providers at 5x the cost of storage due to egress fees, that difference matters.
The Dell Partnership: Not What You'd Expect
HYCU announced their inclusion in Dell's OTC program during the presentation. This is interesting because Dell is fundamentally a hardware company that wants to sell on-premises equipment, while HYCU built its reputation on cloud and SaaS protection.
Why did Dell pick them? Two reasons, according to Subbiah Sundaram, SVP, Products:
- Dell didn't have good solutions for SaaS and cloud backup. They had OEM relationships and partnerships, but nothing clean for SaaS.
- Dell sees HYCU as an "intelligent data mover" for Data Domain, their backup storage platform.
The Dell partnership has already driven business. One of their first post-signature deals was in the Middle East, where a customer required that their first copy of data reside in a specific country due to political concerns, with a second copy on-premises.
The iManage Story: When Legal Data Goes to the Cloud
HYCU recently announced support for iManage Cloud, which is used by 80% of the top 100 law firms. This integration is particularly interesting because it shows how SaaS applications are moving into mission-critical territory.
During the presentation, Brian Babineau described a large law firm that had 25TB of data across 2 billion documents. That was just for testing the software—not their entire data set.
Why does a law firm need such sophisticated backup for document management? Because iManage isn't just storing files. It's maintaining complex structures of cases, documents, links, images, and evidence. If you lose that data, you're not just losing files—you're losing the organizational structure that makes those files useful.
One customer quote from the presentation stuck with me: "iManage is essential to how our legal teams work. It's the assurance we need without added complexity."
The Security Features That Actually Matter
HYCU introduced what they call "R-Shield" for cyber resilience. Two features stood out:
Near real-time malware scanning at source. Unlike competitors who back up data first and then scan it (which doesn't scale when you have petabytes), HYCU scans at the source using snapshots. They do full data scans, not just metadata, and the customer's data never leaves their control.
True immutable storage for SaaS. Most SaaS backup vendors tell you they'll "lock" your data for seven years, but it's a soft lock. If you fire them next year, who pays for the remaining six years of storage? HYCU's R-Lock actually stores data in your own cloud account with true object lock-based immutability.
One customer example from the presentation: a large federal agency migrating from VMware to a mix of Azure Government Cloud, Azure Local, AWS, and some remaining on-premises infrastructure. They needed one solution that could handle all of those environments and provide disaster recovery orchestration across them.
HYCU was the only vendor that could do it.
The Cost of Recreation
Something the presentation highlighted that I haven't seen emphasized enough elsewhere: it's not just about losing data—it's about the cost of recreating it.
Financial services customers stream sentiment analysis data directly from social media feeds. If you lose that data, it's gone. You can't recreate historical Twitter sentiment about a stock from three months ago. And if you wanted to get bulk data from Twitter (now X), you'd pay around $500,000 per year for API access.
For companies doing streaming analytics, losing that data doesn't just mean downtime—it means permanent data loss that impacts their models and predictions.
What This Means for Developers and IT Teams
The presenters made several points that matter for anyone building or protecting cloud infrastructure:
Coverage beats features. HYCU supports over 90 cloud services across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Most backup vendors support EC2, some files, and maybe RDS. But your VMs depend on IAM, KMS, WAF, DNS, CloudFormation templates, and more. If you only back up the VM, can you actually restore a functional system?
The backup industry is consolidating around SaaS. The major Gartner Magic Quadrant vendors combined added only five new SaaS applications in the last two years. HYCU has added 25+ new integrations in roughly the same period.
Sovereignty matters more than people expected. European customers, particularly in Germany, Switzerland, and France, want copies of their SaaS data stored on-premises. It sounds counterintuitive, but regulatory and political concerns are driving this requirement.
Cross-cloud resilience is prohibitively expensive. The egress fees for moving 100TB of data between cloud providers at 5x storage costs make true multi-cloud backup strategies economically unfeasible—unless you have deduplication at the source.
The Bottom Line
Cloud data protection is at an inflection point. The old model of backing up VMs and files isn't enough when your business runs on SaaS applications, AI workloads, and petabyte-scale data lakes.
HYCU's pitch is that they've built a platform that follows the data wherever it goes—from SaaS to cloud to AI workloads—with consistent security and recovery capabilities. They're not asking you to adopt a new console for each workload. They're not storing your data in their control plane. And they're not charging egress fees that make cross-cloud resilience impossible.
Whether that platform approach wins in the market remains to be seen. But the problems they're highlighting are real. Your cloud backups probably do have lifestyle diseases. The question is whether you'll notice before you need to recover something critical.