OwnBackup acquires RevCult to bolster its SaaS data protection across clouds

Cloud data backup and recovery platform OwnBackup has acquired RevCult, a company focused on providing security and governance solutions for Salesforce.

The acquisition comes less than a month after OwnBackup raised $240 million at a $3.35 billion valuation, and just a few months after the company announced its first two acquisitions — SaaS data management company Nimmetry and cybersecurity startup Merlinx.

Founded in 2012, OwnBackup works with major businesses, such as Adecco, AECOM, and Delivery Hero, serving up the tools to create daily backups of their SaaS data and restore it quickly when required. The New Jersey-based company has so far largely supported Salesforce and its broader ecosystem of companies, though it’s in the process of extending support to other clouds, starting with Microsoft later this year.

Misconfigured

Internal security misconfigurations are a common factor in data breaches, with Gartner noting that 99% of “cloud security failures” are down to faults at the customer’s end rather than at a cloud infrastructure level. “That’s because most companies don’t have a holistic solution to tackle fundamental things like data classification, security posture analysis, data backup and recovery, data archiving, and more,” OwnBackup CEO Sam Gutmann told VentureBeat.

This is why OwnBackup is now bolstering its own offering by adding more security and governance smarts to the mix, a category often referred to as SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM).

Founded in 2011, San Diego-based RevCult is all about protecting sensitive Salesforce data from misconfigurations and thus breaches and non-compliance — this becomes all the more pertinent as an organization’s data grows in volume. The company counts among its customers big-name companies such as Intuit and L’Oréal, and it has served as OwnBackup’s data protection partner for several years.

“A single SaaS app includes numerous security settings, controls, and policies that must be managed and tracked, creating a near-infinite number of opportunities for mistakes and oversights,” Gutmann said. “As a result, managing SaaS security is incredibly difficult.”

As things stand, OwnBackup’s customers would need to tap services from multiple vendors to attain these types of data backup and protection capabilities. But with RevCult under its wing, OwnBackup will now be able to offer everything through a single platform.

Above: RevCult

Shared responsibility

While SaaS platforms such as Salesforce offer disaster recovery tools in the event of a systemwide outage, the customer (i.e. the company) is still responsible for account-level security — including permissions and passwords — as part of what is known as a “shared responsibility model,” whereby the platform owner is responsible for infrastructure and the customer is responsible for everything specific to their own account. This is why taking RevCult on board could prove to be a major selling point for OwnBackup as it looks to lure more customers on board — it’s all about preventing issues from happening rather than relying on recovery solutions.

“Many of the problems OwnBackup helps customers recover from are preventable through the addition of proactive security measures like the ones that RevCult provides,” Gutmann explained. “Our combined solution will help customers mitigate the security risks that lead to data loss and corruption and rapidly recover should those types of incidents occur.”

RevCult is among numerous companies that have built a business almost entirely on top of Salesforce. Indeed, while Salesforce itself is a $250 billion business, some estimates suggest the broader Salesforce ecosystem could be 4 times bigger. However, with OwnBackup now gearing up to extend its own support beyond Salesforce to other clouds, the RevCult acquisition will also go some way toward helping OwnBackup provide more security and compliance tooling across the board.

“We plan to fully integrate RevCult’s products into the OwnBackup platform and provide comprehensive SaaS data protection across multiple clouds,” Gutmann added.