From Product To Platform: The Backupify API And The Security Layer Of SaaS

API announcements rarely make big news. But with our official roll out of the Backupify API, I want to talk about why I think this is important news and what it means for the ecosystem. Backupify was started under the premise that every piece of the technology stack is moving from on-premise to the cloud. Our vision has always been to build that data protection layer that sits at the top of the stack.

The idea for an API started several years ago when small ISVs would regularly approach us to ask if Backupify would build a backup for their application. In most cases, it didn’t make economic sense and we had to pass. But clearly there was some demand for small SaaS applications to easily offer their customers a secure, second copy separate from the data that was hosted in the application itself. We began thinking about ways to make it easy for third party developers to add to Backupify, and that thinking overlapped with our own internally focused work about how to make it faster for us to support more applications on our own as well.

The discussion led our CTO Matt Conway, to come up with a model for building a generic backup engine that could be loaded with the data mapping model of any ISV and quickly create a backup. We can now go from taking a matter of months to create a new backup for a new app to building it in a matter of days. It’s a huge step forward. 

So what, exactly, does this mean for the ecosystem?

The new architecture that we have been building since late last year is separated into a component that pulls in data from ISVs, and a component that provides various security, compliance, and data management functions across all data sources. Effectively, we are making it easy for any SaaS application to add backup, archiving, and soon e-discovery capabilities to their application. This means ISVs can move up market to enterprise customers (the ones who most often have these data security and compliance requirements) without building all the functionality themselves. By rapidly expanding to new applications, it positions Backupify to be the data security layer of the SaaS world, which has always been part of our larger vision.

In effect, we are moving from selling a product to selling a platform.

As a Backupify customer, this means that soon, every SaaS application you use can be protected. You can have a secure second copy of your data, for every application you have in the cloud. That data can be restored to the original application, archived, and made available for e-discovery.

As an ISV, you can provide your customers with a much more granular backup, controlled by your customers, as a nice complement to your own disaster recovery capabilities. This will help you get around the “what happens if you…” questions in your sales cycle, and will help you move up market to attract more enterprise customers.

This is an exciting time for us, because it has been a long road, often with technical challenges, to get to this point and execute on our broader vision. But we believe this is where the world is going, and we want to be help lead this next wave of cloud innovation.

We already have a handful of partners signed up, and between now and year end, we will be providing gated access to the joint integrations. If you would like to get in the queue as a customer, please contact our sales team. If you are an ISV and would like to discuss an integration, please email developerprogram-at-backupify.