How Do Mergers & Acquisitions of Backup Vendors Affect Your Company's Data Protection?

Your company has a data protection solution and strategy in place. The product does its job and adequately protects your data and your systems. You sleep well at night.

Yet, one day you hear news that your software vendor is planning to spin-off its backup division, split up the company, or merge with another vendor?

Does the seemingly unrelated change in corporate structure affect your business?

The short answer is: Yes. The corporate ownership or structure of a software company most certainly affects its strategy and product lines – including investments in R&D, maintenance and customer support.

Where’s the new product release you promised me?

When a company spins off, splits, merges or is acquired, you essentially have a new company as your vendor. This company, undoubtedly, will have new management, new corporate strategy and priorities, and a new set of resources. It will also do everything to please new shareholders or investors – including decreasing investment in “less attractive” product lines. This may mean that your product line and the new features you are expecting on the next release will not be there anymore!

The solution you use may get lower priority, or even discontinued. The vendor may also simply choose to stop providing cloud backup services altogether or stop producing hardware appliances you rely upon.

But, it does not end there. Less investment in R&D will mean the solution will not have timely support for new operating systems, applications or hardware – failing to keep up with your constantly evolving infrastructure.

Security updates will also get delayed – directly affecting the safety, security and privacy of your company’s data.

Who will answer the phone?

Less investment in support will mean your calls will be picked up slower, resolutions will take longer, and quality of service to your users and your business will deteriorate.

In short, any significant corporate ownership change can affect the products and lines of business that support your company, eliminating resources, altering the product roadmap, and reducing the level of support.

When it comes to choosing the right data protection solution for your business, you and your management should ask this question: Can I afford to put my business and users at risk by trusting a solution that may not have a vendor behind it in the near future?

Data protection should be a safe choice. Work with an established vendor, whose sole focus is data protection. Only in this case can you be sure that your data protection vendor will continue to evolve with innovative technologies and provide the level of support you rely upon to run your business, completely protecting your entire environment – physical, virtual and/or cloud.

And don’t forget the 3-2-1 Rule for Backup to make sure that you have complete protection – you can watch the video here.

Does your data protection vendor have you completely covered?