After initially focusing on providing data governance services for mobile applications, Druva today announced that it is adding support for its first software-as-a-service (SaaS) application in the form of Microsoft Office 365.
Based on a Druva file system actually running on the Amazon Web Services cloud, Druva CEO Jaspreet Singh says IT organizations can now create an entire replica of their Microsoft Office 365 deployments for governance and compliance purposes.
Using the same agent software it previously deployed on client devices, Singh says Druva has added support for Microsoft Office 365 application programming interfaces (APIs) that now make it possible for IT organizations to capture copies of all the documents flowing between endpoints and the Microsoft Office 365 service.
Singh says that IT organizations should expect Druva to add support for additional SaaS applications to provide a mechanism for applying governance and compliance policies from mobile computing devices to the cloud and back again.
In general, Singh says SaaS application providers such as Microsoft want to see the emergence of governance and compliance offerings that eliminate any regulatory issues that would prohibit the adoption of SaaS applications in any number of vertical industries. The degree to which that plays out, of course, will vary by industry and individual company.
But the one thing that is for certain is that IT organizations are increasingly gaining more control of their IT environments, ironically, using technologies in the cloud that enable them to keep track of usage of applications that end users previously invoked to end-run the internal IT department in the first place.