Storage array customers, like those using Rubrik and Nutanix, increasingly require as-a-service backup and disaster recovery. ADP is looking to expand into this area, and is also exploring how it might use AI with the customer data it collects.
Assured Data Protection (ADP) is a global managed services provider, offering Backup-as-a-Service and DR-as-a-Service. It is Rubrik’s largest MSP and, as of this year, also supports Nutanix. It has main offices in both the UK and US, and operates 24/7 in more than 40 countries where it has deployments, with datacenter infrastructure in six worldwide locations. The UK operation is helmed by co-founder and CEO Simon Chappell and his US counterpart is co-founder Stacy Hayes in Washington, DC.
We met Simon Chappell in London and discussed how ADP is doing and where it might be going in the future.
ADP launched operations in the Middle East in October last year via a strategic partnership with local value-added distributor Mindware. Mindware will establish local datacenters to help clients manage data sovereignty issues and minimize latency in data transfer. In February, ADP partnered with Wavenet, the UK’s largest independent IT MSP, to provide enterprise-grade backup and disaster recovery solutions to UK customers.
ADP has set up an Innovation Team aimed at expanding the company’s DR, backup, and cyber resiliency services with the addition of new technologies that complement current data protection services.
Rubrik recently acquired Predibase to help with AI agent adoption. The agents would be helped to generate responses by accessing Rubrik-stored data, a Rubrik data lake. You can use AI to clean the data but you can also use AI to look into it and analyze it.
What would Chappell think about providing AI support services for Rubrik customers who are using Rubrik as a data source for their AI? Chappell said: “There you go. That’s the $64 million question. The thing we are really good at is disaster recovery and cyber resilience. If we start to think, oh we’ve got all this data, are we as Assured going to do some service analytics around that? That is a big leap because we’ve gone from being pre-eminent at cyber resilience and disaster recovery to something else.”
Our understanding is that ADP is the custodian of the customer data it has backed up using Rubrik, and it could provide the data to large language models. In fact, it could go so far as to build its own LLM. Such an LLM could be used to clean recovered data in a clean room environment. We’re familiar with Opswat and Predatar malware presence scanning capabilities and wonder if ADP might be thinking along these lines.
This is all speculation on our part, based on the conversation with ADP and how it could potentially evolve. We think that there would need to be some kind of metadata filtering as the dataset size could be enormous, in the 500 TB+ area, leading to prolonged full scan time. You would use metadata to reduce the scan set size.
Another potential direction for ADP’s evolution could be to look for adjacent services possibilities, such as a strategic storage array partner. It could provide BaaS and DRaaS capabilities using the Rubrik and Nutanix-focused infrastructure it has built up in North and South America, the Middle East and Europe. Our understanding is that such a vendor would not be a legacy incumbent but rather a storage array supplier similar in its field to Rubrik and Nutanix in theirs. That would mean a relatively new-ish supplier with a strong and growing upper-mid-market-to-lower-enterprise customer base and a long runway ahead of it; an incumbent-to-be so to speak.
We would not be surprised to find out that, in 6 to 12 months time, ADP has a third strategic partner alongside Rubrik and Nutanix, and that it would be a storage supplier. Similarly, we wouldn’t be surprised to discover that ADP is offering malware cleansing services for recovered data.
