Cohesity’s latest software-defined storage  (SD-storage) updates target cloud-based application testing and development and automated backup for data stored in public clouds.

The company today said its on-premises data backup platform, aptly named DataPlatform, now includes a capability called CloudSpin that allows companies to instantly access their backup data in the cloud for testing and development purposes. It converts backup data stored in the appliance into a new virtual machine (VM) for use in the cloud.

Additionally, the cloud-based version of the platform now integrates with public cloud APIs enabling automated data protection.

“As customers and companies are looking to leverage the cloud for lift-and-shift, there’s a general lack of application mobility across their data centers and the cloud,” said Sameer Nori, director of product marketing at Cohesity. “The whole notion of CloudSpin is you can take on-premises backup data and make it really easy to use in the cloud for test and dev.”

The second new capability makes it easier for companies to do backup and recovery once they start using this data to develop and deploy applications in the cloud, Nori said. Instead of requiring manual administration for these tasks, Cohesity’s software integrates with public cloud APIs so that backups scale automatically as cloud workloads are added or deleted. It also allows administrators to automatically set backup policies for different tiers of cloud VMs to match service level agreement (SLA) requirements.

In February the company added file and object storage to its platform in a move that Cohesity said allowed enterprises to simplify their data centers by bringing all of their secondary workloads onto one, scale-out platform.

Secondary storage encompasses file sharing, archives, analytics, backups, unstructured content, and test and development data — essentially everything that’s not mission critical. This data makes up 80 percent of enterprises’ storage needs, according to Cohesity.

Traditionally, enterprises have addressed their secondary storage needs with bulky backup and storage appliances, with multiple copies of data sprawled across storage infrastructure.

Both of today’s updates further advance Cohesity’s vision to consolidate secondary storage, eliminating data copies and hardware silos, and making all of this data useable, Nori said.

“Our solution is really bringing all this together, under one umbrella, one platform,” he explained. “Our Cloud Edition [platform], which runs fully in the cloud, is working with our DataProtect backup software. On-premises data gets backed up to DataProtect and DataPlatform. CloudSpin takes it to the cloud and converts it to cloud format. Once it’s in the cloud, it can leverage the public cloud APIs and ensure those data sets get protected in the cloud. CloudSpin them comes back and helps with this conversion back to an on-prem format.”

Gartner forecasts that more than 80 percent of enterprise data will be stored in scale-out storage systems in enterprise and cloud data centers by 2021, up from 30 percent in 2017.

Largely because of this, both Cohesity and its primary competitor, Rubrik, have seen explosive revenue growth over the past year and made a series of updates to their software-defined storage platforms.

Earlier this month Rubrik launched its software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for data management applications. The new product builds on the company’s earlier SD-storage platform to provide a “unified system of record” across all applications and data, according to Chris Wahl, Rubrik’s chief technologist. It gives users full visibility into where their data lives, in on-premises data centers as well as various clouds. Companies can search and manage all of this data from a central dashboard and build new data management applications on top of the SaaS platform.