 Hi, this is your host up in Bhartiya and welcome to another episode here for a let's talk and today we have with us once again Neeraj Tholia See you and co-founder of Elsian Neeraj is great to have you on the show. So I'm gonna let us so great to be back Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's my pleasure We used to talk, you know when you want to cast and and then it was you know acquired By a VM and if I'm not wrong VM is Investing 21 million series a in Elsian So there's so much to talk about but I would start with the basic which is that after the after you know cast and Of course, you took a break and then you led to this new company talk a bit about what was still the pain point There are so many to be honest within the space that you wanted to address That led to the creation of Elsian and also what is the story behind our name? The story behind the name, right? So just you know, we've spoken earlier, but for your listeners that might not be aware I am very passionate about data protection worked on that in graduate school and then ever since that multiple companies That's what I've been working on. I think it's a big issue for customers in the enterprise And that's why we started Elsian again. I'll talk about why exactly in a second but from the name, I think the name is quite apropos because it is comes from Greek mythology and Halcyon supposed to be the seven days Within winter where no storms happen. It's like a safe harbor in a period of adversity and a Time of peace and calm. So given what we do. It was a great name. Now the Greek domain name was taken so we went for the Spanish version of it and that's why it's Elsian and In particular Elsian at AI, which is actually a great segue to your next question Which was why start another company? No, it wasn't in the books at all But right at me when we started talking to people Backup disaster recovery always a requirement But what people started getting more concerned about as you've spoken about on some of your other episodes is The threats that we see from Attackers out there when we talk about ransomware malware people getting impacted and What we quickly discovered doing bolt-on solutions to existing products would not be feasible So really that's why and we started before the chanjee pretty craze took off But we knew AI was going to be only fundamental way that we would solve these data Protection challenges where it range from backup and disaster recovery all the way to security in the form of ransomware Malware XDR integration broader security ecosystem You could only do it with a green slate a clean slate rather first of all as you rightly said This is kind of a problem like security. That is always going to be there. This is not. Hey, we saw this problem Let's move to the next phase number two is that it's also kind of sticky market once you move to a player you stick to that So talk a bit about with this Elsian are you at this point targeting a specific market? Of course you came up with Microsoft 365 support. It's a market and also how you're planning to deal with this stickiness of this space So it's another rate. Love your questions, but another great question So the way I look at it is right for Microsoft 3 as you said, right? We are looking at data protection to start with with Microsoft 365 the reason why we like it which addresses some of the stickiness part It's a growing market It is slightly underserved not enough people have backup, but people are becoming more aware for the need for backup I think Microsoft released data that hundreds of petabytes of data added every month to SharePoint This is business critical data that people have and so how do you protect that as raised? The priority has gone up as people have moved more to on from on-prem Right, which COVID accelerated to a cloud model where you have data and SaaS services Where you had SharePoint exchange on print all of them in the cloud different API surface different attack vectors different concerns But everyone's using it more So you think that was a great intersection point for us to go start this business in the space because as this need There's an opportunity and we could do something new and is the scope of Elsian going to Kind of limited to you know office 365 like offering or of course We are going to grow we started Microsoft 365 our immediate focus for a while and we we came out of Stealth a few months ago as you know, we announced a 21 million dollar raise for series a couple months ago and What we've really seen is customer feedback. We have a wide diversity of customers everything from construction firms IT finance Private bodyguard companies. Everyone needs the data protected sports boards right one of the world's cricket board is our customer so we're seeing a wide diversity in our customer base here and we are and They are telling us where to go next To answer a question because we protected 365 and now they're saying look We love what you do for solving these SaaS services in the way other vendors are not being able to can you also do this for X and Y for me So we have you know, don't want to commit to something on the show But we are actively exploring how we're gonna expand and for us. It's always been customer driven Can you just give a quick overview of your core products or services? What do they look like our tagline is AI driven data protection from Microsoft 365? So today if you have data in exchange and we surprise how many small businesses still run on email Even though they're one drive in SharePoint So how do you protect critical data in exchange in one drive in SharePoint? Which are the document libraries for people in the ecosystem and then more recently even teams because Microsoft teams We sometimes Silicon Valley everyone's using Slack as an example But when you look at the install basis is so much business happening in across Microsoft teams protecting the data there becomes important to So for across these portfolio of products that Microsoft provides How do you back up the data for backup disaster recovery by the main use case tends to be Security related where how do you detect ransomware happening and how do you do that using AI? How do you do malware detection? How do you detect anomalous behavior apart from your accidents and things of that sort? We also predict against you know for people that have compliance requirements and then people that also have Rate threats about malicious insiders some companies see a lot of churn So how do you protect against that? So that's where customers are coming to us from but I'm not sure it's very simple We use AI and we never mix customers data or customers model But we use AI to protect our customers data when we talk about AI we have been leveraging and using AI for a very long time It's only that genetic AI HIV. They kind of Rekindled interest in AI talk a bit about what what are the thoughts on genetic AI will you also be offering services to? So let's look at it data production or disaster or data recovery for genetic AI at the same agility AI for LCM so right now most of the users in that sense internal Our goal is the we not we focus on security We focus on AI and then focus on ease of use and how these three intersect with each other So our goal is to use this extensively internally so that customers aren't Overloaded by some of this work that we do when it's a lot of complexity We have a great blog on how we do ransomware detection using AI multiple models on a poor user basis which and a poor file basis generally none of our competitors are doing so we're gonna recommend people check that out on a company blog but Really when I look at the use of AI today for us It is Internal that we expose to customers as security incidents Hmm now to go back to your other question wait How do you protect some of these other emerging category of applications? It is something we're definitely keeping an eye on Hmm and how you protect some of the models of source data, etc Especially when you're using third-party services using open AI's infrastructure as an example So some of that will come up but not an immediate focus right now I think that market is just a little nascent that the ecosystem still needs to shake out a little bit more before you can focus on it Let me look at LCN. Of course There are a lot of incumbents which were born in the cloud cloud native era Then there are a lot of vendors which we call traditional or Lexi vendor How do you set yourself apart from these two different breeds? So I think the way we look at ourselves is the big thing and I will use my customers What's to tell you about this? It is ease of use, right? So as a technologist I'm very proud of what we built where we have an entirely serverless system that scales down to zero for a you know Multiple petabyte and hopefully in the near future exabyte scale system. This is what we've designed for we scale down to zero So my technical perspective, it's great Customers what they care about is how easy do you make it to get my job done which in this case protecting my data how can I sleep better at night and The constant thing that shows up is look you have all these amazing features You don't overload us with security warnings. It makes it easy to get my job done I see multiple are sometimes a week from using a system and Ease of use is the biggest thing customers have told us and right you can never customers never wrong there So there's all this great technology under the hood Presented in such an easy to consume manner, which has differentiated us definitely from the legacy vendors All right, and then from when we talk about born in the cloud companies again What we've done for what is a complex product is how we also go to market So we are adopting what people call product blood growth and a lot of our customers come up There's a free trial. There's no hand-holding. There's no sales person. We are there. The sales team is there if you need help But really it's about how users can self-drive their experience as we see with any modern software product Which again is hard to find in the industry and especially in the data protection industry today Which is tended to be complex and therefore they want someone hand-holding you we said no You shouldn't need that in a modern world. What kind of market opportunities are there of course as we discussed earlier of course data backup is more or less like having a Seat belt or airbag or brakes in the car, you know, it had it's very very critical piece so it's not even companies could think about it, but Complications busy market a lot of players and then let's also look at maybe you're also looking at some emerging use cases That you feel LCN can target better than others I think you hit the analogy right that's up now when you talk about airbags, right? You think of airbags somewhat like insurance You don't need on a daily basis, but when you need it, you're really grateful to have them, right? So that is obviously we covered that but I think we've moved it to something For more active things think of it as a gas and break that you use more often that you're using on a constant basis in your car Right or moving forward self-driven cars the software engine that drives that self-driving So what we've looked at is and that's why we use the word protection dot backup We use the word that is more what we try to do is a lot more active again Compared to write some of the competitors you talked about going to the current analogy if you look at a Tesla That's constantly looking at how do you avoid other cars? How do you stay in your lane? How do you make sure the passengers are safe no matter what else is happening in the world around you? We think of it as something similar because some for some customers hundreds of times a day We're checking the state of the system as to is there security attack that something change Can you pull data in from other third-party systems to build a better security posture for you? So it's not just about the airbags that are passive based sensor based things But we pulled it in safe example from other XDR system So if a company's safe example there VMs under attack or the laptops under attack We will take more defensive actions because we can see around us. What's changing? So we've switched from not just including that insurance side of the house when moving over to the more active day-to-day usage of our system For our customers today data production is kind of moving in developers pipeline where they Instead of just having an insurance. They also use it for a lot of different active You know, they're CI CD pipeline. So can you talk about what role data production can or is playing there in that space to enable developers? So I think a couple things there's a lot of definite focus on the whole shift flip the shift left part of it Wait, and we see that happening today where How do you bring this early sometimes it's for data copies for testing in? Testing outside of production as an example Sometimes it is about how do you ensure especially with the growth of microservices and some of those applications as they move From inception to production at every stage the right best practice of the militant So suddenly you don't discover when you're deploying This has happened in some outages recently that oops. I didn't build this out in a highly reliable manner So where there's obviously from the broader perspective that happens in our ecosystem today, the world is shifted So it's not the great traditional developers building microservices But we see in the Microsoft ecosystem the power apps power automate developers Microsoft is extremely rich Ecosystem that's low code. No code. So we are exploring that in some sense We see these SharePoint admins that again responsible for multiple petabytes of data and then how do they manage that in a secure way because the cost of getting making changes is Massive So how do you help those and when they're adding apps to their ecosystem? So we see some of that equal and play out that you've seen in the cloud native ecosystem I just coming off other conference in the coupon recently We sing that show up in some of these other more traditional IT ecosystems because shift left is powerful. Can you also talk about? Some of the use cases is there any specific vertical that you're targeting or it really doesn't matter Which whoever needs data prediction you are there for them You know, there is what you start off with and we said look You know, we think because of a modern cloud first nature We'd initially attract more traditional IT firm startups, etc But the short answer is no our customers. We are right now. We have global Customers, so we are we have data centers in Australia in EU in the US and we make sure for Regulatory reasons data metadata never leaves those regions But we have not only customers that are global but across vertical as I mentioned earlier So IT is a fraction of our business, but we see Great finance firms accounting firms, and we have a bunch of great case studies on our website Raids sports Organizations construction I'm just trying to read rather love Electrical supply houses the folks that supply breakers and panels trucking companies So the good thing is so even and we have a wide diversity and also size of customers from small to very large And we see this to a even small companies now know the importance of protecting the data Right, I mean my part from personal experience contractors We know have gotten fish and ransom bed and it's business disrupting for them And so these smaller companies have woken up to the fact that the business depends on being online And so how do they protect that data? So we are very happy to see this broad diversity of customers that have Selected us and decided to go with us. I want to talk about Of course the previous company cast and that was acquired by Vm now Vm is once again investing 21 million series a in LCN. What does it mean for LCN? What does it mean for Vm? What does it mean for casting? So Vm's a big supporter Between us and now your viewers Taking money from a strategic at an early stage of the company is not something out of traditionally thought about doing But Vm was an exception. There's obviously I have a deep history with them I really like the company and the leadership there. I've known them for many years right now So big fans of that there's some overlap in the market But not as much as you would think because of just how we position being cloud force Vm is traditionally being a product first company which is installed on prem We say how do we take this complexity away focus on newer use cases such as ransomware malware? So there's that but at the end of the day away, there is our box is still independent Vm is an investor in our term sheets and our funding documents if you took Vm's name out and replace it with someone else Who would look just the same? So from their perspective, it is also a financial investment here And our goal is to be independent We see a Very I am very optimistic about the future in front of us based on what the last few months have shown us So I am super excited about building out a large company here What kind of threats you're seeing in this space now? We can talk about the whole traditional ransomware all those things But either we can look at new kind of either that you are looking at or because of the emergence of new workload New kind of social injuring where it's less about the threat but more about hate because of this use case This is and also if you can talk about which industries do you think are going to be more vulnerable? Two or three important things to talk about right when we go look at threats I think some of the attacks are first exchange where For example, we just you know ran through this until the other company traditionally ransomware would come They'll attack your storage system. They'll attack your file or your vm That's all on prem with the growth of these SaaS services You don't even need to be within a company's network perimeter There's an API surface you can access from externally and then you can ransom with the entire thing So your traditional things that might be looking at network flow of data or suddenly so much data started flowing through our systems Aren't effective because it's no longer. You don't see any edge traffic We also see both read and then we focus on ransomware a lot But there's just some it's not a it's an umbrella term is the way I look at it because It is there's so many different kinds of attacks that are happening right now Some that in only partial files to prevent detection Some that are slow moving some that are fast moving some that replace files from that don't So we've deployed multiple models per user To go and that learn online user behavior. No other wheel. We are doing it You can deploy models once a month and figure that one out So we've done a lot of those things To be able to capture these new emerging Threats that people don't think about but going to a second question about who is going to get impacted the most unfortunately, I have Sad news in that sense where ransomware is indiscriminate We have seen them impacting small teams For example, targeted attacks against finance teams. We've seen them attacking more traditional industries Electrical as an example small regional stores So We it is unfortunately there. It's a spray and pray approach for them It's a volume game for them Where they will try and ransomware as many folks as they potentially can and then see who can pay who cannot And with the growth of if you've been read if some of your readers have been looking after this is the growth of ransomware as a service So it's just one of these things where it is truly indiscriminate So I think anyone that is using online services today, which is pretty much everyone out there today In terms of companies and enterprises need to be worrying about this It's not like suddenly anymore finances or large firms are going to be the prime target Indiscriminate attacks is what we see. Of course, you have solutions for them. But what advice do you have for them? So These solutions can go only so far They need to we have talked about the importance of culture as well or having a holistic approach towards, you know Beta backup security, you know or data protection. What advice do you have for them? So here's the other thing talking about the innovative in habitability of ransomware My recent surveys have shown that 80 percent of server respondents have been attacked by ransomware and the joke goes The other 20 percent might just not know it yet Um, and it is again an unfortunate state of affairs, but it's a reality We live in so the advice I give people is obviously first of all explore state of the art We talked about sticking us earlier in our conversation But sometimes the solution that you had five years ago is not the best protection solution for the next five years So explore what the state of the art is Have game days where you look at recovery how recovery happens. So how what's the preparation for this? Um, how do you protect? Your data, how do you tear and categorize later? Do you know where your most important data is that is What do you need to bring your business back online? How quickly can you do that? So have game days have your playbooks run through it sometimes it seems like an investment of time But if you've done this well recovery is going to be great because it's going to Not just bring your business back faster going to cost you less money You won't have to pay ransom attackers Where the number of features we also have built in to make this easier so we don't allow synchronous backup deletions So someone couldn't compromise it an admin. They can't go delete backups Um, but and to be able to go through this checklist will really pay off for customers out there Can you also talk about what is the importance of open source for lg and of course it was quite important for casting But let's talk about lc and asville, you know, I find it very interesting that the data protection industry Unlike some other ecosystems is very little open source in them in a meaningful way There'll be scripts around the product or a dashboard with gaffana But nothing core and we've decided to change that up where we have a very active project called corso And a lot of what we provide as a service today The core of that is you know, uh, you can find it at course of backup.io Back up from xf365 we released completely free and open source. It's under the apache license today And we don't see any we don't have any plans of that changing active community people using us to back up very large systems People are very helpful in the community. You can come find us on discord there And so our belief is my fundamental belief is like sometimes there might be a price issue with paying a SaaS provider You go take this for free I mean it will provide benefit make sure you're protected Once things once budgets change, etc come talk to us But we'd rather have you be protected if you can if it doesn't fit in your budget this year And so and just to be clear the open source course is what we use in our product We layer security and a bunch of other things on top of that when we talk about ransomware malware When the core backup restore functionality is free for our customers today uses object storage So very efficient very cheap to run of course Companies let you know there are a lot of things that you folks are working on a lot of things you cannot talk about but Just just give us a teaser a glimpse of what to expect from you folks. We will be doing in the next couple of months Very very interesting things we focus on security continues But our focus is now you know now that our core foundations in place How do we focus on making our stores much faster? How do we have better tools to the admin to say how do you recover quickly from widespread attacks? How do you do detection faster? So there's a lot of these things that are going to make the admins life easier when when they're under pressure And so those are some of the things that we're working on that I think when it comes out It's going to be you know, fairly interesting somewhat unique in the market Nidaj, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about else And as I can clearly see there are so many things in the pipeline. So I would love to chat with you again soon Thank you Thank you so much for having me swap now to you and your listeners for hearing us out today As always it was exciting chatting with you