 Hello, everyone, welcome to theCUBE's special presentation of the AWS startup showcase on cybersecurity. This is season three, episode three of the ongoing series covering exciting startups from the Amazon ecosystem. I'm your host, John Furrier. And today we are excited to have Cube alumni, Nash Hussein, founder and CEO of Elastio back to talk about data resilience in the cloud. Thanks for joining us today. Hey, thanks, John, great to be here. So the CUBE conversation you guys did great on Elastio. We're getting some of the questions on the resilience, the data resilience story in the cloud. Tell me about the market you guys are targeting, business model, the company, give a quick intro to what you guys do. Yeah, so we target right now cloud, everything we've done is built around cloud native, cloud services and providing data resilience in the cloud ecosystem. And as you know, the operating model in the cloud is much different than on-prem and the technology is in the cloud to make that work and scale because performing for the customer is much different than on-prem architecture. So we started out with the cloud in mind, all our technology is focused on the cloud. So we work today on Amazon, you'll see us go to multiple clouds soon, namely Azure, GCP, the big triumvirate. But that's where we start. We usually we focus on the personas we focus on are the cloud security folks. Also the infrastructure people get involved as well because it's data. So we're kind of in between both of those two folks. The mandates usually come down from when it comes to data resilience from the cloud security teams, they want to know that they have high integrity in their data, that the data is not compromised. But the result is that the infrastructure team gets involved in that as well. Awesome. Talk about the business model, how do people consume the product, service, go cook overview. Yeah, very, very, very good. So it's available right out of the AWS Marketplace right now. So we work with a lot of the Microsoft partners. Also we have a direct team that works with customers directly to get them deployed. It's a very simple way to deploy it it installs literally in 10 minutes. It's through a cloud formation template that's just a technical thing, but it's point and click literally. And then you're able to deploy the platform very quickly. And the product and technology, what's the secret sauce? Can we click over to the product? Yeah. Great. They download obviously, but in the secret sauce. Yeah, very good. So it's from the Marketplace, it's a service that's downloaded into the customer account. One thing that's very unique about what we do, everything's operated in the customer VPC. So it lives in the customer account. So the data never leaves that account. That's a very important component of the platform. So a couple of the core technologies, there's kind of two areas there. One is our deep inspection, our data integrity engine and our ability to finally detect ransomware malware and corruption inside the data. And that's not an easy thing to do. When you think of many, maybe some of the other solutions where they figure out about, they talk about anomaly detection, that's a much different value proposition. We're inside that data and looking for very specific ransomware malware. And we can prescribe exactly what we find. We've spent over the last three years reverse engineering over 1,800 ransomware. So we know what they look like. We've built a very aggressive ML engine that's very fine tuned to figure those, to find those compromises. We also have a storage engine as well. It's called a secondary storage engine, compression, globally dupe built in. And the purpose of that is so you can keep retention of those assets at a lower cost, but it gives you threat intelligence over time. So companies now we have post-attack recovery built in. So we find the compromises, we let customers recover as well. So you solve a lot of problems and do more. Yeah, we solve a lot of problems. It's a big pain point in enterprises today. All right, so let's listen to the customers. What's the main problem you solve for them? Obviously ransomware is hot, everyone wants to not get hit. Obviously you mentioned malware, you mentioned a bunch of other things in the data. What is the customer pain point? What are you solving? What problem do you solve? And what benefits are they getting? Yeah, so it's all about knowing what's inside that data. If my data is compromised, that's a big vulnerability for the enterprise. And if the data is compromised and you don't know about it, that means it gets replicated. That means it gets in your backups. So now my backups are compromised. So it's imperative for companies to know that their data is not compromised. And if it is, they'd like to know it's compromised early and often so they can remediate the issue. So that's a big threat for businesses now. I mean ransomware, I mean these guys are smart. This is an extinction level of events even for big banks, right? It's very risky. And these ransomware gangs are very, very sophisticated now. And they're enterprise businesses. They're like a pyramid scheme. They all get paid if they get a ransom pay. So it's a deep, you know, there's a deep bench of these bad guys out there running around trying to compromise the enterprises. And that's what we're here to help and make sure that data stays uncompromised and make sure businesses can recover the data when they need it safely. Well, it's a great mission. I love what you guys are doing. I think that's super important. Obviously cloud technology is there to help too. And now you got AI, you've mentioned machine learning before. We're going to have a lot more assistance hopefully. But let's get into the data resilience in the cloud. Because this is the topic of this talk and congratulations for your success is well deserved. What are the biggest risks to cloud resiliency, cloud data resiliency that most organizations don't have on their radar? I mean, obviously ransomware everyone's scared to death of. I mean, that's disruptive, disables and could put some out of business. What are the biggest risks? Yeah, good question. So I think, look, most companies right today, they're using all sorts of perimeter protection. So you'll have perimeter protection, network protection and so on already established. But what's happening, unfortunately, is those defenses are getting compromised and the data is getting hit. So it just takes one vulnerability, one in an EC2 instance, the service to the public network, and they can drop a payload. They can circumvent maybe agent-based protection as well. So they're very sophisticated and you kind of layer that on the complexities of the cloud with the sheer nature of the dynamism of it on demand. And you're running thousands of instances, potentially thousands of containers. It's very hard to keep up. So all that needs to be handled in an automated way. So you can constantly be checking that data to make sure there's not compromises in it. So the risk to the business is numerous, right? So if there's compromises in that data, what happens? So now that threat now can pervade by infrastructure. So now it's in my replicas, right? And now it's in my backups, which get replicated to different regions. So now I have these threats sitting around and to compound that problem is if the dwell times of these things, yeah, they may be coming down in duration, but they usually live longer than the retention period. So that means that my recoveries are compromised as well, so I can't get back. So it's a compounding problem and it's a huge risk for businesses. So we try to, when we work with our customers, they've deployed us closest to the application where the application generates that data so that data can get scanned immediately. And we create a copy of that for the customer too so they can recover that if they need to, God forbid if they're infected. What's the other solutions out there? Who else is trying to do this? What makes you guys different? What's unique? Yeah, so in the cloud, we don't know of anybody doing this. That's doing deep inspection of the data inside the cloud. So we're in a pretty fun spot right now. So we have to, we're pushing on the gas. We're creating customers as fast as we can right now. You'll see us go to multi-cloud, which is a big demand for that, an Azure, GCP as you can imagine. So we're super excited. And right now we're just, we'll speed ahead. Raj, talk about some of what a customer is saying about you guys. If I asked your customer base, what would they say about you guys? Why you, what value you provide, what's the experience been like? A couple of things. So I think, you know, customers will say, they'd love the clarity that would they get into the threats that they have in their data, right? Cause we constantly give them a dashboard, they have visibility and to that point in time, exactly what's going on. So they know if they have a compromise or a undetonated malware or an active ransomware in the system, they'll know that immediately. So they love that portion of it. They also love to know that they can sleep at night, right? That my data has been scanned. I know I can recover. God forbid if I'm hit, I have a safe way to recover. And that's the biggest I think benefit to the customers is knowing that they have a way to recover and they won't lose their job, right? I mean, look, I mean, that's like number one job. I mean, risk management has always been a thing, but if you're out of business, you're not doing business. And this is really the disabling opportunities for the bad guys. And they know they got leverage. If they know the data is corrupted, they don't want, it's a no brainer. Okay, I got the next question is obvious one. The next step is, okay, great, you sold me. What questions should business ask themselves to kind of get a pulse of if they're even in a position to have strong resiliency or a strategy in place and when to call you, like what are the signs? Besides the house burning on fire. Yeah, you want to do it before that, right? So I think a couple of things. So business has asked themselves numerous questions, right? Am I testing the integrity of my data for compromises? Am I doing that? Do I know if my backups are recoverable? It's a very standard question, do you know that? Is my data clean, right? Is it uncompromising recoverable? There's a big, big components there. If ransomware is activated, what's my post-attack recovery? What do I do? How do I get my application back, right? So those things are a paramount to understand and we can help businesses answer some of those questions and give them more confidence in their ability to operate in this landscape of high ransomware threat. Rush, how do businesses know if they can recover or not? Or if their data is clean, is there like a benchmark or what's the test? Yeah, so the test is to actually inspect it, right? So the only way to know if you can recover it is by looking inside. In the cloud today, when you use Amazon or cloud native snapshots, for example, which most customers use, they're opaque. You don't know what's inside of them. So I protect them, I make them immutable, great. That's a good thing. You want to make them immutable so the bad guys can't delete them, awesome. But you could be, they could be compromised. They could have threats inside. So you want to make sure of two things. One, that it's clean before you make it immutable and then make sure they're immutable so they can't be deleted. So the combination of those two things give you a short recovery. All right, that's awesome. First of all, I mean, we all know how bad is out there and this is a great, great story. You have a great story over there, congratulations. What's needed. This is kind of a new way. That's why I love the NextGen Cloud. It's bringing a lot more. I'm sure AI is going to help you. Before we get into that kind of next wave, if a company's out there like, all right, I'm always scared of getting ransom. We're losing all our videos. Like how do I, we're not a small company compared to your customers. How can someone get involved? How do they engage? Okay, I'm sold. I want to buy, I want to get involved. I want to protect myself. How do I engage the last year? Very simply. So you could either call us. You can hit the website. Go right to the Amazon Marketplace. There's three ways to go there. You can hit write the marketplace, pull it down and deploy it. So there's a free trial. It's 30 days, you can go run and our support technicians are available to help with the deploy. And we also have a very interesting component. We have an incident response team that'll look at the alerts as they happen. So we'll check those threats out before you maybe even see them and make sure that they're not false positives to make sure they're actionable. And we inform the customer of that. So it's a, our customers love that. We get an A plus plus on that. And, you know, it can be noisy without the, without the, if you're not checking for false positives, right? So our team does that dynamically for the customers in the background. So it makes it much more reliable. Tell me about the marketplace. How's that been for you guys? I think that's the best thing out there. I mean, so easy to get sales. How's that been working for you guys? Cause Amazon has really been putting a emphasis on this marketplace and it's been paying off of them. Billions of people go there to buy. Yeah. It makes it very easy for, for vendors. That's for sure. So yes, it's a, Amazon does a great job there. So literally it's a click. We follow their template for how to deploy products. So it's very standard for AWS. And we follow those processes and it's a couple clicks you're in. The customer then optionally can, can apply those to their enterprise accounts, right? It automatically hits their billing cycles. It's all taken care of. So they make it very easy to transact. It's similar to your iPhone. You download an app, you pay for it, it's done. So they make it that simple. So it's been invaluable for us cause it brings, brings opportunities into the, into the door. It helps customers deploy much quicker. It helps customers with licensing much easier. So it just, it streamlines the process. Now it's giving a great idea for the cube team. I'll put a little voice activated cube. Thank you by, by Elastio now in the marketplace and instantly connects over and crosses over. Great use of voice activated AI. Now, all kidding aside, all kidding aside, this is the next interface. You're starting to see users interface with AI, Genevieve in particular as an interface, but data is huge on the back end of enabling AI value whether it's automation or Genevieve AI capabilities. How do you look at the AI way for your business as the founder and CEO, it's obviously a tailwind for folks who have instrumented systems and access to data and text and content. Yeah, so for us it's, it's, it's, it's, there's two components for it. So one is that our customers are generating a lot of AI data. They want that protected as well to make sure it's resilient. That's number one. So for us, we get a, we get a lot of tailwind on that. That's a, that's a great thing. On the other side of it, on the technology side that we're looking deep into generative AI to help us optimize our models, right? So you'll see, as I think over the next 12 to 18 months really innovate there and try to leverage generative AI and some unique modeling that we can build to enhance our data integrity engine and to provide more resilience for customers. Yeah, I remember, I mean, deep data inspection you're doing is incredible. I remember what the enablement was on the networking side when deep packet inspection helped a lot in the networking area. Just there's more, more touch points and connections in the cloud. A lot more data. This is a new, kind of a new, not a new area per se, but like use case-wise it's fairly new need. How do you see that? Yeah, I think it is a new need. It's just because the volume and the, like always go back to the cloud operating model. It's much different than on-prem. And the cloud enables businesses to leverage data more easily. And that's, that's the name of the game. So the volumes of data is increasing, the use of the data is increasing, the sophistication of the value of the data is increasing. All those things make that, quite frankly, a big attack target for the bad guys, right? Because data is the most strategic asset for any company. So the integrity of that data is paramount. And for us, that's a tailwind. Data is doubling and tripling, but our budgets aren't necessarily doubling and tripling either. You know, more consolidation on the tools, more platform view. I love the trend. I think what's happening in the security business of cloud is phenomenal. I think it's going to a lot more scale. I think the AI will help. I really appreciate you coming on. And again, congratulations for your success. I'd have to ask you about your origination story. Have this all come together? Were you, you know, what, were you scratching an itch? Did you see a need? Were you, you know, having a dinner with a friend? Were you in your garage? Tell the origination story. That's kind of a combination of all that. So two companies ago, we did a company called Apochure as a data protection play. Great business was in the mid markets. And we really focused on the app back then. And we changed the paradigm from backing up data to restoring apps. And what we did so well in those days, it was exchange. Your member exchange was the email platform. And when that went down, the company was dead. So we did a really good job of taking snapshots of those and inspecting the data to make sure we could tell you early and often if it was corrupted or not. So the business could know before they had a recovery event if it was going to fail. So they can proactively fix that problem. They would have much less downtime and they could recover faster if they did. So circa 2010, the company was acquired by Dell, did very well there. That was in circa 2010, circa 2020, my CTO came available, Adam Nelson, and he just left the Dell platform. And we looked at this threat landscape, we're saying, man, that same concept of deeply inspecting the data that applies to this world now because of the pervasiveness of cyber threats. That makes a lot of sense. We have a lot of expertise there. We have a lot of expertise with data because we lived there in the previous companies. So now the challenge was we looked at many of the incumbents, most of them are 10 year old tech, right? Because they were started in 2010, including Aputure, what's needed in the cloud. So our opportunity was, hey, let's innovate in the cloud, create cloud native solutions designed for the cloud, which is different than designed for legacy architecture. And then really focus on the integrity of the data and on cyber. So that's what we did. So we spent the last three and a half years building this out. We raised the seed round. We just finished a series A most recently, which is great. And now we're just off to the races. And we're core technology guys. We have really solid core IP right now, we believe. And that's our strength. And now we're starting to create more and more customers which we're excited about. And that becomes our real strength because now we're learning and learning and learning. So it's just a fun time. Raj, you guys have been very successful with the customers. You mentioned series A. How big is the company? Put a plug in. We guys looking for more engineers. You guys core technologies, as you said. You go into market, you got more customers coming in. What's your goals? What are you looking for? Put a plug in for the company. Yeah, yeah, good. So we are. So we're looking for a lot on the sales side right now. Our engineering team is close to 60 people or so. So it's a solid team. A lot of domain expertise in both security and storage. But we're looking for all types. Product managers, solutions engineers are big for us. Sales people are big for us. We have kind of a dual model. We focused on both transactional selling into the mid-market. There's a lot of value with SaaS businesses in the cloud and so on. We also focus on enterprises because ransomware resilience is a big pain there and they're very vulnerable. So we have kind of a two level sales team there. So we're looking for all the above actually. And we're pretty aggressive on the hiring front. We have a very competitive interview process. And it's actually such a fun time when you're building companies out at this stage. It's great as you start to get your customers going and just hearing the feedback from the customers is just amazing and how they feel more secure now and how we're helping them. So we take a lot of pride in that. Well, congratulations on founding a great venture. Obviously it's in great space, great vision, great execution so far. Looking really, really strong. Great approach. I mean, this is very much needed. So congratulations. I'll give you the final word on the segment. Data resilience in the cloud is a journey for the folks watching. What's the number one, two or three things they should do? What should they think about? How should they, what's their mindset? What advice would you give around being resilient with cloud and your data? Yeah, I think that the number one thing is don't forget about the data, right? Most companies really focus on the perimeter defenses which is very important. But don't forget about the data and make sure you have protection for the data. And it's not just making it immutable. It has to be inspected. And that's the biggest message I have for businesses today. Make sure that data is inspected and it's not compromised. And it's a very important component of a strong security posture. I love the deep data inspection comment. I love that approach. I think it's gonna be very relevant. Again, just protect the data. That's, everyone wants the data. That's where the action is. Just protect it. Nosh, thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing your story on the showcase and can congratulate some of your success. Thanks so much, John. I'll take care. John, forward to theCUBE. This is a special presentation from theCUBE on Amazon's startup showcase. Season three, episode three. Thanks for watching.