Cyber threats have become extremely prevalent today and are growing increasingly complex. Ransomware is now a household word and is no longer something that organizations can ignore.

Enter startup Elastio Software Inc., which was founded by the team behind AppAssure, a backup and recovery software application that was acquired by Dell Software Group in 2012. What AppAssure did very well was figure out how to recover from corrupted data, according to Najaf Husain (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Elastio.

“In those days, it was Exchange, Microsoft SQL. You remember those days, when Exchange went down, I mean, the company was done. You couldn’t communicate,” he said. “That was a big problem. So, we did so well there, as we were able to understand the data and if it was clean or not. And we could do that early and often so the customer can understand if they were vulnerable or not.”

Husain spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Lisa Martin, during a CUBE Conversation ahead of the “Cybersecurity” AWS Startup Showcase event on September 14, an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the Elastio platform and the importance of a data resilience strategy. (* Disclosure below.)

Running after the issue

Circa 2020, when Elastio was founded, the company shifted its focus to cyber, given the fact that cyber threats are so prevalent now. The company spent a lot of time focused on the cloud, and everything it does is cloud-native, according to Husain.

“We really drilled inside of these cyber threats to understand how they can corrupt the data. We spent three years kind of reverse engineering all the known ransomware out there, 1,800-plus of them, created some very interesting machine learning engines, some data integrity scanning engines to go solve that problem,” Husain said. “We founded in 2020 to go run after that issue.”

Today, there are two components to the Elastio platform: protecting data and making it immutable, plus making sure it is scanned, clean and recoverable. In June, the company announced an oversubscribed $18 million Series A investment led by Venture Guides, with participation from Bain Capital. Still, ransomware threats today are increasing in frequency and are only projected to be even more frequent in the years to come. Companies that are getting hit are also often running perimeter defenses, according to Husain.

“The bad guys are still getting through. They’re getting to the data. That’s what we really focus on, the data integrity, making sure that the data is clean, or not, and we’re going to tell you early and often if it’s not,” Husain said. “We continuously check that data for you.”

If it is a corrupted piece of data or if a threat is sitting in the data, the company will notify the business so they can take proactive steps to recover it. It involves a wide-open, left-open space in the market right now where data is very vulnerable, Husain added.

All about data resilience

What might resiliency initiatives look like? It’s a board-level conversation with two sides of the business engaging right now, according to Husain.

“It’s the security-first side. The security mandates are coming down from the board, through the CISOs into the security organization saying, ‘Yeah, this is a serious problem. We have to start thinking about becoming more resilient,’” he said. “It’s all around data resilience. So, we have to start thinking about that, and how do I know if my data’s recoverable and clean?”

As it is a high risk to the business to not know what’s going on in the data, everything Elastio does is intended to make sure businesses know if there are risks inside the data, according to Husain. If there is, the company gives them ways to recover it.

The other side of the coin involves the infrastructure team. Ultimately, they get involved with this as well, because they’re dealing with data and typically with backups.

“The security mandate’s coming in, ‘Hey, I need to make sure that my data’s clean but also that it’s recoverable. So, I need recovery assurance as well.’ That’s where we start to engage that side of the house,” he said. “We’ve done some very clever things with Amazon. We partner very closely with Amazon with some of their tooling to make sure that if customers are running their backup tooling, we can integrate with that as well and provide that value to those customers.”

Here’s the complete video interview with Najaf Husain, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s pre-event coverage of the “Cybersecurity” AWS Startup Showcase event:

(* Disclosure: Elastio Software Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Elastio nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE