Cloud data backup specialist Eon exited stealth mode today, saying the time is right for it to reveal its plans to disrupt the data protection market.

It’s extremely confident in its ability to do that, after raising an impressive $127 million since its founding in January. The money comes from not one funding round, but three, at a reported $750 million valuation.

It began with a $20 million seed round shortly after the company was formed that was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Vine Ventures, Meron Capital and Eight Roads. It followed that with a $30 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Sheva, and finally closed on a bumper $77 million Series B round led by Greenoaks with participation from Quiet Ventures.

That’s a lot of funding rounds and a lot of cash in a short space of time, suggesting that Eon is really doing something quite special, albeit in the rather unglamorous world of cloud data backups. The startup says it has built the first “backup autopilot” for the cloud computing era, and it works by monitoring an organization’s cloud resource sprawl so it can capture all of the data they possess, spread across multiple cloud environments.

The company’s founders have a lot of pedigree in this area. Eon is the brainchild of Ofir Ehrlich, Gonen Stein and Ron Kimchi, who previously co-founded the disaster recovery software firm CloudEndure Ltd., which was acquired by Amazon Web Services Inc. for $250 million in January 2019. Following that acquisition, they went on to build and lead AWS’ Disaster Recovery and Cloud Migration services, and it was there that they came to realize the failings of existing, cloud-focused data backup solutions available to enterprises.

Making cloud backups better

According to Eon, its cloud backup autopilot scans, maps and classifies cloud resources autonomously and continuously, before providing teams with backup recommendations based on their business needs and compliance considerations.

Existing cloud backup solutions rely on simple snapshots, which are vendor-locked, nonsearchable black boxes that require full restores to access. Eon does things differently. It says its next-generation backups are fully managed, portable and support global search functionality. As such, it makes it possible for customers to search for and restore individual files rather than an entire database, and they can even run Structured Query Language-based queries on their backed-up data, without provisioning any resources.

Stein, who is Eon’s chief revenue officer, told SiliconANGLE that the company’s flexible approach to cloud backups has a lot of advantages compared to existing solutions. He said that in most cases, companies only ever want to restore a specific piece of their data, for example certain files or records from databases, not the entire database or server.

“Bringing back a full resource from backups requires the provisioning of compute, storage, databases, licensing and networking, and so it’s cumbersome and costly,” Stein explained. “Not only that, but restoring entire resources can introduce security issues from an old server or database images.”

According to Stein, companies can also realize a lot of value from actually using their data backups, as opposed to just “having them” in case of problems. “For instance, by being able to query backed up data, customers can run forensics, data analytics and more without having to copy it into different forms of primary storage,” he pointed out.

The other key advantage provided by Eon is that its snapshots are fully portable and can be restored in any environment. Stein explained that existing cloud backups tend to utilize native snapshots, such as AWS EBS snapshots, which are essentially “vendor-locked.”

“This means it cannot be restored in a different cloud environment,” Stein said. “Eon introduces a new kind of snapshot that’s fully portable, so customers can restore backed up data from AWS to Azure, for example, providing unprecedented flexibility across cloud environments.”

Sequoia Capital’s Shaun Maguire summed up what the company offers: “Eon’s novel backup solution pinpoints data instantly, saving time, money and compliance headaches.”

It’s all about efficiency

For now, Eon’s technology remains unproven, but the startup’s founders have a strong reputation in the cloud backup and data protection industry that’s sure to get the attention of enterprises. According to NAND Research Inc. analyst Steve McDowell, there is no one in the industry who has a deeper understanding of the intricacies of cloud backup than Eon’s founding team. He said they have identified a clear inefficiency in the cloud backup market and come up with a compelling solution to address that gap.

One of the advantages of Eon’s approach is that it ensures that companies can get the right backup policies in place for any given piece of data, while optimizing the retrieval process for that data, the analyst said. Another use case is data discovery, which can now be extended into what’s being backed up, he added.

“Eon’s approach is in stark contrast to typical methods, where data is pooled together and backed up as a single whole,” McDowell said. “Where tagging and classification are implemented in backups, it’s a manual, time-consuming and inefficient process. IT teams have a natural aversion to inefficiency, and so many enterprises simply choose not to do tagging. I have no doubt that IT teams will want to see Eon deliver on its promise of automating that cataloging and tagging process.”

According to McDowell, while there’s nothing inherently wrong with existing data backup processes, there is a lot of room for improvement.

“Legacy approaches protect data very well, but it’s an inefficient process,” he said. “Eon gives control to the user to manage cloud backups at a file-granular level while optimizing the recovery process. Eon lets me get to the data directly. It’s all about efficiency.”

The startup is aiming to disrupt a fast-growing global cloud infrastructure market that’s expected to be valued at more than $838 billion by 2034, according to a recent study from Precedence Research Inc. That’s a huge amount of money, and the same study shows that most enterprises will spend between 10% and 30% of their cloud budgets on data backups and management.

So there’s an enormous opportunity for Eon if it can disrupt that segment, explaining why it was able to raise so much money in such a short space of time.

As Greenoaks Partner Patrick Backhouse explained, storage and backup-related costs account for a huge chunk of most company’s information technology budgets. But they don’t get much value for their money, he argues.

“Customers are stuck with frustrating, outdated options, leaving them with poorly optimized costs, incomplete data inventories and shallow classification,” Backhouse said. “Eon has the team, the expertise and the ambition to develop an entirely new product that we believe will become the cognitive referent for cloud-native backup.”

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