Hi there. Welcome to Across the Tech Pond, the US-European podcast covering big technology events and announcements, hosted by David Marshall, Neil Hughes, and myself, Anthony Savas. In this show, we have a very special guest with some significant new product news. Software as a service data protection vendor HYCU has established itself in the market with its ARCloud technology that helps companies manage and protect their data across on-premise, hybrid, and cloud environments. As more and more companies are going down the software as a service route, the market for SaaS protection is obviously expanding, which is good news for companies like HYCU. Before we move on, let's introduce ourselves. David.
I'm Anthony Savas. I write for IT Europa, which is a channel-based publication writing about various channel partners and distributors, including managed service providers. I also write for TechLed, which is a communications portal news platform, and I'm also co-host of Across the Tech Pond. Right, as mentioned, we have a very special guest—they're the founder and chief executive officer of HYCU, Simon Taylor. Welcome, Simon. As previously mentioned, HYCU has some very special product enhancement news around your cloud offering. Could you take it from the top, please, and explain what it is?
Absolutely. Well, first, it's wonderful to be here. Dave, Anthony, Neil, great to see all of you again. I'm calling in from lovely Boston, Massachusetts, where the tech is popping and unfortunately the allergies are hopping. It is May and that always is the case here with our wonderful four seasons. But I am Simon Taylor, the CEO and founder of HYCU. HYCU does stand for Hybrid Cloud Uptime. We've got about 4,600 customers in 78 countries, and we are the world's number one leader in SaaS data protection, covering over 103 different data sources. That means if you think about the world of SaaS, on-prem, and public cloud, the next competitor to us has about 12 of those protected. HYCU has invested the last eight years in building out our Resiliency Cloud platform that natively integrates with over 103 different applications and databases. So it's a thrill to be here, folks, and as I said before, we are about to announce something that I think is game-changing in the world of data protection. To get right to it, we are going to announce today, here and now, that we have made a discovery in the world of data protection that I don't think anyone has made before. The discovery is very simple: if you have backup and recovery for 103 different software applications, it effectively creates almost a human brain with every single memory that that organization has ever had, held in that backup data. But up until now, no one has ever been able to speak to that brain. We were clearly just using the backup data to help you recover in the event of an incident. HYCU has spent the last two years working with AI, building its own knowledge graph and context engine, applying an LLM database on top. And for the first time ever, HYCU is going to let you speak to your backup data in natural language. With the announcement today of the launch of HYCU Air, our new AI resiliency platform, you can go into your backup data and ask any cybersecurity-related question you want to get to the bottom of key asks like: who is an insider threat in my organization? Where is my classified and unclassified data sitting? And how can I identify personally identifiable information across my entire workforce? You can even go in there and say, 'Hey, I'm really concerned about posture management. I don't understand who's running what policies, who from an identity and access management perspective may be drifting away from those policies.' And again, we're going to use all of that on top of the backup data. So why I say this is a watershed moment in the world of data protection: since the dawn of time, backup data was just that—it was for the backup. You could really only do one thing: sell it as an insurance policy and recover data in a time of an incident. We are moving the entire industry from insurance to healthcare. And what I mean by that is, rather than just providing insurance—helping you to back up and recover the data when there's an emergency—for the first time ever, guys, we're actually going to let you take care of your organization. So I've gone through this pitch a couple of times now and explained to different folks what this really means. But I think the most compelling and difficult jurist out there was my 13-year-old son. I explained to him HYCU Air three times and he said, 'Dad, I don't get it.' And I said, 'What do you mean you don't get it? We back up the data. Now we can read the data and talk to it.' He goes, 'So what? Why do I care?' And I finally said, 'Okay, imagine that we're sitting at this table today and there's a camera sitting over the table and you take a stick of gum, you chew it, and you stick it under the table.' Well, in typical cybersecurity protocols, if there is a man behind the camera watching the screens, he might catch you. But if that gum was placed under the table six years ago, there's no way anyone's ever going to know. And he said, 'Oh, so HYCU Air is like the tapes in the security system. You can rewind the tape and find out what actually happened.' And I said, 'Exactly.' And he said, 'So why can't anybody do this?' And I said, 'Great question, young prodigy, young protégé of mine.' I said, 'The reason is nobody else bothered to invest in backing up and recovering hundreds of different SaaS services. So it's almost like your tape is crippled. If you can only read the unstructured data, or only read the data on-prem, or only read one or two or three or four or five SaaS services, you are missing a majority of the context across an organization.' And he said, 'Okay, I get it. So because you're backing up all of this data in all these different services, you not only have the cameras looking at the table, you can rewind the tape and it will show you every angle of the organization.' I said, 'That's exactly right.' But for you all, I'll give a more concrete analogy. I want you to imagine that the five of us are running a company and we think that there's a bad actor out there. Maybe we've got 5,000 people in this big company we're running, but we don't know who it is. Now I want you to imagine in natural language you could go into HYCU Air and you could just literally say, 'Run an insider threat analysis.' And then it's going to go out and look at all of the folks who are in Workday and who's on a performance management plan. And then it's going to do a context switch and check everybody in Salesforce and see if anybody pulled an enormous amount of data at a strange time. And then it's going to look at our Entra ID policies and say, 'That's strange. This person is acting out a policy.' And then it's going to look at their data and say, 'Wow, and they're capturing a whole bunch of credit card data on their personal laptop.' This would have taken five tools and five weeks before. But because our customers have already invested in backing up and recovering all of this SaaS and cloud data, we can do it with a single command inside of HYCU Air. It's the power of HYCU. It's the power of our cloud. It's the power of AI making HYCU not the number one leader in SaaS data protection, but now the number one leader in AI resilience.
