HYCU Wakes Up Backup With aiR And Turns Data Into Cyber Intelligence

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 RCloud, or 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. And 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's made before. And 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's 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, which is our new AI resiliency platform, you can go into your backup data and you can 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: for 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. And 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, you know, my son, 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 that I think helps. 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. Okay, now I want you to imagine 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 it's going to 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 it's going to say, 'That's strange. This person is acting out of 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.

Well, I'll tell you, added interest. He's expensive enough as it is. Hasn't asked for any more Pokémon cards.

Easily.

Sure, Dave. I think it's twofold, and I think you're absolutely right. The first is an economics problem. If we think about, as you rightly pointed out, a company that's got anywhere from 200 to 10,000 employees, it really probably has a CISO and a CIO, but they are running on a shoestring budget. They've maybe got 10, 20 people in IT, maybe two or three folks in InfoSec. What they cannot afford to do is go out and buy the UEBA system and the IAM system and the pen testing system. And so what they end up doing, unfortunately, is going right back to Office 365, opening up an Excel file, and doing their best to parse the data based on use. It's a very, very manual process. So I think part of the pitch here is: you've already made the investment in backing up and recovering your SaaS with HYCU. If you haven't, you should. But if you have, even better, because what we're going to do is layer this on top as a simple platform extension that basically says, let's give you more. Let's get more out of the backup data than you've ever been able to get before. Let's turn the backup data into something usable on an everyday basis, and let's make you more secure. I think the second piece of that is what I call the machine speed argument. You've got the economics component, but you've also got the fact that when it comes to AI, the threat has never been more complicated and more sophisticated. When we first started having these conversations, probably during COVID or a little bit after that, what often happened is we would talk about there was a ransomware attack every 60 seconds, and it was every 11 seconds, and you could buy a ransomware attack on the dark web for only $100. That now sounds ridiculously expensive when you think about agents being able to deploy ransomware attacks at machine speed. The level of corruption is off the charts from that perspective. But the other piece is it doesn't have to be a ransomware attack anymore. When you're deploying agents en masse across all of your systems of record and one of them goes rogue, or you put in a wrong command and it suddenly deletes massive bytes of your data—the challenge is you've got to get that data back fast, and you have to know exactly when to bring it back to. Otherwise, you're deleting far too much of your day-to-day work and operations. You're killing your efficiency and your productivity. So I think this could not have come at a better time because people are just faced with an influx of thousands of different cyber services. Nobody knows what to pick, and most people can't afford them. But when we say to them, 'Hey, all of this comes as part of the premier package that you're purchasing when you buy HYCU,' people say, 'Well, I had to back it up anyway. I might as well get all of that additional benefit.' So I think we're making it easier, we're making it far more inexpensive, and we are meeting the moment because of all that machine speed problem statement that we're talking about here.

You absolutely are, Neil. I have to tell you, we have been thrilled with the response—actually quite blown away. I've done a lot of launches in my day, and we had some great success with our cloud and things like that. But when you open up Air and you see that it looks like any other AI search bar, and the customer just says, 'Well, what do I put in there?' And you say, 'Well, ask it. Ask it what it thinks the threats are.' And you watch it analyzing all of their backup data, the eyes sort of bug out, and they say, 'My God, this has been sitting here all along, and I've never had the power to access the data. I've never known that I could do this, and I don't think anybody did.' And so there's this sort of revelatory moment where people's eyes really do kind of bug out of their heads, and that's been a lot of fun to watch. But I do agree with you that the other component to this is the channel partners. People are sick to death of the tit-for-tat that occurs with the backup vendors. It's—this one's offering this service, and this one's offering this feature and this additional object. And we're so down in the weeds and in the minutia when it comes to differentiation at this point that you can almost not discern who's who. But all of a sudden, along comes HYCU, and we say, well, the next guy's backing up 12 SaaS services and doesn't do any of this. We've constructed an entire, almost human brain of your corporation based on all the services we protect, and we can actually do context switching to help you answer questions that are going to keep you up and running and protect your business like nobody else. And so the channel partners, very much as Neil said, are kind of jumping for joy, going, 'My goodness, this really is cyber. I can really go out and replace four or five different tools.' And instead of trying to position these multi-million dollar offerings in the mid-market, I can go in and just say, 'Hey, you've got to back it up anyway. Why not do this?' And Air comes with all of this by virtue of what HYCU offers.

You know, it didn't, and I'll tell you why. Some of our design partners—who I won't mention on this call, but we've got one in particular—he used to say to me, 'Simon, your backup and recovery for SaaS has the most coverage in the world, is the best in the world. It's so fantastic. It's almost unfortunate that I only get to use it if I lose something and need to recover.' And that little nugget really sat with me, and it sat with our GM of Cyber and AI, Andy Fernandez, who's been a great vision partner and thought partner in this here at HYCU. And we talked a lot about that—gosh, we've got all this power, we've got all this data. And what we realized is that when you think about the world of AI, the LLMs are becoming commoditized. Today it might be Claude, tomorrow it might be OpenAI—who the heck knows. But ultimately, they're models that are fractions of a centimeter away from each other and continuously kind of leaping each other. So the differentiation in future technology products is not going to be which model you use. It's going to be the access to having a unique underlying data set, because it's the data sets that you feed into those models that are actually providing the value. And it was sort of like a lightbulb moment. My goodness, we've got the most unique data set in the world, and our customers are gathering this data for their own backup and recovery across 103 different sources. What could we do with it? And so then the question became, well, if you've got access to the most powerful data set in the world and you've got access to all these LLMs, where can we bridge the gap and build the most value for customers? And the obvious choice was cyber intelligence. Because I think there are cyber tools out there that will tell you what's happened. There's cyber tools out there that will try to predict what's going to happen. There's tools like us that can recover your data when something has happened. But what if you could bridge the gap between all three of those, and you could help people to uncover the problems, recover the data, and protect themselves holistically across the entire modern data estate? And I think it's almost one of these things that's so good that you have to slow it down a little bit to help people absorb it all, because what we're really saying here is that there has never been anything like this in the data protection world. And we said this around our cloud, and then we built it. The difference here is we've been able to get to market with something that nobody else has ever seen. And when customers open it up and start asking it those questions—I'll give you a great example. We had a customer the other day, an insurance company, and they went into it and they said, 'These three people I'm concerned about—show me the blast radius of anything they might have touched.' And it automatically just built this beautiful diagram of each one of them. It showed them every single application and database they touched in the last 90 days and where they may have created problems. And you could then drill down into it to identify which of them was the most problematic so you could go run a proper investigation. So all of a sudden it's like, oh my goodness, we are really protecting these companies. We're helping them to uncover things and data and information that they never would have seen before without us. And then we're helping them to recover the data and put it all back right. And I think that whole supply chain approach is just something we haven't seen before in the industry.

You know, Anthony, you absolutely are. And I think this is where the size of the organization is going to matter. If you're in a very large enterprise, you're going to see massive fragmentation of those budgets all the way down to the application level. There might be a Jira app owner, there might be a Salesforce app owner, then you've got your CISO, then your InfoSec team, etc. But if you're talking about a mid-market company with 2,000 to 5,000 employees, typically what we're seeing is that they need to back up all that data. They need FedRAMP compliance, NIS compliance, etc. So the understanding that was not there when we launched our cloud—which we fought so hard for—it's there today. People understand they've got to back their SaaS up. That's great. Now, what's interesting is you go back to that same buyer, and nine times out of 10, what's been happening with our design partners is the CIO says, 'Oh my gosh, there's finally something that lets me and the CISO have a real face-to-face conversation, because it's my backed-up data and it's all the intel that he needs, and we can work together on this.' And then of course the next question is, 'But how much does this cost? Is this four or five times the cost of the backup?' And the answer is no. It's a simple 25% uplift on the charge of the underlying platform. So you're paying essentially a platinum service fee to get endless access to all of this contextual cyber intelligence. And the last thing I'll just add, Anthony, around the budgeting: because it's AI-driven, there's some beautiful things you can do in terms of user experience. One of the things we've added is—we realize we're not going to have all the questions. Your organization might have a very different set of questions than the Boston Red Sox, who might have a different set of questions than your local insurance company, etc. And so what we allow you to do is templatize and pin the questions that are most valuable to you, and you can actually drop those into our public space so they can be usable by the entire marketplace. And this is a great way for us to build community around cyber intelligence and add more power to the system. So it's that idea of publicly broadcasting: 'Hey, did you see what we did with HYCU Air? Did you see the question we asked and how we framed it? Oh my gosh, I got great results when I did this.' And so we really want to do a better job here of making sure that we bring HYCU into the AI era. And a big part of that means creating a digital space in which our customers can interact with each other to really build upon the power of the platform.