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Transforming Enterprise Data Protection: How Eon's Cloud-Native Approach Redefines Backup and Recovery

• Evan Kirstel

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Cloud infrastructure is undergoing a dramatic shift, and with it comes the need to rethink how we approach data protection. In my conversation with Ofir Ehrlich, co-founder of Eon, we delve into why traditional backup approaches fall short in modern cloud environments and how his company is pioneering a fundamentally different approach to enterprise cloud backup and recovery.

Ofir, whose previous company CloudEndure was acquired by Amazon, shares how his experience helping large enterprises migrate to AWS revealed a critical gap in the market. While cloud adoption has accelerated, backup strategies remain rooted in on-premises paradigms that simply don't translate to dynamic cloud environments where resources are constantly being created, modified, and deleted.

The most compelling insight is how backup represents 20-30% of total cloud spend, yet organizations struggle with a paradoxical problem: they're simultaneously backing up too much unnecessary data while failing to protect their most critical information for appropriate timeframes. Eon's solution introduces automated resource classification that allows companies to apply business-level policies across their entire cloud footprint without manual intervention.

What truly sets Eon apart is its approach to multi-cloud environments. Unlike traditional solutions that create vendor lock-in through proprietary snapshots, Eon extracts data and stores it in its own cloud storage, enabling unprecedented flexibility. You can backup from AWS, store in Azure, and restore to GCP – something previously impossible with conventional tools. This architecture also powers Eon's comprehensive ransomware protection specifically designed for cloud-native resources like managed databases and data warehouses.

Perhaps most revolutionary is how Eon transforms backups from pure insurance into strategic business assets. By automatically making backup data available as accessible data lakes, organizations can run analytics or train AI models directly on their backup data without complex ETL processes or duplicating infrastructure. This self-funding approach means companies get both superior data protection and a powerful data platform for the same or lower cost than their current backup solution.

Ready to rethink your approach to cloud data protection? Explore how Eon can help your organization simultaneously reduce costs, improve security, and unlock new value from your backup data.

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Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, really fascinating guest and topic today, looking at modern cloud backup and recovery strategies with Eon Alfre. How are you? Hi? I'm great. How are you Good? Thank you. Good to see you Really intrigued by this chat. Before we dive into all things cloud storage, maybe introduce yourself a little bit about your journey and mission at Eon.

Speaker 2:

Sure, thanks. So first, my name is Zofir, I'm 43 years old, I'm married to the amazing Julia and a father to Rome, who is objectively cutest baby ever born. He's not a baby anymore, but still cutest objectively. Those are the important things. He's not a baby anymore, but still cutest objectively. Those are the important things. Less important things programming.

Speaker 2:

Since I was nine, worked at a startup company at the age of 17, started four companies in total, and this is my fourth. First one didn't know what I'm doing raised $6 million. Company got shut down. Second and third companies got acquired, where most recent one was called CloudEndure. We started at the end of 2012, and we developed technology which enabled large enterprises to move from on-premises to the cloud with no downtime or data loss, for two main business purposes. First one was migration taking your entire data center moving to the cloud, turning the lights off at the data center. The other use case was disaster recovery, which means leveraging the cloud as a secondary data center so, in case bad things happen, you immediately can move everything to the cloud without disruption to your users, no downtime or no data loss. This was we had some curse words in our KPIs, things like cash flow, positive, profitable, and which was unusual for an infrastructure company. An infrastructure startup Got acquired by Amazon on January of 2019 and grew the business internally to be used by pretty much every mid to large enterprise, moving to AWS, me and today my partners, along with the previous co-founders of CloudEndure, managed this business unit, druid, and at the time I became a very active angel investor, invested in many B2B enterprise cloud startups, cyber DevOps, infra, et cetera.

Speaker 2:

And then I left, started advising a few venture firms but really, really wanted to start another company, and there born EON on January of 2024. And we raised $200 million in about 10 months from the leading investors in the world, notably Sequoia, lightspeed, greenhouse Capital and Bond Capital, along with many smaller prominent companies and many, many, many, many angel investors. I'm a very strong believer in bringing as much help as you can if you really want to build a substantial company. Eon is building a cloud backup for enterprise infrastructure, and that's as a title.

Speaker 1:

Wow, what a wonderful representative of Startup Nation. You're quite the spokesman and the practitioner for all the innovation happening there. Well, let's dive in, because I thought that the notion of cloud backup was done and dusted. You know, we had a plethora of solutions. We solved the problem of secure cloud backup. So why?

Speaker 2:

Eon, yeah, isn't it. So I mean, come on, there are so many companies Rubric Cohesity, my grandmother on her phone, she has pictures of her grandkids and they are backed up to the cloud. So how come? Well, I can tell a lot of things about what we're doing and why it's so amazing, but the original scene of all the really really great companies in a minute that are doing cloud backup is that all of those companies were born on premises where there were no enterprises in the cloud. When we were inside AWS, we witnessed firsthand all those very large enterprises actually moving to the cloud Not what the newspapers are saying, but moving.

Speaker 2:

The real big, complicated workloads, actually starting to really use the cloud at a very large scale happened mostly in 2020, 21, kind of frozen 2022 in the downtown and continued in a very strong way around 2023 and onward, and we've seen this gigantic shift into the cloud and they actually started using things and interacting with real problems and experiencing resiliency issues in very large scale. This was very significant because at the same time, there was a new organization who started in the cloud called Cloud Operations, cloud Infrastructure, cloud Compute, cloud Engineering. This is usually a centralized organization inside enterprises and large companies and those are responsible for everything. Cloud infrastructure, for example, resilience. Now, cloud resilience backup, disaster recovery is not a small thing. When you combine both the orchestration cost and the actual storage cost, it adds up to 20, sometimes 30% of cloud spend. So that's a very, very big spend completely now being many times wasted on backups that sometimes you don't need. And even if you need them, those today are like tapes and black box vendor locked in objects. It's very hard to actually use them. So we've seen that first. It's very hard for companies to back up exactly what they need. So they're backing up things that they don't need, but they're not backing up the things that they need most for long enough time. That's one, and the other thing is that when they actually need the data, how can I access that? I need to restore a server from three years back. It contains end-of-life software security vulnerabilities, the network it was in doesn't exist and who has the password for the database? I don't know, probably if the company. So we realized that and decided to found Eon.

Speaker 2:

Now, eon founded on a premise that we want to adjust the paradigms to the new paradigms that exist in the cloud. You can see on-premises, let's say, I don't know. You want to allocate a virtual machine. What do you do? You open a ticket for IT, someone allocates a slice of compute, slice of storage, wraps it up, hand it to you. It's done, curated In the cloud.

Speaker 2:

Every person can create, remove, modify resources as much as they want and you have no control. We're trying to give control back. We want to take those tons of resources, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of resources, which of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of resources, which are going up and down, modified in the cloud, and give the control of how to back them up to those cloud infrastructure, cloud engineering teams. This means that, let's say you have just three rules. Rule number one you want to store your non-production data, which doesn't contain any sensitive information, for 14 days. Rule two, your production data with no sensitive information, stored for 45 days. And rule three production data with contained sensitive information stored for 180 days.

Speaker 2:

We want to enable you to do that in a very simple, very seamless way.

Speaker 2:

We want to enable you to do that in a very simple, very seamless way just to provide your business rules, while today, on-premises, the IT team on-premises and hence now the cloud infrastructure team with the same paradigm need to manually choose across all of those resources what to do with them, and it's an endless work that's very, very, very hard to get just right, and if you did, you go to sleep, you wake up and everything's different. That's one thing we're doing. The other thing is our ability to do global search and granular restore across all of your cloud resources, both for files but also for database records, and we do all of that in a very costly way, a very cheap way, because we're able to build our own storage still inside the cloud. We don't take the data out of the cloud unless the customer wants us to and store it in an efficient way. So both we can make money and the customer can save cost. So it's a win-win situation. So we strive to give a better solution, a more comprehensive one and at a lower cost. So no trade-offs.

Speaker 1:

That's quite an elevator pitch. Very good, and, as you know, what's driving a lot of the industry these days are security threats, ransomware in particular, and I think you've thought a lot about this. You have a ransomware protection package and end-to-end security. What's your philosophy here and what are customers telling you or demanding of you for ransomware protection package and end-to-end security? What's your philosophy here and what are customers telling you or demanding of you for cloud?

Speaker 2:

security these days. So that's very interesting. You see, when we started, I said we're not a security company because we're aiming to cloud infrastructure, but security was always tied very strongly to backup and we got asked by many customers to could you please provide a comprehensive ransomware solution? So, given the infrastructure that we've built and the talent that we have here we have many senior executives from cybersecurity we built a very comprehensive ransomware detection, protection and remediation tool, actually encompassing all of the NIST framework, and when we released it, we actually found out that because of our architecture, we were able to do that, but no one else could. So we're pretty much the only solution who are providing a ransomware detection, protection and remediation for cloud native resources, that is, data warehouses, managed databases, data lakes and so on and so forth. So we have a really unique offering to really protect all your native cloud workloads from any type of ransomware, and we're really proud of it and we've seen customers using the production time and time again and we're getting stellar feedback about those features.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic. That's great news for customers. How do you see automation? You mentioned automated resource classification. How do you see automation in cloud storage evolving and your role in making it easier? For teams when it comes to operational overhead.

Speaker 2:

You're touching a very sensitive point for customers. You see that many times, even when a customer says it's very expensive for us, many times they mean it's very hard for us to do automation. So it both costs a lot of time and effort and because it's manual, we don't sleep well at night. So on the one hand, we're backing up things that we don't need. On the other hand, we're not backing up the things we need for long enough, so we're burning money and not sleeping well at night. The approach for holistic automation enables us to do exactly that to meet customers where they are and tell them just apply, give us your business rules and we'll take care of everything else. Tell us which data you want to retain, for how much time and in which cloud and in which region, and we'll handle everything else. And that's what we're doing Fantastic.

Speaker 1:

We're also seeing a trend towards the multi-cloud a lot of adoption of multiple clouds across different industries, including hybrid kind of modes. How do you think about managing backups across such a diverse environment?

Speaker 2:

Usually what all of the other backup companies are doing in the cloud. They're more or less orchestration layers on top of the cloud native snapshots. Snapshots are the objects that are usually being used for backup. Those are kind of like tapes, black box vendor locked in objects. So if you take and manage database in RDS, for example in AWS, and you back it up, you can just transfer it into Microsoft Azure. It's impossible to do it Because we extract the data and store it in our own storage inside the cloud. We're actually the only vendor who allows you to back up all of your data, no matter what the source is, across all clouds. So, for example, you can backup data from AWS, store that in Azure and restore to GCP. We're enabling the flexibility for all the customers doing that.

Speaker 1:

That's phenomenal. I haven't heard of that one. So you know data protection. You know so many compliance requirements across different countries and regions and data sovereignty issues in Europe. Now, how does that impact your business when it comes to cloud storage and maintaining compliance across different jurisdictions?

Speaker 2:

So we always say that incentives drive behavior, and compliance is a significant incentive. Everyone, compliance is a necessity. One of the things that we're seeing, for example, is not only storing data for not long enough, but storing data for too long. See, many times, if you're a retailer, for example, you don't want to store the data to a day more than you have to, because you're liable to that. We're providing you the tools to let you know. Hey, you wanted to store PII personal identifiable information. You want to store it for no more than 100 days. You're now storing that for 200 days. And these are the resources that are there. What do you want to do with it? And you can decide whether you want to change your policy and make sure that you don't store that for more, or you're willing to take the risk, and we're providing you all the types of tools that you need to make the decisions for you and to be compliant, both for internal compliance as well as external compliance and regulation.

Speaker 1:

Brilliant. What's next? Can you give us a peek into your roadmap or some of the features that you might be rolling out this year? What are customers asking for and what can we expect from EO?

Speaker 2:

Of course, something very interesting that's happening in the world today is AI. I didn't mention this word. We started. I said we're the only company who's not an AI company. We're definitely using AI for various things, but I said we're not an AI company.

Speaker 2:

But this trend first, it's real and it's way too strong to not encompass pretty much everything we do, especially in data. Encompass pretty much everything we do, especially in data. Data in the cloud is booming now. There's so much data being created and so much pressure on companies actually utilizing this data. And something we've realized when speaking with CIOs and chief data officers and VP of cloud infrastructure director of cloud infrastructure, director of cloud infrastructure they told us that the problem that they see in general with backups is that they have so much data that has been stored in the organization across years but it's locked. They can't access that. On the other hand, you see data teams saying that they get pressure from management to monetize on data. For example, use the internal data to train models, just an example. Use that for analytics, use that for BI. So today it's a very costly operation.

Speaker 2:

Think about it, those data teams. Let's say that there are no 10 000 a data center, 10 000 databases inside the organization. They need to go engineer manager by an engineer manager, check what exactly do they have there, convince those engineering managers to get them a sneak peek, do an ETL or today it's more than so ELT from those databases or data warehouses to what's called now a data lake, somehow maintain the right access control that those who could access the data originally those are the only ones who can access data now maintain auditability and create a duplication of the data in this data lake. What we pretty much I don't want to say coincidentally, because it was by design, but what we purposely in at Eon is that we're not only backing up your data, we're making them automatically into accessible data leaks, which means that let's say that you're an enterprise backing up your data with Eon, we can expose that as an iceberg data leak and you can run data breaks, don't know Databricks or Snowflake or train models directly on the backup.

Speaker 2:

So you don't need to take your data and move it into a separate data lake. You don't need to worry about maintaining access control. You don't need to worry about audit, about duplications, about ETL, about maybe hurting production because you're doing queries on the production database. We can do it seamlessly for you at a much lower cost, automating everything and providing one huge access-controlled, governed, audited data lake on top of your entire cloud data center. And it doesn't cost you anything because it's a self-funding project when you do it for the backup. So you take the backup you have today. You could replace that with Eon. You're going to immediately pay less. So you've got your backup and you've got a data lake across your entire organization.

Speaker 1:

Wow, well, that's quite a mic drop moment. So on that, I'll shift gears a bit. Tell us about the culture at Eon. You've seen and built many cultures, startups and you've invested in many. What's unique about Eon and what's made your company so successful? What's the magic in being a founder, co-founder, entrepreneur these days? What's your secret to success?

Speaker 2:

if I can ask in a simpler way so, first, I think the talent here is absolutely amazing and we're able to get it because we continue to be able to hire the best people, because we are first our experience, not our first rodeo to any of us. We're coming exactly from that space, doing that for a very, very long time at the largest scales known to humans, and we've been bringing teams from Amazon, microsoft, google, with Meta we wanted nice UI, so also Wix. We have core maintainers of components like open source projects like Nodejs, and our chief architect used to be chief architect for all secondary storage in Huawei, dell and EMC and has 800 patents to his name just for storage and backup. So we're able to harness really the most brilliant minds with the most amazing experience doing that in the largest companies in the world, and this is the reason we're able to build the way we build. In addition, we have lots of ex-managers inside our R&D. Many of them are individual contributors and the organization in the R&D many of them are to the individual contributors and the organization in the R&D is managed even if it's quite big in a flat way directly under our CTO, who used to be general manager for the disaster recovery migration services in AWS Now Ron, our CTO, managing them in a very efficient way. The only way we could have done it is only because of this is a very seasoned and exceptional team of people who know how to handle themselves perfectly and know how to deliver products and not just code. And Ron is a very, very, very strong manager and we're able to deliver incredibly fast and we're able to bring more and more people without degrading the efficiency and quality of this team, which is a flywheel, so it brings even more great people. It also happens with our go-to marketing.

Speaker 2:

Our VP of solution architecture worldwide used to run all of AWS solution architecture for enterprises at EMEA. Our VP of solution architects in the US used to run all solution architecture, customer success and professional services for Infinidat from zero to $100 million in revenue and run rate, and a lot of other people with lots of experience in the largest companies in the world and the largest backup companies that ever built. So we've been able to assemble such an amazing team which creates a flywheel which allows us to bring even more amazing people, and, given that and given the help from our investors, we are able to truly get the best team in the world for that and to get a lot of access to some of the largest enterprises in the world access to some of the largest enterprises in the world and the reason that they trust us even trusted us early on, as it's called a young startup is it's a great conversation starter to tell a traditional enterprise, a conservative enterprise, an executive there we moved you to the cloud personally so you can feel comfortable that we can provide resilience for what you build there, because we know it inside out. We've seen it in the largest scales possible and it really helps. So it's a flywheel moving itself and we need to make sure that we execute upon that and we need to make sure that we execute upon that.

Speaker 2:

We found ourselves in a position where we actually have the possibility to create a transformational company. Now everyone says we want to build a big company. I'm very I lost my innocence. I've seen so many companies as an investor, as a founder all my friends are founders of companies we really think that we have an actual shot of building a company. Incredibly significant. We started up with a backup product. We're finding ourselves with a secondary storage platform for everything secondary storage needs and now all the cool things are happening to secondary storage, for example, training AI models, so you can do your backups but then use that to train your models. Didn't think about it when we started, I admit, but it resonates very well with customers.

Speaker 1:

Wow, congratulations. Such a compelling story Onwards and upwards. And, mazel Tov, thanks for joining Ophir, I really enjoyed our chat.

Speaker 2:

Thank you very much, evan. It was a real pleasure, and thank you.

Speaker 1:

And thanks everyone for listening, watching and sharing. Take care.