Breaking the cloud backup “black box” with intelligent data mapping and recovery

Since the early days of computing, businesses have used backups to keep their business-critical information protected. A successfully established cloud security posture ensures that the organization is not affected during unforeseen events such as natural disasters or system failures. However, even after a multifold growth in the scale and complexity of enterprise technology stacks, the approach to setting up these backups has remained largely the same: static and error-prone.

To fix this, Aeonan Israel-New York-based startup founded by a team of former AWS engineers has created a new cloud-native backup solution that maps and continuously backs up resources for businesses, depending on the types of data involved. Most importantly, once these backups are ready, it makes them usable by allowing users to recover specific files or records as per their needs.

The year-old company is challenging the status quo in the cloud backup domain, giving businesses a whole new take on how they can back up their data sets and applications and use those copies security when they need it. according to Gartnercompanies are spending $596 billion on cloud infrastructure and plan to increase their investments to more than $720 billion by 2025. Of that, about 10% goes to backup infrastructure, which translates into in millions per company annually.

The company was founded a year ago and is already making waves with its proprietary back storage technology. It has hooked dozens of customers across all industries and raised nearly $200 million in funding, with the latest $70 million round valuing the company at $1.4 billion.

Traditional cloud backup isn’t keeping up

Today’s businesses rely heavily on cloud infrastructure, thanks to its ability to scale quickly and efficiently. Each cloud instance can host a variety of AI and ML applications and petabytes of data, using virtual machines with block storage, object storage, elastic file systems, databases, data lakes, and data warehouses.

In this massive and fast-paced ecosystem, creating a cloud backup becomes a chore. First, you need to cover an endless and rapidly growing wave of cloud assets, from every active application and database to resources that have been shut down or moved. Then, after identifying the resources, they must manually tag them with metadata tags (key-value pairs for easy organization and filtering) and create snapshots. These are point-in-time backups that can be configured with different retention periods, allowing users to restore assets at any time within the retention window.

Over the years, these snapshots have evolved, providing businesses with capabilities such as automation (after initial setup) and encryption. However, at a granular level, they haven’t kept up with business needs and their cloud environments have gotten out of control. Resources must still be tagged on a massive scale, which can be time-consuming and error-prone, and cloud backup must be restored in the form of entire servers/volumes, even when you just need to get some of them back. files

Ofir Ehrlich, who founded CloudEndure with Gonen Stein and Ron Kimchi and later sold it to Amazon to bolster AWS’ cloud migration and disaster recovery efforts, saw this problem firsthand when working with large enterprise customers of the company

“The challenge with these traditional snapshots is that they are expensive and act as black boxes, making it difficult to locate specific files or database records, search them, and retrieve accurate data. This complexity leads to higher costs, inefficiencies operations and slower recovery times, issues that become critical during emergencies,” Ehrlich told VentureBeat.

As a result, the trio left AWS and launched Eon in January 2024 with a mission to provide businesses with smarter, more capable backups.

How exactly does Eon stand out from the crowd?

While most other companies offer cloud backup solutions including rubric, Cohesion, Commvault and AWS Backup, continue to rely on traditional snapshots, Eon took a different approach by developing its own Eon Snapshots, based on cloud-based storage that is specifically optimized for backups. Ehrlich says these snapshots make backup data instantly accessible and searchable, allowing users to locate specific files or database records, search them, and retrieve precise information.

At its core, Eon creates snapshots by automating resource mapping, classification, and policy association. It continues to continuously analyze cloud resources, automatically mapping and classifying them based on the type of environment (whether production, development, staging or QA) and the sensitivity of the data, such as information of personal, health or financial identification. Once resources are allocated, apply custom backup retention policies based on your company’s specific business and compliance requirements. This ensures that data is not over or under backed up.

After snapshots are created, the company makes them accessible to users, with global search across all backup data, granular restore, and seamless recovery across multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP). This allows users to not only locate and restore relevant data, down to specific files, but also run SQL queries directly on the backed-up databases to retrieve specific records from tables or spreadsheets.

This intelligent restore capability saves the hassle of restoring/provisioning entire databases and can even be used by teams to run analytics, forensics, and audits right on top of their backups. Snapshots use machine learning under the hood to remember which application or cloud system the data is connected to, ensuring that the connection is maintained as information is reset/retrieved.

This also prevents misconfiguration or unauthorized access to data.

“Eon excels in its ability to provide instant access to specific data. The solution provides precise file-level restores across multiple cloud providers without the need to restore entire servers or databases, enabling businesses to find individual files and database records in seconds,” Ehrlich noted.

With this approach to automated tagging and instant recovery, Eon essentially makes cloud backups intelligent and immediately usable, unlike what has been the story until now. It even helps reduce costs and operational burdens by excluding unnecessary resources (during mapping) and shortening data retention periods according to business requirements, achieved through context-aware backup policy management.

“This work allows us to deliver a better product that replaces traditional, expensive, black-box snapshots with a more cost-effective, self-managed, and easy-to-use alternative through instance access,” added the CEO. He didn’t share the specific cost benefits involved, but noted that the company only charges for paid backup storage, with no fees for real-time backup or instant access/lookups.

As of now, Eon is working to expand its offering and actively collaborate with dozens of companies in industries such as travel and hospitality, media and entertainment, food services, gaming, financial services, companies insurance and retailers. Ehrlich noted that they already have numerous deployments in place, without sharing specific customer details.

However, it will be interesting to see how the company continues to differentiate itself in the highly competitive cloud backup space. Currently, its intelligent search and retrieval capability is the differentiator (with dozens of patents for cloud storage and data management technologies already filed), but other backup solutions are also starting to catch up of security Commvault, for example, has already started offering features like automated tagging and dependency-based restores.