Challenges in Protecting SaaS Data – Simon Taylor, HYCU

This is Text Drunk tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Tech Drunk tv.

I am, uh, excited to have a first time guest here in a new company we've not introduced you to before, uh, on Tech Drunk. Today, I'd like to introduce you to Simon Taylor. Simon is the founder and c e o of a company called Haiku.

I know he's not going to do any Haiku poems, I don't think, but he's gonna tell us all about Haiku and himself. Simon, welcome, welcome to Tech Drunk tv. Alan, it's great to be here.

Thank you so much for having me on the show. Ah, it's our pleasure. So, Simon, I, you know, first, first time guests.

I always like to kind of share with the audience a little bit about who they are, how they got to be sitting here today. So if you don't mind and we don't embarrass you, give us a little bit of the Simon Taylor, uh, journey story. My gosh, it, it, it is quite a journey.

I'll tell you. Um, I'm a serial entrepreneur, is sort of the, the simplest way to put it. You know, I started my first company when I was 24 years old.

I was working at Forester Research, uh, left there. Um, and I founded a company that was effectively a, one of the world's first reverse auction businesses, you know, an eSourcing platform specifically around, uh, engineering. But the sort of the unique twist was I didn't found it in the United States.

Um, I sold everything I had at age 24, wasn't much. And, uh, I moved to Prague in the Czech Republic, and I did it because it was cheap and there was great engineering talent in the early two thousands, the early knots, sure ts and, uh, you know, went over there and started building this database. And I went all over Eastern Europe.

I went to Estonia, Laia, Lithuania, all over the place. Uh, sort of building this really, really comprehensive database of engineers. I sold that company to a company called Comrade Group.

I went to work for them. I, uh, ended up, you know, running their outsourcing business for a couple years. I left there, I got an M B A in Spain.

Uh, the day I graduated from Spain, that same guy who had bought my first company calls me up says, look, I just acquired all this ip, all this software. Do you want to come run a business for me? And I said, sure, we'll partner on something.

And I ended up, you know, finding out that he had acquired a little bit of IP that connected Citrix and Microsoft. So I built a separate company, um, and effectively it was a monitoring tools company. Uh, we grew it from, you know, zero to 2000 customers in about four years.

And I sold that company to Citrix in 2014. Um, and last Wow. Yeah, so you, you know, sort of then I'm sort of back in the states and I'm, you know, doing my thing and I bump into an engineer that I'd met in Europe named Gordon Greski.

And he was known to be one of the world's best data protection engineers or architects. And that led to a long conversation, um, which ultimately led, uh, to the founding of Haiku, really, which stands for Hybrid Cloud Uptime. Um, we're now the world's fastest growing backup as a service company, and we effectively help, you know, the world's organization stay safer by visualizing all their data and then helping them to back up and recover and restore that data, whether it's on-prem, in public cloud or SaaS.

So that's you, you know, in a nutshell, sort of the last, you know, 20 plus years of my life, Alan, Fantastic man. That What a great story, Simon. Thanks for sharing that, and No worries.

And, and you know what? We, we got the Haiku bag in there too, right? So backup is a service.

Look, it's, it's meat and potatoes. It may, a lot of people don't think of it as sexy, but it's absolutely necessary and, and, and critical mission critical for, right? It may not be core to what companies do, but it's mission critical.

I think that the, the, uh, I always say this, that the, the ransomware problem, the scourge of ransomware as we call it, has elevated data protection from sort of a, you know, a, a commodity that was sort of in the plumbing to something that boards of directors actually now really care about. Because one of the Absolutely, You know, there's a ransomware attack one once every 11 seconds, Alan, you kind of get to this point where you go, okay, it's gonna happen to me at some point when that happens, how am I gonna recover? How am I gonna get my, get my stuff back, and I can either pay a bunch of terrorists or I can back it up and recover it?

Well, you could pay a bunch of terrorists and hope for the best or, or back it up. Yeah. But you know what, look, backup's been around a long time, right?

Tape and all that stuff, remember. Sure. But the, I think ransomware has created a unique opportunity for backup as a service because it sort outsourced the backup to a third party that is not necessarily gonna be infected by your ransomware.

And that kind of blood. What is, what's the membrane between your brain and your, and your heart of the cortex Or something? Yeah.

You know, that does that membrane prevents that third party from being infected, you know, 99%? No, I think, I think it's very well said. And I think, you know, one of the biggest crises, crises, um, that the world is seeing today is what I call the SaaS data apocalypse.

Um, and I've actually just written a book about that called Averting the SaaS data Apocalypse, uh, available on Amazon. But essentially, you know, what the book is about is the fact that, you know, in the old days, people used to keep their data at maybe four or five different places, right? You had some different physical servers, maybe you were using some I B M, maybe you were using some Linux, some windows, et cetera, you know.

But today, the average company keeps their data in over 200, 200 different data silos because of SaaS. And nobody ever thinks they need to protect that data. They just don't think about it.

That there's this great myth out there, Alan, which is sort of like some magical elf is protecting my data, and they're just simply not, you know, in, in reality, if you are not protecting all of your data on prem public cloud SaaS, um, you could really, really find yourselves in a lot of trouble. And, you know, which is why, you know, we worked with the F B I on this and we realized over half 52% of ransomware attacks occur via SaaS, 52%. And how, you know, so think about SaaS Salesforce, you think about Office 365, think about Asana, think about Okta, think about Jira.

I mean, there's over 23,000 SaaS vendors in the United States alone. Um, and until hiq, only five of them were protected by anybody in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, people didn't care about this problem. And it's become, I think, one of the sort of greatest risks to our economy, um, that we've ever seen.

Interesting. You know, I get it. We look guilty.

Let me just say that off the top. Guilty, we, we probably also have, I don't know if we have 200, but I bet you we have at least a hundred different SASS products where we're storing data. And I, I think part of the issue is one of the, you know, what are the attractions of sas?

Well, instead of laying out a lot of money at once, you pay it over, you know, monthly and it's, it's more palatable. You know, it's that whole CapEx opex thing. Great.

But the second part of it is, I don't have a server closet anymore. I don't have an on-prem. Mm-hmm.

It, uh, the same, the same way I, I count on a cloud provider to do their job, you know, power pinging and pipe and, and all of that stuff. I count on my SaaS provider to worry about data protection. I know.

And what happens. I know. And, and so outta sight, outta mind, and I'm happy to, well, I think That, I think it's even more, you know, because, you know, the, the shared responsibility model is kind of like one of life's, you know, one of it's, uh, darkest truths.

It's not a secret. It's out there, you know, but every, if you read your contract, every one of those contracts is gonna say the same thing. Every SaaS vendor says the same thing.

We'll provide the service, but the data is yours to manage and protect. You know, I was, I was talking the other day about the fact that at Dreamforce, mark Benioff actually made this comment. He said, your data's not our business.

And he said it in a nice way, he said it to sort of indicate, we're not trying to sell your data, et cetera. But it's actually, it's got very, very tragic implications when, you know, even the, you know, c e o of one of the world's most successful SaaS companies is saying, it's not on me, it's on you. Yeah.

And I, and I think you're right, it's a little bit outta sight outta mind. When we had that server closet, you kind of knew, you're like, well, who's going into that closet? And I know all my most precious, you know, jewels are in there.

I gotta be careful. Um, because we can't see SaaS. We think that it's safe, and we don't think about it.

And so, you know, one of the things we did is we created what we call our graph, which is, you know, the world's first visualization tool for SaaS. So you plug it in, you turn it on, um, and it will help you visualize. It creates this sort of beautiful tree that shows you every element of your on-prem, public cloud and SaaS estate.

And it tells you, out of all those workloads, out of all those services, what is backed up, what is protected and what is not. Because we wanna sort of visualize that server room for you, give you a sense of, you know, hey, seeing is believing, this is what your estate actually looks like. And, you know, we've had customers, in fact, in the book, we talk about the Boston Red Sox, they turn it on and they see a thousand services.

I mean, they see literally thousands of services. And it's kinda like, oh my gosh, we've gotta protect this. We've gotta do something about this.

Um, so, so look, I, I consider this honestly, to be a huge problem. And it's something that's not going away. I think SaaS is super valuable, but we've gotta get our act together.

We've gotta start to understand that the shared responsibility model, um, essentially means it's on us. We gotta fix this. There's no one else helping.

Well, You know what, Simon? My, I was in security. We didn't call it cyber, but now of course they do.

But I, I was in cyber for 20, almost 25 years. When cloud first came on the scene, 2005, 2006, you know, that was one of the big lessons that the cyber people were trying to teach our corporate overlords, which was, we have responsibility for cybersecurity, but when you're putting everything in the cloud, we don't have visibility or, or PA empowerment for it, right? 'cause we're relying on their security for a good chunk of this.

And it had to be a partnership between the cloud provider security and, and the organization security working together. But ultimately, when, you know, when, you know what hit the fan, it was, it wasn't the cloud provider who took the hit. That's right.

That's right. Right. It was, it was the company.

And it's the same thing here with sas. It hasn't, it hasn't really changed. My, here's a question I got for you though.

Sure. How the heck do you do this when you have 200 different SaaS applications? I mean, the short answer is, oh yeah, use Haiku.

We figured it out. But seriously, it's, no, It's a How do you do this's a great, And, and, and, and I'll and I, and I'll let let you in on a little secret, it's not even 200, it's 23,000 SaaS services, and that's 200 per customer. Meaning that, you know, you could have any combination of anything.

Um, I think this was such a hairy problem that the industry never really even tried to take it on, which is why there was so little SaaS data protection for so long. Um, we had, uh, a little bit of a revelation, you know, which was, you know, it really shouldn't be us built trying to build data protection for 23,000 SaaS services. We should create a platform that lets 23,000 SaaS services right?

To us. And so what we did is we kind of tore the lid off of our platform and we created a low-code development platform for SaaS vendors, the world's first, first of its kind. Um, and we've now got over 50 different integrations in that, uh, in that platform, we'll have over a hundred, you know, inside the next sort of six months, we'll have about 300 by the end of next year.

And so very quickly we go after this problem, not by trying to build it all ourselves, but by saying we're gonna make it so easy to write to our platform. So you're still gonna have native and natively integrated enterprise tooling, but we're gonna get that velocity, that scale, by allowing those SaaS vendors to write to us. Um, and it's proved very successful.

We've actually found is that there are so many service providers out there and partners who actually want a piece of this as well. Because, you know, for years, SaaS has been elusive for, if you're a reseller, you used to sell everything in your closet that, that IT closet. Sure.

But, you know, in, in recent years, that's become tougher because the IT closet is moving to the cloud or moving to SaaS. And you know, suddenly they're realizing, oh wait, I can, we can get in on this SaaS stuff, uh, by building a data protection integration with Haiku. Love it.

Yeah. So, so you've reversed, instead of you trying to be a plug into all these sockets, you became the socket. That's right.

We became the Universal a p I that lets anybody write to us. And, you know, I think not just that, what we do is we provide the entire enterprise data protection platform, but we're, we're literally just letting people write to it. So all of the granular recovery aspects are being designed, you know, by the SaaS vendors themselves or the partners.

Um, but it's all based on our platform and using our technology. So, so, you know, yeah, go Ahead. I get it.

So out of the 22, 20 3000 plus SaaS providers out there, how many of them have active a p I integration with you at this point? Yes. So we launched this, we only officially launched this, you know, to the market a few months ago.

And we've already got, Okay, so it's, we've Already got sort of the top 50. Um, we'll have the top a hundred, you know, inside of, I think the next six months. And I think, you know, ultimately, you know, where we wanna get to is you wanna have sort of the top four to 500, you know, covered.

Um, and at that point, you know, you really have a vast majority of these things that you really need to protect. Again, you know, up until this point, only five of these SaaS services were ever protected. So the fact that we've already got 50 is 10 times our nearest competition.

Absolutely. But you, you got work cut out for you there. It's no small problem.

And I think No, no. Yeah. Well, it's also a target rich environment, right?

For you, for your BizNet people. Hey man, I got 23,000 potential partners I gotta convert here. Um, and so I just wanna make sure RCloud, that's the name of the Haiku offering here.

It's called RCloud. Yeah, It's called RCloud. The letter R dash cloud, um, stands for resiliency.

Uh, and essentially, you know, it, it's the first of its kind. It's the first time anybody's ever looked at data protection this way. Um, you know, we always joke, we like to keep it sassy at Haiku, you know, because this really is a SaaS service.

You go online, you turn it on. No, it's perfect. It Discovers your environment and you protect yourself.

You know what it, it's, it's the, it's the method and the, the platform they're used to, right? This is, that's it. You want SASS vendors to use in sas.

Hey Simon, we only have, uh, we only have a few seconds left, we never even got into, alright, for our people out here who want to use Haiku maybe for their own data backup as a service, it's not spelled H A I K U, right? It's H Y C U, right? That's right.

com. ai. Yeah.

com. Uh, it stands for Hybrid Cloud Uptime because we allow you to keep all, everything on-prem, public Cloud and SaaS up and running at all times. And once they go there, is there kind of like a free trial?

I mean it's, you know Yep. You just click on free trial and you know, you can, you can turn it right on. You can also request R Graph, which is the visualization tool that's completely free of charge.

So, you know, when you go select R graph, you know, we'll turn it on for you. We'll, you'll discover your environment and you'll be able to see where all your SaaS services are. You know, and I can't tell you the number of times we talk to customers and they say, hi, I know where everything is.

They turn on this tool and suddenly they go, oh my gosh, I didn't know that the marketing department had gotten that. When did that, when did that show up? Um, or, or, oh, I forgot we were still using that.

Right? So, so just, just that visualization, um, is, is a really powerful thing, but to be able to take it a step further and then click on it on those integrations and, and light it up and protect it, that's something else entirely. This is, this is big stuff.

Got it. Alright man. Simon, I want to thank you so much for coming on today and get, making us a little bit smarter about SaaS and, and SaaS backup and SaaS data protection.

It, it, we really do need to be thinking about it. The name of the book again is Averting the SaaS Data Apocalypse. It is available on Amazon or wherever you, your favorite book vendor is.

Uh, Barnes and Nobles is still opening stores around us, so know you can probably go in there too. Simon, don't be a stranger. Come on and keep us posted here.

Okay. Thanks For having me. I appreciate the time.

No problem. Simon Taylor, founder, c e o of Haiku. com.

Check it out. We're gonna take a break here on Techstrong tv. We'll be right back.