Guest: Niraj Tolia (LinkedIn)
Company: Alcion (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk About AI

Alcion employs an AI-driven approach to securely protect data from ransomware, malware, accidents, and outages. Its most recent milestone is the general availability of its AI-driven Backup-as-a-Service for Microsoft 365.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk About AI, Alcion CEO and Co-Founder Niraj Tolia shares details of the company’s history, its core offering, and its future plans, particularly in the data protection space.

Alcion backstory:

• Tolia has always been passionate about data protection. It has been his focus from graduate school on to his leadership positions in multiple companies.
• He co-founded Alcion with the goal of addressing data protection challenges, from backup and disaster recovery all the way to security, SBR, and integration.
• The company name is the Spanish version of Halcyon. In Greek mythology, it is supposed to be the seven days in winter when no storms happened, a safe harbor in a period of adversity, a time of peace and calm.

Alcion today:

• Its initial offering is a backup solution for Microsoft 365 because it is a growing market, and it is slightly underserved. Not enough people have backup. Microsoft released data that hundreds of petabytes of data are added every month to SharePoint. Alcion wants to help protect this business-critical data.
• The company tagline is AI-driven data protection. Its main use case tends to be security related: detecting malware/ransomware, anomalous behavior, malicious insiders, etc.
• It came out of stealth mode a few months ago and announced a $21 million Series A funding.
• It has a wide variety of customers, including construction firms, finance, ports, private bodyguard companies, and sports boards, electrical supply houses, folks that supply breakers and panels, and trucking companies.
• It has global customers. It has data centers in Australia, EU, and the US. For regulatory reasons, data and metadata never leave those regions.
• Their expansion beyond Microsoft 365 is customer driven.
• Alcion is different from legacy vendors in that it’s built in an entirely serverless system that scales down to zero for multiple petabytes. It has great technology under the hood, presented in such an easy-to-consume manner. It is adopting what people call product lead growth, i.e., free trial, no hand-holding, no salesperson, the sales team is there if you need help. Users self-drive their experience.

On the use of AI:

• Alcion focuses on the intersection of security, AI, and ease of use. AI is used extensively internally so that customers aren’t overloaded by its complexity.
• For example, for ransomware detection using AI, they are using multiple models on a per user or per file basis.

On current ransomware attacks:

• Attack surfaces have changed. With the growth of SaaS services, you don’t even need to be within a company’s network perimeter. There’s an API surface you can access externally. The traditional method of looking at the network flow of data is not effective, because you don’t see any edge traffic.
• Some attacks only encrypt partial files to prevent detection, some that are slow moving, some that are fast moving, some that replace files, some that don’t.
• Ransomware is indiscriminate. They employ a spray-and-pray approach. There is even the growth of ransomware-as-a-service. So, anyone that is using online services today is going to be a prime target. It is no longer just finance or large firms.
• Surveys have shown that 80% of respondents have been attacked by ransomware (and the other 20% might just not know it yet).

Advice for companies:

• Explore state-of-the-art solutions. The data protection solution you had 5 years ago is no longer the best protection.
• Have a game plan where you look at recovery, how recovery happens, how you prepare for this, how you categorize data, where your most important data reside, what you need to bring your business back online, and how quickly can you do that.
• Have game days and have your playbooks run through it. It’s an investment of time, but if you’ve done this, well, recovery will be easy and you won’t have to pay ransomware attackers.
• Don’t allow synchronous backup deletions.

What’s ahead for Alcion:

• Continue to focus on security.
• Focus on things that will make the admin’s life easier, e.g., faster detection, faster restores, better tools to recover quickly from widespread attacks.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.