Storage News
Alcion Exits Stealth As ‘Modern AI-Driven Company’ Focused On Data Protection, Security, CEO Says
Joseph F. Kovar
‘You will be seeing a lot more work on the security side. We know very well how to do core backup and disaster recovery. ... But we have also been spending a lot of time on the security side to bring those worlds together. I think we will see this fundamentally be the market shift in the next couple of years,’ says Alcion co-founder and CEO Niraj Tolia.
Define Alcion.
Alcion is a modern AI-driven company. We’re solving the problem of data management and data protection. Traditionally, data protection has only meant backups. But in this case, we are looking at a combination of backups as well as security. We’re starting in the area of modern SaaS services—how to protect people whose data is now in the cloud. We started with Microsoft 365 just because of how quickly it’s growing an underserved market. But in a nutshell, we are AI-driven data protection for Microsoft 365.
You said ‘modern’ SaaS services. What are you doing differently than some of the other companies that may not be startups anymore but are relatively new to the market?
First of all, ‘modern’ is a funny word. I always look at ‘modern’ as a point in time. What is modern today might not be modern three years from now, as an example. But let’s talk about differentiation. I believe what Vaibhav [Kamra], my co-founder, believes. We’ve been working in backup and data protection for 20-plus years. My Ph.D. dissertation was on deduplication. …
