VMblog:  If you were giving an AWS re:Invent attendee a quick overview of the company, what would you say?  How would you describe the company?

Subbiah Sundaram:  HYCU is the fastest-growing data protection as a service company. We provide AWS customers and partners with a way to enhance their data protection. More and more companies are turning to cloud services and modern applications in their IT environments, and they need a way to not only backup critical data and services that are used to run applications but they need an easy way to recover in the event of human error or malicious actor. That is where HYCU comes in. We've been working with thousands of customers around the globe across on-prem, public cloud and now with SaaS applications to protect and recover mission-critical data. And, for many that could be important configuration files as much as customer and user data.

VMblog:  Your company is sponsoring this year's AWS re:Invent event.  Can you talk about what that sponsorship looks like?

Sundaram:  Great question. You can find HYCU at Booth #1269 to learn what's new and why we're excited to unveil major updates to the HYCU R-Cloud data protection platform. These new updates provide customers additional protection for their Amazon Web Services (AWS) applications across their data lifecycle, from build to runtime. You can also join HYCU at DevOps & Darts on Nov. 29th at Flight Club in the Venetian's Grand Canal Shoppes from 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm. We'll be sharing more information about our plans around GitLab data protection. And, if you're good at darts, you'll have a chance to play the HYCU team and get free access to our HYCU GitLab backup and recovery.

VMblog:  How can attendees of the event find you?  What do you have planned at your booth this year?  What type of things will attendees be able to do at your booth? 

Sundaram:  Stop by the HYCU Booth (#1269) to start. We'll be demoing all of our latest services support, the broadest in the industry for enhanced data protection for AWS services. Also, for anyone who signs up to schedule a demo now for during the show, they'll get a $100 gift card plus a extra special gift. The team has been having a lot of fun with this gift so we know it's something everyone will want! Also, for anyone that signs up for their own custom demo, after the meeting, we'll send them a $100 gift card.

VMblog:  Have you sponsored AWS re:Invent in the past?  If so, what is it about this show that keeps you coming back as a sponsor?

Sundaram:  We have. This is our third year at AWS re:Invent. It just keeps getting better and better. Granted two years ago, we were all just starting to see the return to conferences and events post-Covid. It is still one of the most widely attended events in the IT industry and it is THE place where anyone that want to learn about the latest AWS services and solutions needs to come. For us, it's where all our AWS customers and partners come and a great place to meet, network, and share the latest from HYCU and how they need to re-think how they protect their AWS services across the entire application development lifecycle.

VMblog:  What do you attribute to the success and growth of this industry?

Sundaram:  More enterprises than ever are now rapidly adopting the use of modern applications running on AWS. These modern apps achieve the scale and flexibility required for mission-critical infrastructure by leveraging dozens of independent AWS services. A recent report found that on average organizations are running 184 microservices, with 60% of respondents running 50 or more (Vanson Bourne, 2019). These services hold critical data, configurations, and settings that should be protected and also be recoverable in the event of an unexpected disruption. And, we're not even factoring in the growth of SaaS application use across the modern data estate. All of which means, there is a need to look at how you deploy, manage and protect these applications and the supporting data and services. For us, that means customers need to evaluate what they are using for backup and restore. We're proud that we are the only solution that enables protection of all critical applications and services from build to runtime. That means, we help protect applications used to design, develop, and build on AWS like Atlassian Jira Software, services used to secure critical services like AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and deployment services used to take applications to production like AWS CloudFormation and AWS Lambda. We help to make every application and service protected and recoverable from the build phase to runtime. 

VMblog:  What are you personally most interested in seeing or learning at AWS re:Invent?

Sundaram:  Talking to customers, prospects and partners. Listening to what are their biggest challenges and what we can do to help solve them. Not just that, but hearing from the team at AWS to hear what new innovations they are bringing to market and how we can help our own customers and partners take advantage of what they have to offer.

VMblog:  What kind of message will an attendee hear from you this year?  What will they take back to help sell their management team and decision makers?

Sundaram:  It's not a matter of if, but when. If you think your data is secure and you are using all the protections you have available, trust us when we say, you can always do more. It's not just to address the latest scare due to ransomware but more common human error or deletion. Nothing is more frustrating for a developer than to have to start over from scratch because configurations or scripts were deleted. This is especially true for any services that may need more protection than is currently available. That's why we created R-Cloud, low code development platform, and why we created R-Graph, a powerful visualization solution that allows end users to visualize their entire data estate to see what applications including SaaS are protected and unprotected. Knowing is half the challenge.

VMblog:  While thinking about your company's solutions, can you give readers a few examples of how your offerings are unique?  What are your differentiators?  What sets you apart from the competition?

Sundaram:  As we all know backup and recovery or more broadly data protection are not new. HYCU certainly did not invent either. However, when you look at the modern data estate and factor in the number of data silos that exist, we fundamentally believe that simplicity and efficiency are at the core of everything. If you need a PhD to operate your data protection solution, or a team of professional services reps, or multiple solutions across your enterprise to accommodate the growth of SaaS applications or AWS services then you are probably spending too much time and money on solving the wrong problem. HYCU currently offers more SaaS application support than any other enterprise data protection solution provider.

VMblog:  AWS re:Invent is typically a great venue for a company to launch a new product or an update to an existing product.  Will your company be announcing anything new?  If so, without asking you to give away too much, can you give us a sneak preview?

Sundaram:  Well the good part is now that this is live so too is our major news for the event. In our newest updates, we are making it easy to build on the powerful AWS services to keep all the components of the modern application ecosystem available and most importantly recoverable. We're focusing on not just the data, but also the settings, configurations, and functions that are critical to build, deploy and run modern applications on AWS as well as those SaaS services supporting AWS applications. We remain steadfast in our focus to give organizations the power to restore and recover critical data and configurations for any service - in one click.

With the updates to the HYCU R-Cloud Platform, we have expanded to deliver a fully managed backup and recovery service that delivers granular, item-level restore and cross-regional recovery for:

• Core Compute and Storage Services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and AWS Lambda
• Database services including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Aurora
• Core Platform Services including AWS IAM, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), as well as,
• Dozens of supporting SaaS applications that are critical parts of build and release of applications in AWS like Asana, Atlassian Jira, Jira Work Management, and Trello.

Come check us out at the HYCU Booth to see all of this in action.

VMblog:  Do you have any advice for attendees of the show?

Sundaram:  Use the time to explore and see what companies like HYCU have to offer. It's not always the companies with the largest booths where most of the innovation is coming from. Stop, ask questions, and make sure you feel like you have the answers you need. And, of course, take the time to ask if you can see the technology in action.