From an impressive stealth exit to a founding team with proven success, Eon has made quite an...
In a tech landscape crowded with backup solutions, how does a newcomer emerge from stealth mode with a billion-dollar valuation? This episode of TopShelfTech features Dr. Assaf Natanzon, Chief Architect at Eon, who explains how their revolutionary approach to cloud backup is challenging industry norms and redefining what backup technology can achieve.
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This blog recaps Jeremy's TopShelfTech interview with Eon, available to watch above. |
Watch the full conversation to hear firsthand insights on cloud backup innovations and detailed technical explanations, or continue reading for a comprehensive recap of this episode.
Making Backup Right for the First Time
With 25 years in the backup and disaster recovery field, Dr. Natanzon makes a bold claim: Eon is "making backup right for the first time." But what does this mean in practice?
Traditional backup approaches often rely on manual tagging of resources, leading to misclassifications and overlooked assets. Eon's agentless deployment turns this model on its head by automatically discovering and classifying data based on content rather than tags.
"Managing tags is a nightmare," Natanzon explains. "99% of the time, you forget to update the tag. If something happens, you often misclassify the data because you do it manually."
Eon's solution automatically detects sensitive information, installed applications, and resource types, enabling intelligent backup policies based on what's actually in your data rather than how it's been manually labeled.
From Backup to Data Lake: Transforming Recovery
Perhaps the most significant innovation is how Eon transforms the restoration experience. Traditional backups are essentially black boxes that require complete restoration before you can access any information. Eon's approach is fundamentally different.
"Unlike cloud services that provide backup as an opaque black box that you can just restore, we actually let you query the data or access the data of the backup, making the backup data basically like a data lake," Natanzon describes.
This capability enables remarkable efficiency gains in scenarios like database recovery: "If you're backing up 1,000 databases with 100,000 tables, you can search for specific tables based on content. You can see which backups you have for the table and even run queries on every backup directly without bringing the machine back."
This approach dramatically reduces recovery time from hours or days to seconds, while also enabling valuable use cases beyond disaster recovery.
Cloud Backup Posture Management: Security-First Approach
Eon has coined the term Cloud Backup Posture Management (CBPM), positioning backup as an integral part of security frameworks rather than merely an operational function.
Natanzon explains how this maps to the NIST cybersecurity framework:
- Identify: Automatically discover and classify important resources
- Protect: Implement air-gapped backup architectures across separate accounts
- Detect: Identify ransomware patterns, file encryptions, and other threats
- Respond: Restore clean versions of files or entire systems
"When we scan your data, we understand where you have ransomware. When you explore the file system in the backup, you'll see which files are suspected as corrupted and which version of the machine is completely clean," Natanzon explains.
This integrated approach means you can quickly locate clean versions of individual files or entire systems, dramatically reducing recovery time and improving security posture.
The Future of Cloud-Native Backup
Looking ahead, Eon plans to expand its coverage across cloud providers and services:
- AWS and Azure support already available
- Google Cloud Platform support coming soon
- EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) support
- Additional database platforms including MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and more
The ultimate vision is to become "a full single one-stop shop for all backup resources of any resource," with pricing comparable to or less than cloud-native alternatives despite the additional capabilities.
Conclusion
As businesses increasingly rely on cloud services, the need for intelligent, efficient backup solutions has never been greater. Eon's approach represents a significant departure from traditional backup philosophies, treating backups not as dormant insurance policies but as active, queryable assets that contribute directly to security posture and operational efficiency.
"Today backup is like a black box that you just pay for and get nothing back," Natanzon observes. "Now if your backup becomes your data lake as well, you get your ETL for free, and you can actually monetise it. Backup becomes something completely different."
With its automatic discovery, content-based policies, integrated security features, and data lake capabilities, Eon is positioning itself to transform how organisations approach data protection in multi-cloud environments.
