Elastio CEO Naj Husain Emphasizes Ransomware Detection at AWS re:Invent 2023

This is Techron TV And we are back live streaming here at Amazon Reinvent 2023. I'm Shera Rubinoff, chief Cybersecurity Officer for Techron. And I'm here with Na Hussein, CEO of Veela, osteo nj.

Such a pleasure to be with you here today. Oh, Shera, thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Oh, thank you nj. So, na, I'd love you to explain to the audience who is ELA osteo and what is your story. Yeah, thank you so much.

Sure. So, ELA osteo, uh, what we do is we help companies, um, protect themselves against ransomware. It's, as you know, it's a huge pain point.

Hot topic and the topic. It's crazy. Yes.

You know, 50%, more than 50% of communists gonna get hit last year. Certainly hundreds of millions of attacks every year. So how do you protect yourself?

Right. So what we do is something very different. Mm-Hmm.

We actually dig inside the data and make sure that that data's clean and always recoverable. 'cause at the end of the day, the business needs it when they get attacked. It's not a matter if they need to be able to recover their applications.

And that's what we focus on. You know, that's so important. You know, people don't really talk about the recoverable data and is it a clean set of data Mm-Hmm.

To recover with. It's more of what do we have now? Make sure, and they're not focusing on the data that's recoverable.

And I think that's a very important niche in the industry. So how do you set yourself apart from your competitors within industry and what is your edge? Yeah.

So very good. So number one is we focus on the recoverability of the data. That's really important to know that at any given point that you can get your applications back safely.

Mm-Hmm. So to do that however is not, it's very difficult. Sure.

So what we did is we reverse engineered all the known ransomware. We spent the last three years doing that. Wow.

So over 2000 of them. But we find between two and 25 new ones a week. I mean, it's pervasive.

Some are novel, some are well known. That's right. Um, and we, we haven't technology now that we, since we reverse engineered them, we can precisely detect it inside the data.

Right. So that's very powerful. So as you scan your data as either, uh, directly from an application snapshot or if through a backup, we can tell if that's infected and and produce that report back to the customer.

Say, yes, this, this is recoverable. Recoverable or not. So, you know, a perri, if you can recover when you're attacked, Well that certainly falls into the bucket of being proactive in your cybersecurity stance.

Yeah. There's the reactive piece, which you certainly are focusing on, but you're being proactive and ensuring that it's the correct set and, and sitting there. And I know that you've made some really wonderful announcements here at AWS, some very exciting ones.

Yes. And please share with our audience these wonderful announcements you've made as a company. Yeah, thank you.

Yeah. So, uh, so we do a lot of partnerships with Amazon. We're very tightly coupled there.

Yes. So we're actually integrated in, obviously with their snapshots, their snapshotting engines. Sure.

We've also integrated with AWS backup. So customers using AWS backup can leverage ELA year to make sure that those snapshots are recoverable. We've just announced today S3 support.

Wow. Which is a big, big area of concern for customers. There's a lot of payloads that get dropped in S3 and they need to be scanned and protected.

Right. Uh, we also have EFS support, which there's file systems in Amazon, so we have support for that as well. So those two things were announced today.

So we're excited about that. Well, how do you find the conference going for you? Amazing.

I mean it's a huge conference. I mean it's dwarfs any conference I've been to in terms of head count is 75,000 people or something. Yeah.

But there, the expo has been fabulous. The sessions are amazing. Uh, we're meeting a lot of customers here, which is exciting.

Well, Who would be an ideal customer for last year? Yeah, so we kind have two profiles. So the mid market's a good place for us.

So, um, you know, SaaS companies are a good target for us. Financial institutions are a great target for us. Insurance companies are a great target for us, either in the mid-market or enterprise.

So we're seeing, you know, customers in both sides of that area, in both those areas. 'cause it's such a big problem with ransomware today. Oh, certainly.

And I think a lot of these companies think, well, it's just such a big thing to bite off. What would you tell them if they said, you know what, we're interested in learning a little bit more, but you know what, we don't have a massive budget or we don't just have so much time. What is it that you can lead them along?

What road can you lead them on Here? Yeah. So with the last deal we offer of some tools for the customer, so part of what we offer is to be able to do a, a scan.

So you can just for free take it, uh, deploy it, scan your data to see how, see how cr uh, you know, vulnerable you are. Look at the risk. You can Exactly.

You can see what the risk is. And that's Something that people really don't realize what their risk is. Correct.

Yeah. And that's a big, that's a big problem. So we can kind of assess that risk for you upfront.

Mm-Hmm. Tell you how vulnerable you are in terms of do you have infections or not. Sure.

And also misconfigurations in storage. And when we go in deploying customers a hundred percent of the time, yeah. We find storage misconfigurations.

How Does that Happen? So they're just, the clouds are so ephemeral, right. They're so dynamic.

People create, they make users are developers create a volume, they don't encrypt it. Right. Or they have a snapshot that's open to the public.

These are just simple things. You think Human error here. Yeah.

These are just simple things that happen 'cause of the sheer volume information that's going on and the dy the dynamism of the cloud. So we, we, we protect those in real time. So you can see that.

Plus we actually scan the data to make sure that the data that you have is not compromised. So, and That's all in real Time and we can do all that. Right.

So we do that against the live workloads if you'd like. Right. We can do it against the backups if you'd like to make sure they're recoverable.

So any part of that infrastructure, you can decide for your mission critical apps. You may want to, you may wanna scan them closer to where production lives, where the production date is. Yeah, that makes sense.

And then for the recovery side, you may wanna scan the backups to make sure they're recoverable. So both of those are covered over the last year. Well that sounds like a very much need to have type of technology.

I know we've spoken before about a nice tab, which is pretty much everything out there. Yeah. A need to have is when the dollars become available.

And the must have is, listen, we the pain points today, what are these pain points? And ransomware attacks are the number one pain point that organizations are facing today. But it's also, you know, what, what do you do to be proactive in that?

You have to have the proper backups. How do you know that they're gonna be proper? How do you know that they're gonna be, um, completely clean in a way that should be deployed to businesses today?

Yeah. So I think this is something you people should definitely look at. I know we also discussed that there are some other things coming up gamut that you'd like to share with our audience Today.

Yeah. So we're excited. Our customers are asking for a lot of capabilities across platform now.

Yeah. So we're moving into Azure as we speak. Oh, very good.

Um, also coming back OnPrem with VMware. It's very exciting for us. So we have those two areas coming into play.

Um, on AWS we're fully robust now. We cover anywhere that, that you can place files where customers can store files as you want 'em have have protected. So that's covered now in AWS So we've got the file services covered with EFS and FSX.

We got the object storage covered with S3. And then we also have the block storage obviously. So a Amazon's complete.

So now we wanna take that to more other clouds. Wow. Very exciting movement within the company.

And congratulations on all your success so far. Certainly wanna hear more and gonna be listening and watching to see what's coming next out of Veela Osteo. Thank you so much and thank you so much NJ.

It's a pleasure speaking to you and I look forward to speak to you again soon. Thank you. Uh, thank you from Techstrong and we will be back shortly.

Thank you.