Israeli co Reduxio renders ransomware ineffective

Reduxio Photo: PR
Reduxio Photo: PR

Reduxio's innovative data storage method foils hackers looking to hold company's for ransom. 

"I know that the subject of storage is hard to digest, so I'm trying to make it interesting for you," Mark Weiner, founder and CEO of Reduxio, an Israeli company getting its first exposure, told me. Reduxio completed a $32 million financing round in March, and has raised $48 million since it was founded in 2012.

"Storage is very important, because we have to store all the time: images, Word files, Excel files, and so forth. We want to store safely in the long term," adds Weiner, a Canadian Jew being interviewed in English, who says that his Hebrew is "not so great." "Companies spend a lot on what is called 'data management' - a third of their entire IT budget. That's a lot."

In order to explain the innovation in the information storage system developed by Reduxio, Weiner gives a little historical background. "Storage was first on magnetic tapes. Then came the disk, followed by the hard disk, the CD ROM, and flash memory. With the revolution of smartphones, tablets, and all the other mobile devices, however, came the problem of how to store, and of equal importance, how to transmit data from one device to another.

"Today, most of the data is stored on a stationary computer or the public cloud. It takes a lot of time to transmit them from one of these to the other, because it's not virtual. Actually, what hasn't yet undergone virtualization is information storage. Reduxio does this virtually, thereby making the process more flexible, rapid, cheap, and effective," Weiner says. As an example, he cites the way Amazon transmits its huge databases of up to 100 petabytes using a service called Snowmobile, which is actually a truck on which tons of hard disks are loaded. "Transferring such quantities of data through the Internet takes years. Even the fastest Internet in the world can't do it in less time," he declares.

According to Weiner, this is where Reduxio's innovation comes in. He says, "We have created a completely new storage method. Assume that you have a spaceship made out of Lego cubes, and you want to move it from one place to another. You'll have to dismantle and reassemble it each time. That's inefficient. Anything made out of Lego has unique parts that can be transferred and stored, while other things don't have to be transferred and stored. The proportion of these parts is fairly small, and dismantling and reassembling the spaceship will be simpler. When storage is involved, what Reduxio does is to catalogue the special pieces of data, store only them, and when it's necessary to reconstitute the data, to reassemble and/or transfer them from one place to another, all that is needed is those special pieces, not all the parts of data. This makes the process much quicker."

According to Weiner, Reduxio's solution makes the information reconstitution process 10 times as fast as the other solutions in the market, and halves the cost. "We store less data, and that's the reason."

As a result, Reduxio's software in effect creates a less important, but more colorful, feature: an enterprise "time machine." "Every special piece of data that we store has a time stamp - the time when which it was created. When the customer wants to reconstitute data, he therefore only has to tell us what time to reconstitute, and we can do it starting from the second before the data was deleted or damaged. In that way, we can neutralize any ransom attack, human error by an employee, malicious deletion of files, and so forth, because our system can retrieve the data from a second before the event. This is very important in ransom demands. You don't have to give in to hackers' demands."

Weiner explains that the conventional backup, as currently used in quite a few companies, does not make it possible to reconstitute data a second before the event. "Companies with very large databases can't do a backup every second, so the most recent backup is usually several hours in the past, not a few seconds, just like a smartphone. What we've actually done is bring the smartphone storage technology to enterprises."

Reduxio's competitors are EMC and Netapp. "It doesn't matter from where or to where the data has to be transferred; Reduxio can do it," Weiner boasts.

"Globes": How many customers does the company have right now?

Weiner: "Over 100. We're been selling the system for over a year, and I assume that by the end of the year, we'll have 200-300 customers. In the second quarter, we sold five times more than during all last year."

Published by Globes [online], Israel Business News - www.globes-online.com - on August 28, 2017

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2017

Reduxio Photo: PR
Reduxio Photo: PR
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