Elastio uses reverse engineering to better understand increasingly sophisticated ransomware

Ransomware is on the minds of most corporations today, with a big concern about the impact of getting hit on day-to-day operations. Various solutions have emerged to help mitigate those headaches, including when it comes to cloud-native and cloud services.

The operating model in the cloud is much different than it is on-prem, according to Najaf Husain (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Elastio Software Inc. That means there’s a very different strategy in place when it comes to technologies in the cloud to make things work, scale and be cost-performant for customers.

“We started out with the cloud in mind. All our technologies [are] focused on the cloud,” Husain said. “We work today on Amazon, you’ll see us go to multiple clouds soon — namely Azure, [Google Cloud Platform], the big triumvirate — but that’s where we start. Usually, the personas we focus on are the cloud security folks. Also, the infrastructure people get involved as well because it’s data. So, we’re kind of in between both of them.”

Husain spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier at the “Cybersecurity” AWS Startup Showcase event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the secret sauce of Elastio’s solutions and technology, along with the problems it aims to solve. (* Disclosure below.)

Knowing what’s in the data

Elastio is available out of the AWS Marketplace and works with a lot of Microsoft Corp. partners currently. The company also has a team that works with customers directly to get them deployed, with the product installed in 10 minutes through a cloud formation template, according to Husain.

“One thing that’s very unique about what we do, everything’s operated in the customer VPC,” he said. “So, it lives in the customer account, so the data never leaves that account. That’s a very important component of the platform.”

When it comes to Elastio’s core technologies, there are several areas at play, including the company’s deep inspection, its data integrity engine, and its ability to finally detect ransomware, malware and corruption inside data, according to…