Jason Buffington .com

Every ten years, the #DataProtection industry (what we’re mostly calling #CyberResilience these days) rediscovers two truths and asks the same question: what else can I do with my backup data? HYCU, Inc. aiR might finally give us an answer — here’s why.

press release: https://lnkd.in/ghJ-HJcU

Congrats to Simon Taylor, Andy Fernandez, and the HYCU, Inc. team.

video transcript

If you haven’t seen HYCU’s announcement of Air, go check it out.

Every ten years, the data protection industry, or what we now call the cyber resilience industry, rediscovers two truths and reaffirms one core goal.

Truth number one: the stakes for comprehensive backup and agile recovery continue to rise.

It used to be that we only focused on backup. Then came disaster recovery, ransomware, data encryption, and identity threats. Now all of those challenges still exist because we keep adding threats rather than replacing them, and they’re all accelerating at agentic AI speed.

Truth number two: whenever the production landscape shifts, new leaders emerge that are purpose built for where organizations are going, not where they currently are.

In the previous era, traditional data centers often supplemented their primary backup solution with something designed specifically for virtual machines. Then, as VMs became the default production format, the VM specific solution became the primary platform and the old solution became secondary.

We are now at a similar inflection point as organizations increasingly embrace SaaS platforms.

If your current solution does not protect the wide range of SaaS applications your business depends on, you’ll likely supplement it with something like HYCU because of its broad SaaS protection capabilities. And eventually, when SaaS becomes your dominant IT model, what started as the supplemental platform becomes the primary platform and vice versa.

As interesting as that trend is, it’s not actually the news of the day.

For years, the lingering question in backup and cyber resilience has always been: “What else can I do with my backup data?”

HYCU Air may finally provide an answer.

Air is not about backing up more data. It’s about unlocking more value and actionable insight from every backup HYCU has ever performed or will perform in the future because Air is fundamentally about metadata.

Every Entra ID or Okta identity change, every GitHub deletion, every data modification where the production platform knows which user performed an action or what kind of information exists within the data — all of that context becomes accessible.

That creates major potential benefits for forensics, audits and compliance, cyber preparedness, and more.

The most exciting part, which I do not have time to fully unpack in a three minute video, is how this enables the broader community and ecosystem around HYCU. I’ll spotlight some of those scenarios later when I have more time to dive deeper.

Credit to the HYCU team because these new security and AI capabilities were not built in isolation and stitched together afterward. This is a unified codebase with a common control plane, an architecture designed from the ground up for diverse SaaS environments, and a thoughtful approach not just to the data itself, but to the metadata surrounding it.

Now they’re unlocking all of that potential through AI.

Congratulations to the HYCU team. This should be a very interesting summer.