As recent high-profile hacks (Atlanta-based Equifax comes to mind) indicate, protection of secure data is top of mind for every consumer — and thus, important for every company who takes in any sort of data from customers. Atlanta-based RestorePoint provides data protection as a service; storing, protecting, and backing up a global client roster of companies’ data in the event of an incident.
The company began as a U.S. training arm of a global software enterprise, teaching employees how to use software that backed up their own data. But clients quickly began asking RestorePoint to manage the backups for them, and a new company was born. They’ve since added disaster recovery services to their offerings — last year, 60 percent of their restores were due to a disaster event such as a computer virus.
Now, the team of about 20 will be led by a new CEO with a background in data protection services sales. Dave Albano formerly led the southeast regional team that sold AT&T’s data protection services (which include backup, disaster recovery, and security services) to enterprise customers. Under Albano, the southeast region was AT&T’s highest performing region in this capacity.
“Solutions for data protection, storage and recovery are all about the application, and as applications have become virtualized and now containerized, the methods and tools that companies need for data protection are changing,” says Albano.
Albano says that many companies still focus on a single “point” solution to protect their data — a strategy he says is ineffective in a world of ransomware and rampant cyber attacks.
“All the software providers say that one tool can do everything — but we know from experience that is not the case,” says Albano.
“In the world of security breaches, it is not if you are going to get hacked, it’s when,” he says. “There is no company that can provide 100 percent assurance that their data won’t get compromised. The Equifax breach is an example that companies need visibility, control and analytics in their data protection strategy.”
So, RestorePoint offers a “platform approach” of multi-layered protection — backup as a service, disaster recovery as a service, a digital archive for old data and more.
“With a platform, you can monitor the various ingress/egress points in your environment, correlate the information, and reduce the attack surface. In addition, rather than using people to manually monitor and patch your environment, we recommend data feeds with machine learning that can automatically update security profiles in near real-time,” says Albano.
He also says they are starting to expand into new security technologies, like applying blockchain. Blockchain’s distributed, decentralized ledger system makes it inaccessible to hackers, unlike a traditional cloud environment. Albano says this could offer “another level of audit and compliance for the safekeeping of our client’s data.”
Ultimately, Albano expects to continue the upward trajectory of growth the company has seen since its genesis. The market is wide open, and Albano intends to take advantage of it.
“Data is now the world’s most valuable resource,” says Albano. “Enterprise backup, security and recovery has become one of the most critical tasks for every company, regardless of industry.”
