Debtset – Bailiff-Sheriff Aust MEMBER Login
Cloudian helps business tackle big data management storm
SPECIALIST BUSINESS mass data storage and management company, Cloudian, has officially launched its operations in Australia and New Zealand.
Cloudian, founded in 2011 by CEO Michael Tso, who attended high school in Melbourne, has become the world’s most widely deployed ‘independent object storage provider’ – a term used to describe Cloudian’s management, protection and leverage of massive data sets without sacrificing ease-of-access.
Cloudian’s award-winning HyperStore solution allows businesses to manage mass data without having to capitalise, exceed budget limitations, or run afoul of data sovereignty requirements.
Cloudian has a strong network of partnerships with some of the world’s largest cloud and technology companies, including Cisco, HPE, Lenovo, Rubrik, Veeam and VMware.
Led locally by Australian industry veterans James Wright and Jason Mantell – both with prior experience at Nutanix and Pure Storage – the company believes it is well positioned to capitalise on Australia and New Zealand’s heightened reliance on data.
“Around 80 percent of the data created by organisations today is unstructured, primarily images, video and voice data,” Cloudian regional director for Australia and New Zealand, James Wright said. 
“But A/NZ enterprises and governments are struggling to store this data, protect it and analyse it, particularly given the limitations of traditional storage systems.
“Cloudian addresses this challenge, providing a limitlessly scalable, highly cost-effective and secure means to store and create real value from increasingly large data sets. We also deliver seamless integration and data movement across on-premises/private cloud and public cloud environments,” he said.
“With data playing an ever more central role in A/NZ and increased concern about public cloud data being stored outside national borders, there is a great opportunity to expand the company here.”
Cloudian aims to bolster its local team and partner network in the region and has already signed distribution agreements with Exclusive Networks and NextGen. The company has also begun working with managed service providers (MSPs) with expertise in the government, financial and other sectors across Australia and New Zealand.
CLOUD ‘REPATRIATION’
Mr Wright said Cloudian saw a significant opportunity in the increasing number of organisations rethinking public cloud storage due to unexpected costs, concerns about data security and control – including data sovereignty – and highly variable performance.
He said a leading industry analyst firm recently reported that 85 percent of IT managers surveyed said they were moving some portion of their workloads back from public clouds, a process known as ‘repatriation’.
He said Cloudian offered guaranteed compatibility with the S3 API, the widely adopted protocol of public cloud storage. This allows the full ecosystem of S3-compatible applications to employ Cloudian storage systems on-premises or as part of an in-country service provider’s offerings, which also preserves data sovereignty.
“A/NZ businesses are becoming more aware of the drawbacks of storing large volumes of data in the public cloud, but they want that same user experience,” Mr Wright said. 
“Because of our fully native S3 compatibility, we can provide the scale, flexibility and ease-of-use of the public cloud within a customer’s own data centre at up to one-third the cost.”
INCREASING RANSOMWARE THREATS
Ransomware attacks have become a rapidly growing global threat, and this region far from immune.
Mr Wright said research last month showed that such attacks had increased by 10 percent in Australia during COVID-19, while New Zealand has been named among the most vulnerable countries susceptible to a cyber-attack.
With a feature called Object Lock that prevents hackers from encrypting data, Cloudian can help Australian and New Zealand organisations to protect against this threat.
“We know that ransomware attacks often come more than once, as cyber criminals both identify the vulnerability and know the company is willing to pay to unlock their data,” Wright said.
“Object Lock creates an immutable copy of backup data, ensuring a clean copy for reliable recovery so businesses are covered when security measures fail.”
ends
