Former Commvault Vets Lead Startup Parablu’s Goal to Disrupt SaaS Backup
Two former Commvault veterans are leading early-stage company Parablu, aiming to disrupt the crowded field of SaaS backup providers. Parablu on Thursday announced that 27-year Commvault alum Randy De Meno has joined the company as its chief strategy officer.
De Meno, longtime VP and CTO for Commvault’s Microsoft platform offerings, joins former colleague Anand Prahlad, Parablu’s founder and CEO. Prahlad spent 16 years at Commvault, where he was senior VP of engineering and product development. After leaving Commvault in 2010, Prahlad shifted into the world of cybersecurity, serving as managing director of McAfee’s India Center.
Using his combined data protection and security background, Prahlad founded Parablu in 2015, focusing on providing secure backup and recovery. Parablu now holds patents that Prahlad believes will help take on established players. Among those Parablu is challenging include Commvault, Cohesity, Druva, Rubrik, Veeam and Veritas.
Parablu is zeroing in on Druva, which provides a SaaS backup offering that includes multilayer threat and ransomware protection. Because Druva is tied to Amazon’s AWS infrastructure, Prahlad believes aligning Parablu with Microsoft presents an opportunity. Both Prahlad and De Meno have strong relationships with Microsoft and technical background on the Microsoft stack.
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De Meno was responsible for creating and fostering Commvault’s once unlikely partnership with Microsoft in the mid-1990s. The Microsoft partnership played a key role in Commvault’s success, leading to its IPO in 2006, De Meno recalled. Now he hopes to create a similar success story for Parablu.
“I plan to have similar type of strategic partnering with Microsoft that we had with Commvault,” he said. De Meno left Commvault last fall.
No one is better to expand Parablu’s Microsoft partnership than De Meno, according to Prahlad. De Meno and Prahlad worked closely together at Commvault.
“We were joined at the hip,” Prahlad said. “We built products together and we built relationships together. So when I heard Randy was available, I told him to come on over.”
Ransomware Detection and Mitigation
Prahlad and De Meno told Channel Futures how they believe the technology in its BluVault and BluSync offerings are unique. While most commercial and enterprise backup and recovery solutions now feature ransomware protection, Prahlad claims Parablu has an advanced approach.
For instance, Prahlad said it can restore to specific points in time. Parablu also has a learning engine trained with numerous ransomware samples. Using what Prahlad described as “smart triangulation” during an incremental backup, if it detects an increase in infected files, based on unusual activity, it will flag the potential ransomware.
Parablu also provides incident management, Prahlad added.
“We have ways to quarantine, or they can give us hashes of files and quarantine them from getting restored,” he said. “We have ways to quarantine devices so they don’t perform restores from them, even accidentally. It also can provide curated recoveries, that ensure only clean files are restored.”
Using OneDrive to Reduce Storage Costs
Parablu said it has a unique patented approach using Microsoft OneDrive for Business and Google Drive enabling a self-scaling model.
“We don’t make you storage from EMC or NetApp or anyone else, or even in the cloud, because we got this innovative way by which we can use the OneDrive and Google Drive allocations that your users already have,” Prahlad said.
Using what he calls a “smart connector,” Parablu takes the backup data streams from various endpoints and other sources.
“Rather than direct it to a storage target like most backup solutions do, we have a smart way of directing it right into a secure vault that we create inside every OneDrive account,” Prahlad said.
The one terabyte of storage included with each OneDrive account with M365 subscriptions should suffice for most organizations, he added. As organizations hire more people, most won’t need to buy extra storage because each employee gets OneDrive licenses, Prahlad emphasized.
“The storage is elastic; it grows and shrinks with user population,” he said. “And their data is all already …
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