‘Aparavi Discovers, Classifies & Optimizes Data No Matter Where It Lives, Across Data Centers, Cloud, and Edge Along with Automated Data Actions enabling Organizations to Easily Control and Exploit Their Data’: Gary Lyng, CMO of Aparavi

“As a SaaS platform, Aparavi removes the complexity of data management to  seamlessly address data risk, data costs, and access to relevant data without complexity.”

Aparavi is the data intelligence and automation platform that empowers organizations to control and exploit their data without complexity. The Aparavi SaaS platform lowers data costs, reduces risk, and provides greater insight for data-driven companies to discover, classify, and optimize their data. The company serves customers in various markets, including financial services, healthcare, legal, state and local government, manufacturing, and more.

Aparavi was founded in 2017 and is based in Santa Monica, California.

To highlight and further understand what Aparavi stands for and seeks to explore in this segment, I sat down with Gary Lyng, who serves as the company’s Chief Marketing Officer.

Below is an excerpt.

Q. Have you always been passionate about software and technology? Tell us what inspired the creation of Aparavi?

I have always been involved with data in one form or another, but the thing I found attractive about data is that, at its core, it’s the lifeline of a business. Getting the right information at the right time and making sure it’s easy to access is essential for every business.

The primary vision of our founder and CEO Adrian Knapp and co-founder and CTO  Rod Christensen was to stop the insanity of blind data management, specifically the unstructured data that makes up nearly 90 percent of all data out there. At the core is to transform data chaos or sprawl to intelligent information for everyone that fuels knowledge and accelerates innovation.  Unfortunately, data is very much siloed by the device, application, and the user. Aparavi addresses and transforms an enterprise’s data workflows without the typical cost and complex solutions of traditional vendors.

We help organizations find and unlock the value of data no matter where it lives to mitigate risk, reduce cost, and create new value.

Our strategy is to positively disrupt the status quo of data management, inject intelligence and automation into the ecosystem of data players transforming data silos into a secure, accessible, and intelligent data lake that accelerates business and innovation.

Q. Aparavi transforms data chaos into intelligent information to fuel knowledge and accelerate innovation for everyone. Splendid. Would you like to elaborate on this a bit more?

Aparavi is a cloud-based platform that discovers, classifies, and optimizes distributed data then ensures secure access for modern data demands of analytics, machine learning, and collaboration. We connect business and IT to transform data into a competitive asset by tackling unstructured data sprawl and ROT (redundant, obsolete, or trivial) data - automatically. Aparavi’s proprietary automation process reduces many risks including compliance and storage costs in all data-intensive industries, including financial services, legal, insurance, healthcare, and more.

Q. What can you tell us about your cloud platform? And how intelligently does it unlock the value of unstructured data?

The Aparavi platform discovers, understands, and optimizes data that is highly distributed and fragmented across on-premise data centers, private cloud, and edge along with off-premise cloud sources and destinations. Our customers want an intelligent and automated solution that is user-friendly, can be scaled and addresses unstructured data. Aparavi’s primary design objective was to avoid the need to ingest data to analyze it. Additionally, Aparavi queries and utilizes cloud data without incurring egress costs.

The platform allows users to find unstructured enterprise data, no matter where it lives, to reduce risk, cost, and gain insights. Enterprises can find unstructured data across any NAS, endpoints, servers, or cloud; locate and defensibly dispose of ROT data, and identify personal or sensitive data with over 140 pre-defined policies. Aparavi enables data exploitation with open and secure access for new applications, business analytics, machine learning, and more. Organizations can secure easy access to organized content by end-users and applications; get third-party application access through secure API for AI, ML, advanced analytics, reporting; and access data in the cloud without moving data allowing the user to avoid egregious fees.

Q. In our world of ever-growing data, how can businesses best manage unstructured but sensitive data like legal, HR, medical and clinical files?

Some vendors want to reinvent the entire data infrastructure from the ground up! They’ll often come in with massive proposals on infrastructure, new apps, and controls. This is not necessary. Half the battle is to know what you have, knowing what to look for, and doing it easily without cost or complexity.

As an example, you can do a very easy yet powerful search with Aparavi and simply click on a check box to search everywhere for HIPPA relevant data or SOX data, and you don’t have to understand the law or be an attorney; just search and get the results from many different data sources with a simple view that can be acted upon or even streamed directly into user applications like Excel or PowerBI for your own analytics.

Q. How does Aparavi help companies combat hackers and prevent data exfiltration?

Data Compliance and, for that matter, the specific data privacy laws that are coming out every month are a forcing function for companies and agencies to ‘get their data act together’. When you know what you have, you can ascertain the value, the volatility, and thereof implement the right data governance to protect and comply. We are not a security company or a backup company. However, by providing continuous knowledge of your data, you can get clean, efficient, and trusted data infrastructure that can then be protected more easily and comply more easily without the past costs of complex, dirty, and old data environments.

One of the Aparavi’s solutions focus is the simplification and data accuracy in the process of a merger and acquisition period with Due Diligence and Data Management. The platform makes it easy for corporations, consulting companies, venture capital, or private equity firms to simplify due diligence and data management, prevent data leakage, reduce administrative burden, create economies of scale, and accelerate data migration and integration.

Actionable intelligence allows admins to move, copy, or delete data at the source. Administrators can store data where they choose for long-term retention or further data analytics. If there is a need to keep sensitive data local, then any S3 compatible on-premises storage can also be a destination. This ensures customers have a choice in integrating with current data infrastructure and have flexibility in growth.

Legal departments can eliminate the administrative burden of legal holds, collections, and internal investigations to easily find the relevant information needed to support an argument, allowing the user to make informed business decisions. The platform allows legal teams to carefully curate documents before sending them to their outside counsel for review, eliminating potentially thousands or millions of dollars in processing, hosting, and review fees. They can preemptively withhold or redact privileged information without exposing the data to additional security risks built into the transportation of data because those documents can remain searchable within your existing storage solutions.

Q. Will your company be expanding, bringing on any new products or services that we should be aware of?

Yes, of course, our core vision we call the data nexus, where data can learn, i.e., cognitive and is unleashed from the lock-in of ownership by one application or the storage device that data can truly be shared securely, the data can be trusted, and the data can evolve.

Additionally, in June, we launched our European presence with offices in Zurich and Munich with a CEO of Europe, Gregor Bieler, an ex-Microsoft executive with extensive leadership experience. We have customers in the Asia Pacific and will look to expand there as the economic environment evolves for us.

About | Gary Lyng

Gary Lyng is the Chief Marketing Officer of Aparavi. He has over 20 years of experience in enterprise software and infrastructure, driving innovative, award-winning products, teams, and programs. He is well-known in the industry as a trailblazer capable of developing new initiatives for leading technologies that transform into true business benefits for clients and partners. Gary is regarded as a “rare species” with an uncanny ability to differentiate the business value and customer experience.

Before joining Aparavi, Lyng was CMO at Violin Systems, a leader in high-performance storage, where he helped boost revenue, perception, and leadership and was named one of 2019’s ‘Most Influential CMOs’ by CIO Review. Prior to Violin, he spearheaded products and solutions at SanDisk (acquired by Western Digital), EMC, NetApp, Hewlett Packard, and Veritas Software.

“We connect business and IT to transform data into a competitive asset that tackles unstructured data sprawls and  ROT (redundant, obsolete, or trivial) data.”