Govind Rangasamy, Appranix CEO and Founder: “Make your distributed cloud applications resilient with cloud-native backup and recovery of all resources, services, data, and dependencies.”

Appranix was founded on the premise that existing data backup systems are not sufficient to provide resilience to distributed and dynamic cloud applications. As organizations digitally transform using hyperscale cloud platforms, they will adopt an application-centric model to recover from outages for their cloud environments and that they need to not only backup the data but also their cloud application environments. A recent study indicates that about 45% of breaches that cause outages are cloud-based. The average cost of a single ransomware attack is 4.54M USD and it takes about 23 days to recover from a single ransomware attack outage. As hyperscale cloud applications are more distributed, dynamic and auto-scaled, and cloud infrastructure goes through changes faster to accommodate those distributed applications. Application resilience is achieved when the application data and the associated cloud infrastructure are protected and recovered in-sync by using the programmability of the hyperscale cloud platforms.

Appranix saw a great opportunity to create and occupy a whitespace in the application recovery and DR market. Existing backup, DR, and data management products were all designed for the datacenter. Appranix’s patented cloud application resilience system was created from the ground-up for the cloud environments to deliver significantly better application resilience to help companies recover from outages. Gartner named Appranix as a cool vendor in the backup, recovery, and data management that helped Appranix to differentiate itself in the market for the mid to large enterprise customers. The company has recently added its new president of sales from IBM to lead its growth in the direct and partner sales channels across the globe.

In conversation with Govind Rangasamy, CEO and Founder of Appranix

Q. Can you explain about your services in brief?

Appranix delivers cloud application resilience to cloud-enabled organizations. Our cloud-native SaaS platform protects and recovers cloud environment resources 6-10x faster while reducing the cloud recovery infrastructure costs by close to 70%. Appranix’s unique agentless continuous learning system creates and maintains a cloud time machine for organizations to protect distributed application systems based on organizations RPO policies. Our hyperfast recovery system uses recovery-as-code to rebuild application environments rapidly from immutable data copies at any point-in-time in any region of the cloud so humans do not have to do it.

Q. How do you optimize and update your solutions regularly? How do you gather insights from clients or their consumers?

Appranix is a continuously updating SaaS platform. We update our system 6-11 times per day. Customers do not have to install and maintain agents so there is no toil to maintain a backup or data replication system. Appranix delivers an integrated backup and DR-as-a-Service so all the service levels are continuously monitored for the SLAs. Appranix platform also automatically scales to accommodate ever increasing protection requirements in terms of scale and complexity from enterprise customer cloud environments.

Q. How do you streamline your services without compromising with data security?

Appranix is SOC 2 Type II compliant SaaS. Our microservices architecture allows us to update different parts of our system without affecting overall reliability and security of our system. Customer cloud infrastructure meta-data is streamed with 256bit encryption and protected with 256bit encryption at rest and kept in an immutable cloud time machine and spread across different region and across cloud providers.

Q. What are the factors that affect the pricing of your solutions?

Appranix is priced per instance per month. Cloud environments discovery and reporting are completely free. Customers can choose to go with on-demand pay per use model or private offer with yearly or multi-year commitment discounts.

Q. What would you say are the top three skills needed to be a successful leader?

Empathy, resilience, and delegation.

Q. About adaptability, how do you stay relevant to the people’s interests and needs in this high volatile market?

Data backup and recovery market is ultra-competitive with large incumbent players having an outsized influence. However, the advent of hyperscale cloud platforms and the need for organizations to transform digitally to respond to customer needs have enabled newer and smaller players like Appranix to innovate and thrive. Cloud application resilience is a hard problem to solve. We have created a subspace within the BCDR market. Having Gartner Cool Vendor recognition gives a couple of years of headway in the market. Also, with our microservices based SaaS architecture, Appranix can continuously innovate and add capabilities to keep our leadership in solving adjacent use cases, such as chaos engineering, live cloning of environments for security testing, cloud region migrations, cloud region optimization and proactive resilience with drift analysis. 

Q. Do you have any new services ready to be launched?

Yes. We are going to announce integration with Vanta for SOC 2 Type II backup and disaster recovery compliance in the coming weeks. Vanta is the leading platform for SOC 2, ISO 27000, GDPR, and other compliance monitoring for SaaS companies. Appranix is tightly integrated with Vanta to help our common customers become compliant with various frameworks instead of spending weeks and months and manually gathering evidence for auditors.

Q. What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

Absolutely. Cloud Infrastructure Backup is becoming an important requirement for cloud-enabled enterprises. Data backup alone is just not sufficient. We will continue to evangelize the concept of Cloud Infrastructure Backup for application resilience to enable organizations to recover from ransomware attacks confidently. Look out for Appranix entering larger partnerships to drive this space in the coming months and years. 

Meet the leader behind the success of Appranix

Govind Rangasamy, a serial entrepreneur, is the CEO and Founder of Appranix. With extensive experience in building products in the cloud automation and enterprise system management space, Govind founded Appranix with a belief that existing infrastructure-centric cloud and IT automation solutions are completely inadequate to handle cloud-scale applications. Prior to Appranix, Govind was the CEO of FogPanel, a multi-cloud service management company that he sold to UST Global. Before starting FogPanel, Govind led cloud, and DevOps products and solutions group at Actifio, a pioneer in the data management space. He also led products at Eucalyptus Systems, an AWS-compatible open source private cloud leader. Prior to Eucalyptus, he successfully transformed HP’s Storage Management product line to be a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant. Govind’s extensive IT background started with engineering at PTC and multiple startups before starting his own companies.

“Appranix not only backs-up and replicates your data but protects your application’s Cloud Infrastructure, and recovers with Recovery-as-Code using a Cloud Time Machine at any point-in-time in any region”