An Interview with Lee Exall, Capital Continuity CEO and Founder: ‘We Will Continue to Innovate and Deliver Resiliency in the Modern Cyber World’

“Our BIPs software designs are focused away from the active environment and our customers understand the benefits and values this approach delivers.”

Businesses around the world are in the midst of an unprecedented digital transformation, empowering them to collaborate and conduct business like never before. Led by cloud, big data, and an expanding social universe – highly agile data clouds are now the foundation upon which new revenue, cost efficiencies and great customer service are built. But enterprises must act quickly and align their infrastructures to capitalize on this emerging opportunity. In order to facilitate and protect these new infrastructures a new breed of Cloud Service Provider (CSP) – a specialty partner with the technology and track-record to deliver a resilient hybrid cloud infrastructure.

In view of the above-mentioned scenario, we’re thrilled to present Capital Continuity.

The company provides Business Interruption Protection software (BIPs) which they claim is the world’s leading hybrid Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) technology

Capital Continuity was incorporated in 2006 and is headquartered in London, UK.

Lee Exall, Capital Continuity CEO/Founder, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

TSR: Why was the company set up? And how did you expand your company and its offerings over the years?

LE: Capital Continuity and BIPs was born from the clear indicators that data was growing in an untapped manner but the technologies and services to protect and recover the data explosion were not keeping pace. As data now runs nearly every part of our daily lives in an always-on world, people’s tolerance and acceptance of it not being available is near-zero.

As cloud computing especially, hybrid clouds are dominating digital transformations, BIPs enables businesses to protect their legacy and cloud environments with a single unified solution which also empowers service providers to deliver the leading hybrid Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service offering which has culminated in our growth over the years.

TSR: What kind of responses have you received from your consumers over the years? How have they motivated you to shape your offerings/grow the company?

LE: Since day one our philosophy for delivering IT resiliency is that any solution should not degrade or intrude on the customers’ core business activities. Our customers operate in every industry such as Aviation, Finance, Healthcare, Media, Insurance, Technology etc. – and their IT environments are the lifeline of their business activities. Our BIPs technology protects their data and workloads every millisecond of the day; their businesses are resilient, protected and recoverable from all types of modern-day incidents and threats. This philosophy has ensured that our BIPs software designs are focused away from the active environment and our customers understand the benefits and values this approach delivers.

TSR: What factors make your company a leader in IT resiliency?

LE: BIPs provides protection of legacy environments and modern cloud workloads with the freedom to switch cloud providers, compute, hypervisor and storage technologies.

Over the past 10 years the IT industry has been evolving from legacy data silo’s, physical compute, spinning storage, low capacity networking, old-school applications and databases to the new era of these technologies – and the pace is only becoming quicker. While most of these technologies are groundbreaking not every business needs to adopt them lock-stock for the pure sake of cloud modernization. Organizations have businesses to operate and grow while undertaking their cloud transformations, which can be daunting. BIPs can deliver and complement their resiliency and transition objectives during and beyond modernisation.

TSR: Do you have any new products ready to be launched?

LE: Yes, we’ve just released BIPs version 3.0 and its feedback already from our global partners is extremely positive. We’ve continued with our solution design philosophy but have reengineered certain elements to make it highly scalable beyond the largest enterprises with significant performance improvements. We’ve also extended our data retention policies and API integration to carter for instant recoveries from cyber attacks. One other major aspect we are addressing is the ability to ‘prove’ resiliency readiness frequently.

Recent media headlines have detailed many high profile outages where resiliency solutions or services have let them down when they’ve been needed most. These situations are mostly avoidable by having the right solution and having the ability to test and prove its capabilities frequently. Unfortunately, while protecting your data and workloads does offer value the real value is returned when in a business impacting incident that data can be made instantly available for business operations. While most technologies struggle with testing environments due to 1:1 relationships, uncaptured change control, storage cloning, recovery speeds, breaking out of virtual application environments BIPs delivers on-demand instant test recoveries of any capacity workload in a few seconds. To complement this BIPs3 will also deliver fully orchestrated resiliency readiness reports where testing recoverability will produce a resiliency report based on the workload and it’s application genetic data which BIPs is constantly aware of. This unique capability will enable our customers and partners to prove resiliency on a daily basis which is of significant value compared to their current infrequent regimes.

TSR: As a question on sustainability, where do you see your company a couple of years from now?

LE: There’s no doubt that IT resiliency and availability will continue to be a top priority for businesses, Capital Continuity will continue to innovate and deliver resiliency in the modern cyber world.

Ultimately, I see resiliency services will provide additional value as inbuilt cloud enablement as businesses will move their data and IT environments more over the next 5 years than they have over the previous 50 years. Once these transitions have happened then onward protection is required which can also enable their next move. Capital Continuity will be here continuing to provide our customers with daily business value from BIPs but to also keep them, resilient, available and out of the headlines.

Lee Exall: A Brief Background

In the IT resiliency space, Lee Exall has been involved in the Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity since the mid-1990’s. Over this time, his experiences, depth of technical knowledge and commercial awareness have been translated to many market-leading innovations which global businesses and service providers have adopted for their evolving IT resiliency needs.