CIO Bulletin

Appranix enables enterprises to recover rapidly from cloud application outages improving resilience and business continuity.

Our daily lives are increasingly influenced by technology, which has also altered the way we use services. It is crucial to secure that technology. This need is much more pressing on the cloud, because information is accessible from anywhere. The technique of rapidly recovering from disruptions to a business’s IT service is known as cloud resilience. It also entails preparing for business continuity and figuring out how technology systems can be continuously protected on the cloud platforms so the data and access are not lost even after a natural or cyber disasters.

Given its function in ensuring that operations continue in any situation, cloud resilience falls under the aegis of business continuity. We introduce you to Appranix which was established collaboratively by a group of experts in the cloud and container industries. Appranix cloud application resilience makes your cloud applications significantly more reliable with an application environment level backup, cross-zone, cross-region, and cross-cloud disaster recovery solution.

We had a conversation with Govind Rangasamy, Founder and CEO, to understand the company better

Q. What made you start Appranix? How has the company grown over the years?

Appranix was founded on the premise that as organizations transition to public cloud platforms, they will adopt an application-centric way to achieve resilience from outages for their cloud 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 26 days to recover from a ransomware attack outage. Cloud-enabled applications running on the hyperscale clouds require a new type of resilience management system to recover from outages as they are more distributed, dynamic and auto-scaled.

We saw a great opportunity to create and occupy a whitespace in the application recovery and DR market. Existing infrastructure-centric backup, DR, and data management products were all designed for the datacenter or hybrid cloud era and retrofitted for the hyperscale cloud environments and hence do not address cloud application resilience problems properly. Appranix patented cloud application resilience system was created from the ground-up for the hyperscale clouds to deliver significantly better application resilience to help companies recover from outages and customers like our approach compared to the common denominator model provided by other vendors.

Q. Can you introduce us to what you specifically do in the application resilience space? What are the main challenges you help navigate?

Appranix delivers cloud application resilience to cloud-enabled organizations. Our cloud-native SaaS platform increases the speed of cloud environment recovery time by 6-10x while reducing the cloud recovery infrastructure costs by close to 70%. Appranix unique agentless continuous learning system creates and maintains a cloud time machine for organizations so they can recover their business critical systems from ransomware attacks, cloud region or zone failures, cloud misconfigurations or simple human error. Our hyperfast recovery system eliminates the need to port traditional infrastructure-centric backup, replication or recovery systems over to the cloud.

Q. In a fragmented market with a bunch of recent unicorns from a valuation perspective, what makes Appranix different from the rest?

Unlike other vendors that started recently in our space, we avoided raising outside money. Our bootstrapped model helped us patiently define and occupy an unmet white space in the market with a unique SaaS product.

Almost all the products in the backup and DR market were created for the data center era. Appranix SaaS was created to fully take advantage of the capabilities built into the hyperscale cloud platforms to deliver application resilience as opposed to simple backup and recovery for data. Appranix was specifically designed to recover complex, dynamic application environments at hyperscale. We have made our solution very simple to deploy and use compared to other approaches where complex deployment and maintenance are very common. Product uniqueness combined with a very focused execution have not only led to our tremendous growth in recent years but also helped us keep the company profitable with a very scalable unit economics.

Q. What ignited the proverbial “entrepreneurial spirit” within you? If there was any life experience that caused this, can you share it with us?

I wanted to start my company as soon as I finished my grad school in India and that was 25 years ago. So, the entrepreneurial spirit has always been there in me but it’s about the right market opportunity, training, timing and most important of all, the right team. My formal entrepreneurial education came from Babson, the #1 entrepreneurship school, where I learnt the fundamentals of putting together a company from scratch. That formal education, combined with the right advisors, helped me see corners that would otherwise have been difficult to avoid. I have been lucky to get the right team that is excited to redefine a market with patience and hard work.

Q. What were the challenges you overcame in your entrepreneurial journey? Can you share a few with us?

The first challenge was to find the right balance between our remote team’s talent, and the requirements of the market for the amount of funding available to us. Second was to say “no” to a lot of potential customers’ requests so we can be very focused on what we are supposed to do to keep the product simple and solve a particular problem well, in other words, set up the company to scale with the right product core. Third challenge was to grow fast enough to generate revenue and cash flow to keep us improving the product, satisfy existing customers and hire more people with all kinds of macro and microeconomic challenges - pandemic, war, inflation, great resignation and most importantly a hyper competitive market.

Q. When it comes to team building, Thomas Reid said “a chain is no stronger than its weakest link.” As an entrepreneur, do you agree with this? How important do you think it is to hire the right people? How have you helped in building the team at Appranix?

Absolutely. And this is so true especially when building remote engineering and customer success teams. You must find the right caliber of people to execute your vision and build the organization for the long term, and most importantly, keep all of them happy.

Q. Would you like us to highlight something important happening in your company that we may have missed asking?

Ransomware attacks are becoming very sophisticated, and a lot of the attacks take over the entire cloud accounts. Appranix will be releasing a substantial update to our service in Q1 to be able to recover entire application environments and all the associated application data even if the entire cloud account has been taken over by the attackers. We will be adding 100s of partners to drive growth across cloud regions to help cloud-enabled organizations reduce outages caused by ransomware attacks.

Meet the chief

Govind Rangasamy, a serial entrepreneur, is the Founder and CEO of Appranix. With extensive experience in building products in the cloud automation and enterprise data management space, Govind founded Appranix with a belief that existing infrastructure-centric cloud and IT automation solutions are completely inadequate to deliver cloud application resilience. Prior to Appranix, Govind was the CEO of FogPanel, a multi-cloud service management company that was sold to UST Global. Before FogPanel, Govind led the cloud and DevOps products and solutions group at Actifio, a pioneer in the data management space. Govind’s extensive IT background started with engineering at PTC and multiple other startups before starting his own companies.