In an interaction with CRN India, Poojan Kumar, CEO and Co-Founder, Clumio highlights how the company’s recently opened R&D Center in Bengaluru is driving cutting-edge solutions in cloud innovation, data protection and proactive customer support
Tell us about the new R&D center in India, how will it fit into Clumio’s business?
The Clumio Research and Development Center will be an integral part of Clumio’s capability to create and deliver data protection services on its cutting-edge platform built on AWS. It is a strategic investment for the company that will not just act as support for the global team. It has its own charter and will drive front-end innovation and research to build cloud solutions from the ground up. The engineering teams will play a leading role in product development and building best-in-class technology solutions.
What makes India an ideal location for you to open the center here?
India has a huge talent pool in technology, and it is only growing as top-tier Indian educational institutes such as IIT’s, BIT’s, NIT’s produce new graduates. Unlike many larger companies that go to India for cost reasons, Clumio is going for the talent. This will enable us to have the Clumio Research and Development Center be part of the DNA of the company – not an afterthought.
Given the situation with COVID -19, do you see any challenges in achieving your growth and hiring plans?
While COVID-19 is a monumental and unfortunate challenge that we all have to deal with in our personal and professional lives, it is forcing enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives and move more workloads to the cloud faster. Given that Clumio is a cloud-native platform, our touchless data protection service is well-positioned to support these kinds of initiatives and we have not had to pivot our business plans in any major way. Since the shelter in place began at the beginning of March, Clumio has added 18 new employees – many of them in India – which is nearly 15% of our current staff.
What kind of work will be led out of the Bangalore R&D center and what roles are you looking for to hire?
Clumio Research and Development Center is driving cutting-edge solutions in cloud innovation, data protection and proactive customer support. Key examples of work already done with the India team’s support include the recent addition of Microsoft 365 to its secure backup as a service. This made Clumio the industry’s first private, public and SaaS enterprise data protection service on a single platform. The team also built the REST API platform for Clumio – it delivers on the promise of what REST architecture was supposed to solve for the internet era, applied to an enterprise domain such as backup, offered as a service.
The team has also, in parallel, built strong foundations in simplifying user experience by constructing simple and intuitive user interfaces for several crosscutting features implemented by their state-of-the-art engineers from across the globe. Clumio is hiring bright individuals to fill roles across Software Engineering, Cloud Operations and Customer Support and Success.
With COVID-19 transforming the work culture and forcing a remote-working environment, do you think this creates opportunity for cloud services to grow?
Yes, when more people are working from home, the threat surface of a company expands and its security posture can weaken, creating opportunities for bad actors to take advantage. Ransomware in particular has been on the rise since the world transitioned to remote work. Clumio’s service, inherently secure from its foundation, can be used to create ‘air gap’ copies of data outside users’ AWS accounts. In the event that those accounts become compromised, another copy of the data exists, and the ransomware attack is mitigated. With these protections in place, enterprises can increase their use of cloud services.
How well is Clumio placed while helping the customers in their cloud journey?
Clumio has reimagined enterprise backup and recovery, taking full advantage of the scale, economics, and elasticity of the public cloud to give its customers a new and game changing backup experience. Clumio eliminates the complexity of managing infrastructure, on-premise and in the cloud, to deliver secure and authentic SaaS. As a result, enterprises are able to accelerate their cloud journeys once they have removed barriers like complexity, cost, and lack of compliance.
