Who is The Cloud Daddy?

Had a great couple of online sessions recently with Joe Merces of the splendidly named CloudDaddy.

The aim of CloudDaddy is to simplify one of the great pain points of IT (no, not repairing daisywheel printers, I think that really is historical pain), that being backup and restore, by incorporating AWS into the process. So often IT gets carried away with inventing for its own sake and ignoring the “stuff” that has always caused the most problems.

CEO Joe (who grew up the hard way as CIO of the New York City Law Department) and I spoke about the old uncertainties of not just ensuring backup strategies went according to plan but the sweat-inducing trauma of… the restore! Of course, there are still gazillibytes of data out there on tape, so the traumas continue for many, but with something like CloudDaddy a company can move its backup into the cloud site by site, byte by byte, just in case “cloud paranoia” is at work.

Talking of paranoia, an important point to make is that CloudDaddy comes with fully integrated security; yes, I appreciate this should be a given, but it isn’t. We referenced the city of Atlanta attack, where they found even their backups had been encrypted. Nice… One look at the CloudDaddy dashboard would have show them every instance that wasn’t secured. And another look at the AWS site map shows you where you can backup your data to. It’s like a new form of global war game – “I’m going to launch a backup at Australia…”.

Hoping to get a full look at the product asap; given its global approach via AWS, this could just be THE cloud daddy!

And talking earlier of IT all too often getting obsessed with “what’s new” and marketing hype, machine learning (now in its 4th historical hype cycle by my reckoning) has been much overused and abused of recent, but it is also now making its way into the world of data backup and recovery, care of Imanis Data. The company set out to use machine learning to protect Hadoop and NoSQL applications against Ransomware, but have extended the intelligence to backup/recovery, albeit currently for Hadoop and NoSQL enterprise data management specifically (hardly a small market!) but you can see where the concept could go in the future, so be watching of this space!