Breaking the cloud backup ‘black box’ with intelligent data mapping and retrieval

Since the earliest days of computing, businesses have used backups to protect their business-critical information. Successfully established cloud reserve position ensures that the organization remains intact during unforeseen events such as natural disasters or system failure. However, even after the scale and complexity of enterprise technology groups have grown manifold, the approach to setting up these backups has largely remained the same: static and error-prone.

to fix this AeonThe Israel-New York-based startup, founded by a team of former AWS engineers, has designed a new cloud backup solution that continuously maps and backs up enterprise resources, depending on the type of data involved. Most importantly, when these backups are ready, it makes them usable by allowing users to download specific files or records according to their needs.

The year-old company is challenging the status quo in the cloud backup space, giving businesses a whole new perspective on how they can back up their data sets and applications and use those backups when they need them. According to Gartnercompanies are spending $596 billion on cloud infrastructure and plan to increase their investment to over $720 billion in 2025. Of that, about 10% goes to backup infrastructure, which translates into millions per business per year.

The company was founded a year ago and is already making waves with its patented storage technology. It has attracted dozens of buyers across various sectors and raised nearly $200 million in funding, with the latest $70 million round valuing the company at $1.4 billion.

Traditional cloud backup isn’t keeping up

Today’s businesses depend heavily on cloud infrastructure, thanks to its ability to scale quickly and efficiently. Each cloud instance can potentially host a variety of AI and ML applications and petabytes of data, using virtual machines with block storage, object storage, elastic file systems, databases, data lakes, and data storage.

In this massive and fast-moving ecosystem, creating a cloud backup becomes quite the task. First, an endless, rapidly growing wave of cloud assets must be covered, from every active application and database to resources that have been shut down or moved. Then, after identifying resources, they must manually tag them with metadata tags (key-value pairs for easier organization and filtering) and create snapshots. These are point-in-time backups that can be configured with different retention periods, allowing users to restore assets at any time within the retention period.

Over the years, these snapshots have evolved, providing enterprises with capabilities such as automation (after initial configuration) and encryption. However, at a granular level, they haven’t kept up with the needs of businesses and their out-of-control cloud environments. Resources still have to be tagged on a massive scale, which can be time-consuming and error-prone, and the cloud backup has to be restored as full servers/volumes, even when only a few specific files need to be restored.

Ofir Ehrlich, who founded CloudEndure with Gonen Stein and Ron Kimchi and later sold it to Amazon to fuel AWS’s disaster recovery and cloud migration efforts, saw this problem firsthand when he worked with the company’s large enterprise customers.

“The challenge with these traditional snapshots is that they are expensive and act like black boxes, making it difficult to locate specific files or database records, search through them, and retrieve accurate data. This complexity leads to higher costs, operational inefficiencies and slower recovery times – issues that become critical during emergencies,” Ehrlich told VentureBeat.

As a result, the trio left AWS and launched Eon in January 2024 with a mission to provide businesses with smarter and more capable backups.

How exactly does the Eon stand out from the crowd?

While most other companies provide cloud backup solutions including Rubric, Cohesity, Commvault and AWS Backup, continue to rely on traditional snapshots, Eon has taken a different approach by developing its own Eon Snapshots, based on cloud storage optimized specifically for backups. Ehrlich says these snapshots make backup data instantly accessible and searchable, allowing users to locate specific files or database records, search them and find precise information.

Essentially, Eon creates snapshots by automating resource mapping, classification and policy association. It continuously scans cloud resources, automatically maps and classifies them based on the type of environment — whether production, development, staging or KA — and the sensitivity of the data, such as personal data, health or financial information. Once resources are mapped, it applies customized backup retention policies according to specific enterprise and compliance requirements. This ensures that data is not under- or over-protected.

After the snapshots are created, the company makes them available to users, with a global search of all data backups, granular restoration and seamless recovery between multiple cloud providers (AVS, Azure, GCP). This gives users the ability to not only locate and restore relevant data—down to specific files—but also run SQL queries directly against the backed-up database to retrieve specific records from tables or tables.

This smart restore capability saves the hassle of restoring/backing up full databases and can even be used by teams to run analytics, forensics and audits directly on their backups. Snapshots use machine learning under the hood to remember which application or cloud system the data is connected to, ensuring that the connection is maintained while the information is being restored/retrieved.

This also prevents misconfiguration or unauthorized access to data.

“Eon excels in its ability to provide instant access to specific data.” The solution provides precise file-level restores across multiple cloud providers without the need to restore entire servers or databases, allowing businesses to find individual files and database records in seconds,” noted Ehrlich.

With this automated tagging and instant download approach, Eon essentially makes cloud backups smart and immediately usable — unlike the story so far. It even helps reduce costs and operational burdens by excluding unnecessary resources (during mapping) and shortening data retention periods according to business requirements, which is achieved by managing backup policies according to the context.

“This work allows us to deliver a better product that replaces traditional, expensive and black-box snapshots with a more cost-effective, autonomously managed and easy-to-use alternative via instance access,” added the CEO. He didn’t share specific cost benefits, but noted that the company only charges for backup storage on a pay-as-you-go basis, with no fees for real-time backups or instant access/search.

As of now, Eon is working to expand its offering and actively collaborates with dozens of companies in various industries such as travel and hospitality, media and entertainment, food services, gaming, financial services, insurance companies and retailers. Ehrlich noted that they already have numerous implementations, without sharing specific customer details.

However, it will be interesting to see how the company continues to differentiate itself in the highly competitive cloud backup space. Right now, its smart search and retrieval capability is a differentiator (with dozens of patents for cloud storage and data management technology), but other backup solutions are also starting to catch up. Commvault, for example, has already started offering capabilities like auto-tagging and dependency-based restores.