Founded in 2011 by CEO Michael Tso, who attended high school in Melbourne, and led locally by Australian industry veterans James Wright and Jason Mantell, Cloudian says it believes it it is well positioned to capitalise on Australia and New Zealand’s “heightened reliance on data”.

The company says it has a strong network of partnerships with some of the largest cloud and technology companies, including Cisco, HPE, Lenovo, Rubrik, Veeam and VMware.

“Around 80% of the data created by organisations today is unstructured, primarily images, video and voice data. But A/NZ enterprises and governments are struggling to store this data, protect it and analyse it, particularly given the limitations of traditional storage systems,” said James Wright, Regional Director for A/NZ at Cloudian.

“Cloudian addresses this challenge, providing a limitlessly scalable, highly cost-effective and secure means to store and create real value from increasingly large data sets. We also deliver seamless integration and data movement across on-premises/private cloud and public cloud environments.

“With data playing an ever more central role in A/NZ and increased concern about public cloud data being stored outside national borders, there is a great opportunity to expand the company here.

“A/NZ businesses are becoming more aware of the drawbacks of storing large volumes of data in the public cloud, but they want that same user experience,” added Wright. “Because of our fully native S3 compatibility, we can provide the scale, flexibility and ease-of-use of the public cloud within a customer’s own data centre at up to one-third the cost.”

Cloudian says it aims to bolster its local team and partner network in the region and has already signed distribution agreements with Exclusive Networks and NEXTGEN - and also begun working with managed service providers (MSPs) with expertise in the government, financial and other sectors across A/NZ.

According to Cloudian, ransomware attacks have become a rapidly growing global threat, and A/NZ is not immune, with the company citing Research last month showing that such attacks have increased by 10% in Australia during COVID-19, while New Zealand has been named among the most vulnerable countries susceptible to a cyber-attack.

“With a feature called Object Lock that prevents hackers from encrypting data, Cloudian can help A/NZ organisations protect against this threat,” Wright said.

“We know that ransomware attacks often come more than once, as cyber criminals both identify the vulnerability and know the company is willing to pay to unlock their data,” said Wright.

“Object Lock creates an immutable copy of backup data, ensuring a clean copy for reliable recovery so businesses are covered when security measures fail.”