When Disaster Strikes, CloudEndure Advises Putting Your Head in the Clouds

CloudEndure CEO Ofer Gadish, VP Product Leonid Feinberg, CRO Gil Shai, and VP R&D Ofir Ehrlich

For most people, “if I could turn back time” is just a title of a Cher song. But for the team at CloudEndure, it’s a way of life.

As a major player in the growing world of Disaster Recovery (DR), CloudEndure ensures that when disaster strikes, companies can quickly and easily revert their entire IT environment to a healthy version from before the event ever happened.

The idea for CloudEndure came in 2012 when a friend of the founding team experienced a catastrophic failure at his small startup, which had devastating effects on the company. It was the early days of cloud computing, before DR existed for AWS, so their friend’s company struggled for several days to get back online. This sparked the idea to build disaster-proofing for cloud-based businesses.

“There was a lot of excitement whenever we brought up the idea,” says Gil Shai, CloudEndure’s Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer. “A lot of people we talked to validated the idea, saying things like, ‘That’s a good point! Why isn’t there any DR in the cloud?’”

Where they landed was the world’s first DR platform designed specifically to protect on-premise and cloud-based workloads by using the cloud as a low-cost and robust DR target. “By leveraging the cloud, CloudEndure has been able to dramatically reduce customers’ DR infrastructure costs while still meeting their recovery objectives,” said Shai.

And though the success of any company is never assured, the founding team at CloudEndure certainly has had a head start. For one, their pedigrees alone put them ahead of the pack. In college, CEO Ofer Gadish ranked as one of Israel’s top engineering students, and VP of Product Leonid Feinberg received his bachelor’s at age 17.

But even more important than their past lives as whiz kids, the founding team already had a successful exit under their belt. “As serial entrepreneurs, it was easier for us than budding entrepreneurs to get the first round of funding,” Shai says. “We got the first round [Series A] about four months after we started.”

After partnering with their first beta customers to build out an MVP, it became clear that being “enterprise-grade” would be key to the company’s success. Most cloud-based companies at the time were smaller in size, but they knew it was a matter of time before larger companies would migrate to the cloud and use it for DR. That meant that robustness and ease of use were two guiding principles for the product.

“It’s not trivial to create such a complicated solution and make it very easy for the customer to use,” Shai says. “That’s a major competitive advantage we have over other players. Our customers love us for making it very simple to use.”

And their prediction paid off. CloudEndure now counts some of the largest Fortune 500 companies as clients. The team is even branching out to support VMware as a target in addition to the cloud.

If things keep going their way, the word “downtime” might soon be eradicated from the business lexicon around the world.