Companies used to be able to locate and protect their data relatively easily. It’s not so easy anymore. Information is now scattered across a sea of cloud services, on-premises data centers and SaaS applications, making it difficult for organizations and data-hungry AI bots or agents to get the information they need.
Simon Taylor saw the need for a better way, so more than a decade ago dedicated himself to solving the modern data dilemma with HYCU (pronounced “Haiku”), a hybrid multicloud data protection as a service (DPaaS) platform company. As HYCU cofounder and CEO, Taylor is helping advance data backup and disaster recovery capabilities for data centers running virtual machines, cloud native technologies and SaaS environments. The company has been a Visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Backup and Data Protection Platforms (formerly Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions) since 2022.
In an interview with The Forecast, Taylor reflected on his path as a serial entrepreneur. After he sold his data management startup company to Citrix, Taylor’s fate would take another turn, deeper into the world of bits and bytes. Wandering through a Las Vegas tech conference in 2015, he ran into an old acquaintance, Slovenian engineer Goran Garevski. Over drinks, Garevski mentioned he’d been focused on innovating data protection, a market Taylor immediately dismissed as dull and irrelevant. But Taylor knew Goran had amassed deep knowledge working with data protection providers. After a little probing, Taylor and Goran reunited to form a new startup that would be called HYCU.
“If Uber can reinvent something as established as the taxi industry, why couldn’t someone with vision do the same thing for data protection?” Garevski suggested.
That question stuck with Taylor.
Weeks later, he reached out to Garevski to begin conceptualizing a simpler, more modern approach to data protection. The result was HYCU, a company the pair co-founded in 2018 to deliver a unified approach to data protection across different IT infrastructures. Taylor became CEO and Garevski took on the role of VP, Engineering and CTO.
“We focused on bringing together all the different elements of the modern data estate and making it incredibly easy to backup and recover data,” Taylor said. “Almost as simply as you would on an iPhone with iCloud backup.”
Success from Adversity
The vision came easy, but finding a market for it wasn’t so simple. Taylor said when he and Garevski launched the company, most CIOs thought in binary terms. You either stayed on-premises or you moved most things to the cloud. Few did both. And with hyperscale vendors selling the stability and safety of the cloud, few CIOs or CISOs saw a need to protect those assets.
“People would say, ‘I understand backing up a hypervisor, but why would I back up my cloud?’” Taylor chuckled.
The pandemic triggered a surge in sudden cloud migrations. HYCU, as it turned out, had tools that made workload transfers faster, easier, and safer. As a result, its revenues skyrocketed, rising 450% during the COVID period, Taylor said. The privately held company now has more than 4,600 customers across 78 countries and partners closely with Nutanix to protect data wherever it resides.
Still, HYCU’s growth hasn’t been all one-directional. At the tail end of the pandemic, many companies that had rushed to move their digital assets to cloud environments began reconsidering those decisions. Rising costs, latency challenges, compliance requirements, and mounting security concerns ultimately led many organizations to bring workloads back in-house. In fact, a recent Liquid Web survey of more than 1,000 IT professionals reported 42% are "repatriating" workloads to private servers.
“We found that about 40% were migrating away from the cloud at the same time others were moving in,” Taylor said.
To meet these changing needs, HYCU rolled out a capability called “Spin Up, Spin Down,” which enables companies to move entire workloads between environments with just a few clicks. The feature has helped HYCU maintain momentum and stay true to its vision.
“We believe in the power of on-prem and the power of public cloud,” Taylor said. “We want to make sure there’s a seamless transition, whether you’re going one way or the other.”
The New Reality of Data Sprawl
As hybrid and multicloud environments become the new norm, Taylor sees a familiar problem taking on new urgency. Data has been multiplying across every layer of enterprise infrastructure – from on-premises systems to SaaS platforms – faster than many organizations can handle.
“Everyone talks about data like it’s this golden mine,” Taylor said. “But what we’re also dealing with is the modernization and fragmentation of applications that generate and use that data.”
Containerization and microservices have only added to the challenge.
“We’ve gone from a world of monolithic thinking to a world that’s not just fragmented, but actually almost sharded,” Taylor said. “It takes modern platforms to support that.”
HYCU’s answer is to make the invisible visible. Its platform now protects data from 92 sources, spanning Nutanix, VMware, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and the major public clouds.
“That’s more than 12 times any other data protection vendor in the marketplace,” Taylor said.
Building a Foundation for AI
Such reach is proving crucial as enterprises race to operationalize AI. Training large language models and other AI systems requires access to vast troves of structured and unstructured data, often scattered across incompatible systems. Success depends on ensuring that the data feeding those systems remains accurate, traceable, and secure, Taylor said.
“What we’re building toward is an AI fabric that connects all those data sources in one place,” he said.
“If all of the data across on-prem, public cloud, and SaaS were linked together with AI, think about what you could stop buying, what you could start to automate, and how you would interact with the AI.”
In that vision, HYCU acts as a command layer that allows enterprises to see and protect their entire data estate. Its observability tool, R-Graph, maps and assesses every data source, flags potential risks, and helps companies enforce the right policies before data is exposed to AI or attackers.
“The secret sauce is that we have access to more data sources than anybody else by a factor of 12,” Taylor said. “That puts us in a position to help customers stitch together the fabric of all their data and prepare it for whatever AI brings next.”
The Stakes Are Rising
The need for that kind of protection is growing. Recent HYCU research (See: The State of SaaS Data Resilience in 2025) shows that half of all ransomware and cyberattacks now originate in SaaS and cloud environments, a sharp increase from a few years ago. At the same time, the economics of cybercrime have flipped. Automated tools and AI-driven exploits have made it faster and cheaper than ever for attackers to find vulnerabilities and trick users into making mistakes that lead to costly breaches.
“When we started, it cost about a hundred dollars to execute a ransomware attack on the dark web,” Taylor said. “Today it’s about $1.50.”
That imbalance is forcing defenders to fight smarter, not just harder, and AI-driven tools like those in HYCU are making that possible, Taylor said.
“For the first time, it’s becoming cheaper for us to innovate on the side of the defenders,” he said. “AI is helping us build and deploy protection faster, more intelligently, and at a lower cost.”
For Taylor, HYCU’s mission extends beyond backup and recovery. He sees it as a way to give organizations control over their digital assets in an era defined by sprawl and complexity. That extends to the Nutanix partnership, where the HYCU R-Cloud data protection platform provides seamless, native, agentless backup and recovery across entire Nutanix data estates.
“What we do with Nutanix is provide an integrated solution that ultimately becomes the framework by which customers can access and leverage not just their Nutanix data, but all of their backed-up data in one central location,” he said.
As AI continues to reshape the enterprise landscape, Taylor believes visibility and control will be the ultimate differentiators.
“AI is here, it’s here to stay, and it’s only going to get better,” he said. “Companies that understand where their data is and how to protect it will be the ones that thrive.”
David Rand is a business and technology reporter whose work has appeared in major publications around the world. He specializes in spotting and digging into what’s coming next–and helping executives in organizations of all sizes know what to do about it.
Ken Kaplan contributed to this story. He is Editor in Chief for The Forecast by Nutanix. Find him on X @kenekaplan and LinkedIn.
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