Data Deposit Box President & COO Troy Cheeseman talks to Cantech Letter

Security breaches happen so often that they barely register with us anymore.

Credit card information stolen at Target or Home Depot, the twenty-million names, government security numbers, phone numbers and credit cards stolen last year South Korea, the huge cyberattack on eBay; these are events we now brush off as though they are boy band gossip or a paper thin reality TV plot.

But these breaches have real world consequences, and they don’t just happen to big companies.

Increasingly, small and medium sized businesses are the target of data breaches too, and many are ill equipped to deal with the problem. A recent investigation by Verizon discovered that 62% of breaches take months to discover, and some go on for years.

Toronto-based Data Deposit Box (Data Deposit Box Stock Quote, Chart, News: CSE:DDB), which was founded in 2003 and went public recently, thinks it can help the Small and Medium Sized Business market improve drastically improve its data security, and take a chunk of the burgeoning multi-billion dollar market in the process. The company’s products are designed to provide Fortune 500-like security to companies that need simple and intuitive solutions.

Cantech Letter recently talked to Data Deposit Box President & COO Troy Cheeseman about what’s next for the company.

Troy, can you tell us about the history of Data Deposit Box?

We founded the Company in 2003 when data was growing and backing up was a big issue. The only methods available then were to tape and most were expensive and complex to manage. The tapes used would often fail when trying to restore. The idea was to build a small background task that would quietly backup your data in real time, and bandwidth was an issue so from the beginning the product was designed to suspend backups when the user was working and resume backups when the user was away from their machine. We have a patent on the pause and resume process because we saw that there were no other companies at the time doing this. This was all before remote backup was branded cloud.

Data Deposit Box now operates in over 50 countries with products available in 39 languages. The Company has over $5MM in predictive reoccurring revenue and 200,000 accounts under management. Last year we launched the Continuous Data Protection (CDP) engine, managed for one of the world’s largest private PC\Laptop\Tablet/Server manufacturers and as of February 2015 this product is found white labeled in retail stores worldwide.

What problem is the company trying to solve?

We are bringing enterprise disaster readiness, backup and recovery cloud solutions to the small-medium business (SMB) and small-medium enterprise (SME) markets globally. We offer enterprise features, protection and security with simplicity at an SMB price. Consumer grade products are not robust enough to meet the needs of these businesses and traditional enterprise solutions are too expensive – Our products exceed their need for security and functionality at a price sustainable for their business.

After Data Deposit Box, the client simply captures all endpoints including Exchange, SQL, file servers, desktops, laptops and mobile devices. The client does not need to change the behaviors of the company to copy data to server because all data is protected.

How large is the SMB data protection space?

In North America there are over thirty million Small and Medium Sized Businesses. Globally. that number is estimated to be double if not triple in size.

We typically think of data breaches as happening to large companies such as the recent attack on Target. How do breaches differ for Small and Medium Sized Businesses?

They don’t. All levels of business are open to attack. Historically, SMB and even SME organizations maintained “paper records” of critical financial customer data. Credit cards were swiped with a carbon paper sleeve and the customer manually signed the receipt. Over the past 10+ years, the SMB has been equipped with varying technologies that digitize the same data, capturing and storing the financial data in online accessible storage mediums. Think of the “square credit card reader”, the debit and credit system where you can plug it into your iPhone, scan a credit card and charge the account with an immediate acknowledgment to the customer via a digital receipt. This system can be purchased for $9.99 at Best Buy. All of this new digital data requires a secure means of storage and that’s why our SMB and SME products offer 448bit blow fish encryption. More importantly, we encrypt the data before it leaves the device, while in transit and while it is at rest at our secure cloud facility. We use the highest standard available while the vast majority of other solutions use only 256bit or even 128bit encryption.

Can you describe a typical customer of Data Deposit Box?

Our products were designed to be simple as our primary target was micro small business. Typically in businesses this size, the office administrator is in charge of IT including backups. Since the acquisition of ROBOBAK, we have moved up stream into larger businesses and over the years we have been adding more power to our server product and have been able to attract larger SMBs.

In 2014, roughly half of our revenue was generated through reseller channels. We have over 1,000 resellers. The reseller is the trusted third party that advises the client and selects the product to use for backup and recovery. This channel is very important to us today and help to guide our future development efforts.

The simplicity of our backend has attracted some very large partners that enjoy multi-petabyte vaults managed by less than 1 FTE. We have some very large competitors in this area that not only have a maximum vault size but also require extensive effort on a weekly or monthly basis to maintain the vaults. Our partners are very pleased with the extremely low amount of resources required to maintain a multi-petabyte vault.

Organizations globally struggle with maintaining corporate security and data compliance as their end points increase daily. All levels are looking for effective ways to secure the end point and it all starts with ensuring that the data is captured, secured and controlled and that’s where DDB can help.

Can you describe a before and after customer scenario?

Customers traditionally have been doing nothing to backup data. They have, incorrectly, developed an implicit trust that there server will not fail. For companies that do some level of backup, the policy in the company is to put everything on a server and they may use a backup product to either backup to tape or make a second copy on disk. Once these backups are setup, they rarely check to see if they have been running correctly, and never try to do a restore until they actually need it. They certainly don’t have any protection for all the endpoints and the only person who can verify if the backups are running or restore data is the IT guy.

After Data Deposit Box, the client simply captures all endpoints including Exchange, SQL, file servers, desktops, laptops and mobile devices. The client does not need to change the behaviors of the company to copy data to server because all data is protected. Information about any problems with backups is emailed to one or more interested employees. Restore can be self-serve or centrally managed and all data is available on all devices include mobile.

Who is your competition?

“So simple, so smart” is our company’s tag line. We have always maintained this as our focus when dealing with the competition. We invented set it and forget it in this space. We have extended this idea when it comes to the enabler channel as we offer, license free, very flexible pricing models that are distinctly different than the competition. Our direct competitors are IASO, ATTIX5, ASIGRA and EVAULT.

How much has the preponderance of mobile changed the security landscape?

Dramatically. Corporate, SME and SMB data is now available OUTSIDE of the business walls more now than ever. Mobile devices now have the ability to move, edit, share, and disseminate company’s critical and confidential data anywhere, anytime. Organizations globally struggle with maintaining corporate security and data compliance as their end points increase daily. All levels are looking for effective ways to secure the end point and it all starts with ensuring that the data is captured, secured and controlled and that’s where DDB can help. Our backend object storage technology allows for a flexible, secure and compliant storage facility and our integrated backup products for end points ensure that all of the data is captured with 448bit blowfish encryption. This is the only way a business can be assured their data is not leaking from the organization.

From a business growth perspective, our focus is on growing top line revenue. We plan to aggressively expand our global footprint mainly through the Enabler business channel and through strategic regional partnerships.

Rob Puzzuoli was recently appointed as Chief Technical Officer. What does he bring to the table?

Mr. Puzzuoli brings 13 years of technology management and Chief Systems Architecture experience from ROBOBAK, a technology provider he founded in 2003. Over his 13 years, Rob focused on managing software development and system architecture teams guiding and mentoring junior and senior staff.

As DDB enters into our next stage of growth, it is crucial that we focus on evolving our corporate infrastructure to accommodate increased demand and new service/product offerings. Rob is a strong technical leader who will play an integral role in the next chapter of Data Deposit Box and we are excited to welcome him as CTO to the senior management team. Rob’s primary mandate will be to focus his skill and attention on evolving our products and services.

What milestones should investors look for from Data Deposit Box over the next 12 months?

DDB will focus on offering additional products to meet our goal of becoming the complete SMB and SME cloud disaster readiness and backup and recovery provider globally. Today, the SMB and SME must leverage 1, 2 or even 3 providers to protect all its end points, data security\retention and physical\virtual disaster recovery needs. By the end of 2015, that same SMB and SME will need only one provider for local and cloud disaster readiness, recover and cloud backup; Data Deposit Box. In 2015 we will improve and add to our virtualization features, expand our product offering with a focus on physical to virtual DR capabilities, we will expand our support for the various public and private storage technologies and we will bring a new local recovery option which will complete our suite of products.

From a business growth perspective, our focus is on growing top line revenue. We plan to aggressively expand our global footprint mainly through the Enabler business channel and through strategic regional partnerships. We are focused on key partnerships in each region enabling our managed service provider partners to aggressively enter the SMB and SME market with our products by offering a full suite of services backed with a low cost per GB, license free and revenue sharing pricing model to incentivize the MSP and the SMB/SME within the region. We will establish strategic relationships with a focus to grow and expand the MSP customer base rather than gathering as many licensing deals as a region could permit. This approach will encompass the NAM, LATM, EMEA and AsiaPAC regions. Other areas of expansion will include the enterprise end point protection technical alliances with digital security company’s looking to leverage our respective reseller channels.

Disclosure: Data Deposit Box is an annual sponsor of Cantech Letter and Editor Nick Waddell owns shares in the company.

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