Superna Appoints Alex Hesterberg as Chief Executive Officer

Former Delphix Chief Strategy Officer will drive Superna’s growth for data first security in the multi-cloud storage market

AUSTIN, Texas, Dec. 15, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Alex joins Superna as CEO with more than 25 years of experience across executive leadership, business strategy, business operations, customer success and sales functions helping customers solve some of the most challenging security and storage business problems.

Prior to Superna, Alex served as Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Customer Officer of Delphix during its years of hyper-growth. Over the last two decades, Alex has held executive roles at Turbonomic (acquired by IBM), Pure Storage (IPO in 2015), Sailthru (acquired by CM Group), Riverbed (IPO in 2006) and Veritas (acquired by Symantec in 2004). Alex has served on the Advisory Board of TSIA, the Board of Directors of Cornerstone Technologies (acquired by Sonasoft) and currently serves as a Board Member of the Soi Dog USA Foundation.

Data first security, automation and compliance for the multi-cloud

“I’ve been fortunate to work with some incredible teams over the years that have either delightfully disrupted a technology segment or solved a material customer problem with technology that then ushered in new ways for businesses to innovate. With Superna, I’ve been lucky enough to find both” says Hesterberg. “Superna is the only platform that solves modern day security, automation and compliance concerns by keeping data at the center of its product strategy. Our customers are avoiding Ransomware attacks, cutting spend by over 60% by intelligently archiving the right data to the right platform and more effectively meeting the controls and safeguards of, for example, HIPAA and GDPR compliance audits.”

The unstructured data revolution

The Superna platform solves for security gaps, cost overruns and compliance requirements in multi-cloud unstructured data environments. Today, unstructured data represents over 80% of digital data – globally growing at a 65% CAGR. “We’re at the beginning of an unstructured data revolution. This data is a rich, complex aggregation of crown jewel information ranging from financial records, to medical information, to big data analytics, to intellectual property and now, it’s becoming the backbone of next generation backup and recovery” Hesterberg shared. 

As many companies are now harnessing the power of file and object data, Hesterberg is excited about the opportunity ahead. “Everyone knows that critical application file system data is as precious as critical application database data. For example, SAP and EPIC customers rely as much on file system data as they do on relational data. But hyper-granular backups, meant to reduce the impact of Ransomware and exfiltration, are now being stored on highly scalable and cost effective object storage platforms across the multi-cloud. Even in-memory databases like SAP HANA are taking advantage of the limitless scale of object storage, since they are architected closer to compute than traditional databases.” As customer demand for using scalable, cost effective object storage as a core recovery or production platform skyrockets, Superna is offering the most comprehensive suite of solutions in the industry. 

Prevention is the new recovery

Cybercriminals are creating more sophisticated attacks by leveraging advanced attacker tools openly available on the black market or downloaded from the Dark Web. Attacks are evolving to stay ahead of threat detection tools and this becomes a problem for traditional security approaches to cyber threat prevention. “The goal posts have moved,” says Hesterberg, “sophisticated attacks on data have become the standard and the data-to-security gap has never been more exploited. Prevention is the new recovery and that’s where Superna is leading the industry.” 

The core of the Superna platform is an AI layer, with policy-based automation that enables the data layer to become increasingly aware. “Having a data-first approach also means introducing intelligence into the data layer itself. This not only enables incredible cost reduction opportunities with intelligent archiving, but it also paves the way to ransomware and exfiltration prevention.”

Native integrations with industry partners

“No two data footprints are the same and organizations are increasingly adopting a multi-cloud approach to managing and securing their global data environments,” Hesterberg notes. “This is why we have natively integrated with some of the world’s leading storage platforms.” For example, Superna and Dell have partnered to deliver the world’s most secure file and object storage solution for hybrid environments, with robust support for scale out NAS infrastructures and multicloud storage environments.

“Our multi-cloud strategy obviously also involves protecting the attack landscape in both private and public clouds,” Hesterberg states. “Attackers are starting to target unstructured data with ransomware and other advanced cyberattacks and this is why we built a cloud-native solution for AWS S3 buckets.”Superna ransomware defense for AWS monitors all access to S3 buckets, analyzes data access behavior for indications of ransomware or other malicious activity, and stops the attacks before cybercriminals can compromise critical data.

About Superna

Superna is an industry leader in security, automation and compliance for multi-cloud unstructured data environments. With global operations and thousands of customers across all verticals, Superna delivers a scalable, secure and easy to orchestrate platform to secure data wherever it lives. www.superna.io

CONTACT: David Orban, david.orban@superna.io