data protection
Data protector - - HYCU has launched a set of AI Agents in an aiR product, that query multiply-sourced backup data to find cyber-resilience risks no single-source risk visibility app can discover.
HYCU’s R-Cloud protects more than 100 unique workloads, including on-premises infrastructure, every major cloud, SaaS systems of record, DevOps toolchains, identity platforms, collaboration tools, databases, and AI workloads such as vector databases and data pipelines.
CEO and founder Simon Taylor said: “For two decades, security tools watched what happened inside applications and backup tools stored the record of it. The two never spoke. That worked when data changed slowly, and humans were the only ones touching it. Neither is true anymore.
“Between SaaS sprawl and AI agents acting at machine speed, most companies can't tell you what they have, let alone what changed in the last hour. Resilience now means knowing what you had, what changed, who changed it, what data was impacted, and recovering immediately. aiR delivers intelligence. R-Cloud delivers recovery. That's what resilience looks like."
The aiR software features natural language search across backups. Customer admins can ask plain-language questions of their backup data:
- "Show me all files containing passport numbers across our Salesforce and Microsoft 365 backups."
- "Flag every permission change in our Okta environment over the last 90 days."
- "Identify which AI agents accessed customer records in the past month."
With the information already contained in HYCU backups, aiR makes it queryable, from the first snapshot, with no configuration required. Each agent reads the same backup data and answers a different question. Eg;
- Regulated Data and IP finds PII, PHI, financial records, and intellectual property scattered across protected applications.
- Insider Risk detects unusual access patterns and behavioral anomalies.
- Configuration Drift compares snapshots over time to identify settings that changed without authorization.
- IAM Posture Management tracks identity drift and access policy violations.
- Anomaly Detection spots unusual data patterns that signal compromise.
- Agent Governance monitors AI agent activity across the protected estate.
HYCU calls this an agent garden, and customers extend it by building and publishing their own templates, creating agents that ask the questions specific to their compliance regime, their industry, and the way their organization actually works.
It says that, because every query runs across every protected application at once, HYCU can surface thousands of cross-application insights no point tool could produce. The intelligence was always there, dormant, latent but unrealizable. HYCU claims it’s is the first to treat backups as a memory rather than as insurance.
Insights from aiR reveal cross-application patterns no single-workload tool can surface:
- An identity change in Oktathat cascades into Salesforce and GitHub permissions, - An AI agent that read customer records in Confluence and wrote output to SharePoint,
- Regulated data that left a sanctioned application six months ago and now lives in three places no compliance team has mapped.
HYCU is opening an early access waitlist for aiR today. Organizations joining the waitlist enter the early adopter program alongside existing HYCU customers currently testing the capability.
Comment
The idea of adding an agentic data access layer or superstructute to data-generating and storing applications is spreading. We have reported on Scality's ADI offering and Veeam has just announced its DataAI Command Platform. It is such a powerful concept that we believe it will become a standard part of every storage, database and backup supplier's product set; table stakes.