Doug Balog Strategic Executive Advisor, FalconStor

FalconStor Software, Inc. announced that former IBM executive Doug Balog has joined its advisory board.

In this capacity, he will provide strategic guidance as the company expands its commitment to the hybrid cloud community and its focus on MSP partnerships.

He spent more than 35 years at IBM as a senior executive running units responsible for the innovation, sales and growth of their storage, server and mainframe businesses. In these roles, he worked with some of IBM’s largest customers and channel partners, including MSPs, to architect and deploy enterprise IT infrastructure solutions increasingly designed for the hybrid cloud.

“I am pleased to join forces with FalconStor, a data protection leader steeped in deep technical expertise across the data management challenges that I saw within the customer IT and MSP community,” he said. “I am impressed by the progress the team has made in bringing this expertise to the hybrid cloud data protection market and by the commitment it is making to the MSP community to help make customers and partners successful technically and financially. Particularly, IBM i customers and MSPs would seem to benefit materially from FalconStor’s deep technology integration with the IBM i platform for de-dupe, backup, replication and data migration to the cloud.”

“We announced our initial capabilities for cloud-enabled backup-as-a-service in 2020 and our commitment to the MSP community in 2021,” said Todd Brooks, CEO. “The entire team rallied around those fundamental strategic changes, driving a new solution focus, cloud integration, fundamental pricing changes and a new MSP market development program. With Doug’s addition to the team, we are now ready in 2022 to take our efforts to the next level in hybrid cloud data protection with our growing network of MSPs.”

Some of the company’s technological advances and recent business decisions that continue to be a strong selling point for both MSPs and enterprises are:
• Cloud Enabled: Firm’s core replication technology, long-used to replicate from one enterprise data center to another for active protection, now supports replication to private cloud deployments, often managed by MSPs and the leading public cloud providers.
• Multitenant Management: Company’s StorSight user experience is built for multitenancy, a fundamental ingredient in addressing backup-as-a-service requirements for MSPs managing hundreds of customers, enabling backup automation, billing and chargeback.
• Security: Core encryption capabilities for data in-flight and at-rest allow MSPs to keep tight control over their customers’ data in the face of ransomware attacks and make cloud a safe option for long-term data retention.
• Subscription Pricing: The firm unveiled new monthly subscription pricing based on the number of customer tenants an MSP serves, rather than time-honored data capacity pricing. With its data reduction technologies, MSPs can drive highly profitable and valuable hybrid cloud data protection service lines.

Balog currently serves as board member, advisor and investor to several technology companies in hybrid cloud, data protection, cybersecurity and AI/ML.