Najaf Husain

Founder & CEO Elastio (Elastio Software)

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Najaf Husain is founder and chief executive of Elastio, a cyber-resilience company built around an argument about where enterprise security actually fails. Elastio’s position is that the gap is not at the perimeter but at the recovery point: modern ransomware stages inside an environment for months, deliberately targets backup infrastructure, and corrupts selectively so that anomaly and entropy-based tools do not fire — meaning that by the time an organisation reaches for its backups, the backups may already be compromised. Elastio inspects live, replicated and backup data with detection models trained on thousands of ransomware families, and its product promise is to prove that a verified clean recovery point exists. Husain has spent roughly twenty-five years founding venture-backed companies in and around this problem, first in storage resource management at Precise/SRM, then in backup and recovery at AppAssure, then in private-cloud infrastructure at Cloudistics, each of which was acquired.

Career Highlights

• Chief executive of Elastio and a member of its board of directors, alongside three investor-advisers.
• Leads a company headquartered in Reston, Virginia with a sales office in Boston and research and development in Toronto.
• Founded AppAssure Software and served as its founder, president and chief executive from 2006 until its acquisition by Dell in 2012.
• Grew AppAssure from nothing to a 50 million dollar revenue run rate in four years.
• AppAssure was named the fastest growing backup company worldwide by Inc. Magazine.
• Founded Cloudistics in 2013 and led it as chief executive until its acquisition by Fungible in 2020.
• Co-founded Precise/SRM, the storage resource management company later acquired by Veritas.
• Holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland.

Professional Journey

Husain read computer science at the University of Maryland and has spent his career as a founder rather than as a corporate executive, returning repeatedly to the same underlying question of whether data can be trusted and recovered.

His first venture was as a co-founder of Precise/SRM, in storage resource management — the discipline of knowing what data an organisation holds, where it sits and how it is behaving. The company was acquired by Veritas.

In 2006 he founded AppAssure Software and ran it as founder, president and chief executive. AppAssure sold backup and recovery software at a moment when virtualisation was changing what backup had to do, and it grew fast enough to be named the fastest growing backup company worldwide by Inc. Magazine, reaching a 50 million dollar revenue run rate in four years. Dell acquired it in 2012.

He founded Cloudistics in 2013, moving up the stack from data protection to infrastructure itself, building composable private-cloud systems for organisations that wanted cloud economics without leaving their own data centres. He led it as chief executive until Fungible acquired the company in 2020.

Elastio followed immediately, dating from around 2020, and it reads as the synthesis of everything before it. The company takes what it calls an attacker-led approach: it studies how ransomware evades detection, hides inside data that looks normal from the outside and compromises the recovery path, and encodes that into an ensemble of detection models which the company says are trained on more than 2,300 ransomware families and 10,000 variants. Elastio markets the result as verified data and provable recovery, claiming that no customer of its has paid a ransom and that it has caught tens of thousands of threats that had already passed perimeter, endpoint and backup-vendor defences.

Husain has assembled an unusually security-weighted organisation around the product, including a Cyber Resilience Council of former government officials and enterprise chief information security officers advising on strategy and product direction, drawn from the United States Secret Service, the National Security Council and the private sector. Its customers are concentrated where a failed recovery is not survivable: financial institutions, healthcare organisations, managed service providers and public sector agencies.

Education

University of Maryland

B.S., Computer Science