From Vision to Reality: The Story Behind IssAssist and the Future of Kubernetes Backup
Sometimes you have to look back to understand exactly where you are heading. The development of IssAssist is moving at an incredible pace, but the product didn't emerge out of nowhere. It's the result of over 25 years of experience, a few shattered illusions, and a realization that the data protection market had to fundamentally change.
Here is the background story of why IssAssist exists and what our mission is moving forward.
How it all began: CBS and the first BaaS model
Fifteen years ago, I worked at, and was a co-owner of Cristie Nordic AB. We were focused on data recovery and was well known in the Swedish Enterprise market. In about 15 years ago we hired my brother, Magnus Thunberg, and together with him, Bo Österman, Daniel Larsson, Karin Österman, and Kenth Juthberg (who was at IBM at the time), we created something entirely unique. We built the industry's very first Backup-as-a-Service model. We called it CBS (Cristie Backup Solution), based entirely on IBM Storage Protect.
It was a massive success, even too big for IBM to understand and handle. A few years into our achievements, I wanted to take the concept further to "CBS 2.0". The vision was a complete HCI (Hyperconverged Infrastructure) solution—imagine something similar to today's Nutanix, IBM Elastic Storage (ESS), or IBM Fusion. The idea was an intuitive WebGUI that would drastically simplify life for anyone managing their IBM Storage Protect environment. Software and hardware in one seamless package.
A few years after our first prototype, however, reality hit. Solutions like Rubrik and Cohesity stormed the market with the exact concept I had envisioned for CBS 2.0, but with an even greater focus on Scale-Out.
Years passed. We (Bosse, Karin, Daniel, and I) sold Cristie to PEDAB. The new owners and management made the decision to shut down the CBS 2.0 project to instead focus on acting as a value-added reseller, selling other vendors' ready-made solutions rather than building their own. With hindsight, I honestly believe that was the right choice for the company at the time.
A new path: IssTech and a paradigm shift
After my time at Cristie, I started IssTech. The original plan was to build a pure AI company. But reality had other plans—the demand for my backup expertise was enormous, and old contacts were constantly reaching out.
To avoid ending up in competition with Cristie, I searched high and low for new, unexplored areas. I bounced ideas off many smart people, including Patrik "Totte" Torstensson—one of the absolute sharpest minds I've encountered in my IT career. He planted a vital simple but extremely smart seed:
"Why not combine AI and Backup?"
At the same time, I was spending time at several unicorn companies, which gave me a brutal but clear realization: Traditional VM backups are dead. The future is about protecting Kubernetes and Cloud.
The birth of IssAssist – The digital backup consultant
With that insight, the thoughts of CBS 2.0 were revived, albeit in a new, modern form. We decided to build a digital backup consultant based on AI, where step one was simply to make life easier for our customers.
Our main purpose became crystal clear: We will eliminate the need for traditional consultants for daily backup operations. The goal is not to get rid of my industry colleagues, but to free up their time so their expertise is only needed for unique, complex, and highly specific architectural issues. The daily "heavy lifting" should be handled by IssAssist.
Where do we stand today in 2026?
Today, about two years have passed since the starting gun. My colleague Mazen Mardini leads the main development, and progress has skyrocketed—largely driven by direct requests from our end-customers.
Today, our customers use IssAssist primarily to perform automated restore tests on a massive scale (Scale-Out-Restore). Technically, we can now restore random data from thousands of VMs in just a few minutes by leveraging the power of Kubernetes.
The awakening surrounding Kubernetes data protectio, the era for Backup-as-Code has just arrived.
Now in 2026, we are noticing how the market for Kubernetes data protection has truly exploded. More and more companies, large and small, are realizing they seriously need to back up both their stateless and stateful applications.
2022–2024: Many companies lived under the illusion that they already had a working solution by combining classic backup tools (which are great for VMs and databases) with their CI/CD pipelines. “They said we don’t restore, we rebuild.”
2025-2026: Now the penny has dropped. Companies are realizing the hard way that Operation Recovery (we rebuild with CI/CD) is not the same as Disaster Recovery (DR).
When Git goes down, your CI/CD pipeline crashes, or when you quickly need to migrate your entire environment from Environment A to Environment B—an Operation Recovery no longer cuts it. You are forced into a DR scenario where you only have two choices: Rebuild everything from scratch, or restore from a backup. A backup that a terrifying number of organizations currently lack for their clusters.
Next steps for IssAssist: Full control of your data
What can IssAssist do for you right now? Today, we can connect to one or more of your Kubernetes clusters to gather information and give you the most important insight of all: What are you currently not protecting?
Our next step is an even deeper identification of your Kubernetes environments to uncover hidden data you didn't even know you had, and above all—help you protect it in the absolute best way using Veeam Kasten.
A parallel track: Take control of your SaaS solutions
We aren't stopping at Kubernetes. In parallel, we have started developing integrations for AvePoint. Through this, Service Providers can gain full control over their licenses and quickly see if their customers are over- or under-licensed. Here too, we will soon launch large-scale automated restore testing, where we can restore and verify data from hundreds of mailboxes in just a few minutes.
Do you want to join the journey?
We are building the future of data protection—and we are doing it now. If you think this sounds interesting and want to follow the project:
Want to try it yourself? We are constantly looking for companies that want to evaluate, test, and contribute with feedback. Reach out to me, and we'll make sure you get a trial license to play around with!
