Emil Novakov, Scaleflex: “we should all be educated as early as possible on how to behave on the internet”

Even when the economy is trembling, various business and security solutions like VPNs and SaaS keep blooming, as businesses have become reliant on automatic management tools.

Today B2B SaaS or business-to-business Software-as-a-Service is a widely used cloud-based software distribution. It is valued for a variety of solutions that can end the aches of businesses from the most different departments.

To talk about the possibilities brought by this technology, Cybernews invited Emil Novakov, CEO of Scaleflex – an international SaaS startup with a mission to simplify the recurring tasks involved in developing a website, online store, and mobile and desktop applications.

How did the idea of Scaleflex originate? What has your journey been like?

On a cold winter night in Paris, in January 2017, my co-founder and I realized that the increase of images on the web and mobile applications were greatly improving the user experience on the Internet. However, this was coming with additional Internet bandwidth requirements and eventually slower applications.

On one hand, visual content was bringing more and more value to Internet users, but on the other, web and mobile applications were getting slower and slower. So we decided to fix it by building Cloudimage, a Cloud-based image server and CDN that resizes, compresses, and accelerates images on-the-fly for all customers relying heavily on images.

As we got the opportunity to talk to more and more customers, we decided to add support for video as well and build a platform to act as a single source of truth for all media assets within the company. This is how Filerobot was released 2 years ago, first as a Headless DAM (Digital Asset Management) for developers and then last year as a collaborative DAM for marketers and creators.

Can you introduce us to your media asset management solutions? What are their key features?

We currently provide 2 B2B SaaS:

• Cloudimage: On-the-fly media optimization and multi-CDN acceleration to save time preparing images for publication and accelerate their delivery
• Filerobot: a Digital Asset Management platform for various teams to upload, store, categorize, collaborate, optimize and publish media assets such as images, videos, and product documents on multiple channels.

Cloudimage is fully integrated into Filerobot, meaning that customers purchasing Filerobot will automatically benefit from the Cloudimage value proposition around media optimization and acceleration.

What are the best practices companies should follow when developing, and, when launching a website?

One aspect people usually put on the back burner is scale and performance. Obviously, when you launch a new web or mobile application, you need to make trade-offs between, among other things, time-to-market, quality, UX, scale, and performance.

Often, scale and performance are the easy trade-off candidates, but they usually become the biggest problem when they become relevant. This is exactly the problem we are trying to solve for our customers at Scaleflex: help them build scalable, flexible, and performant applications from day 1, without trade-offs.

How did the recent global events affect your field of work? Were there any new challenges you had to adapt to?

The challenges people had to face in the last 2 years are unprecedented for our generation and it would be a lie to say that all was great. Even though we have been a remote-operating company since our inception in 2017, the additional pressure of not being able to meet with colleagues, customers, and partners put a big strain on our entire team.

I could not be prouder of how we managed to go through these hard times together and believe that we came out stronger. Business-wise, we managed to raise funds during the pandemic and doubled our revenue and team size. This makes me feel very confident about our future.

What security features do you think are essential for every website?

In my opinion, every website should look into DDoS, unprivileged access, account theft, and privacy protection as starting points. There are plenty of great technologies allowing for the deployment of layers of security for reasonable investments.

Talking about average Internet users, what details do you think everyone should be especially vigilant about when browsing? Are there any security tools that you would like to recommend?

I believe we should all be educated as early as possible on how to “behave on the Internet”, the same way we are educated on how to behave when we walk on the street, drive a car, or exercise.

It is of great importance for the average Internet user to have basic reactions to recognize phishing emails/websites, use complex identities with complex passwords and make sure people do not share more personal data than required. These basic reflexes should be taught at school and repeated in companies.

Why do you think companies often hesitate to try out new and innovative solutions that would enhance and secure their operations?

I believe most people are reluctant to change as every change comes with unknowns, and risks, and forces one to get out of his/her comfort zone. We see too often customers coming to us to help them extinguish a fire they have around their web performance, core web vitals (SEO), or media management.

Also, it is no secret that most innovative solutions are made by Startups/Scale-ups and enterprise customers are usually reluctant to work with startups because of the “risk they represent”.

What does the future hold for Scaleflex?

We want to continue building software we enjoy building, with features that scale and are easy to use. Our goal will always be to solve real problems our customers report and are willing to work with us on solving. We are in a growing market with a huge opportunity ahead.