(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from New Orleans. It's The Cube, covering VeeamON, 2017 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. It's our first day of coverage at VeeamON 2017. The first time The Cube has covered VeeamON and it's quite an event. About 3,000 people here and as I say, we're being going two days of coverage talking to executives and partners and of course, the customers, we love the customer segments. Markus Marksteiner is here. He's the CTO of Baloise Group, insurance company out of Switzerland. Markus, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for coming on. >> You're welcome. >> So tell us a little bit about your company, your role and what are some of the things driving IT decisions. >> Okay, so are a life insurance and long life insurance company within Switzerland. We also have a bank in Switzerland which is included. We operate in Europe, in the country of Belgium and Germany and Luxembourg and Lichtenstein. So we are a company with about seven and a half thousand employees. And my role in there, is actually I'm a head of infrastructure and supports so I'm responsible for the data center, the user service center and the workplace environment. I also act as a group CTO because we have centralized all the data centers from the different locations to expose it to our headquarter. >> So financial services tends to be in the cutting edge of technology typically, very competitive industry and fast moving, very IT-oriented. What are some of the drivers in your business today? >> I think in the, especially in the insurance companies, we are, within Switzerland but also in Germany and Europe itself, it's a highly regulated market so. The possibility to, let's go for the public cloud is very limited because of regulation part. So therefore we have to deal with insurance companies within Europe but also within US and China, especially, which are very agile out on the market so. Therefore our business is now changing completely because from the traditional insurance which we have selled years ago, we will have to translate this into the industrialization world so meaning, we have to be more flexible on the market, to have shorter periods of production. And for me, as an IT reseller within the company, means my organization have to be agile as well. So, this is actually the most part we are changing to deal with security, that's the one part. But the other part is the agility. >> Paint a picture of your environment. What's it look like? Applications that you're supporting. What does your infrastructure look like. Your storage. Obviously, your backup, we'll talk about that. >> So we have, within Basel we have two data centers nearby. And we have now set up a third data center outside of Basel for disaster recovery because Basel is located on a earthquake area with a high risk impact so therefore our internal audit is set, it's not that good to have for the complete group data centers located on a earthquake plate so please set up a data center which is at least 100 kilometers away from our location now, so. Within the data centers, typically we have mainframes, we have servers, we have storage, all kinds of flavors. We have some centralization there. We have one with strategy in the infrastructure which a huge partnership with HP. In this area we have from storage part, we're using NetApp and DocuStorage. And as a backup software of course now, since nearly a year now, we are using Veeam for doing the backup of all the virtual machines. In the future, also the physical machines. And also we elevated Veeam because of the data implication into data center three. So this guarantees me to bring up the data at a certain time to get us into three to make the restore and the restart there. >> So you've got, two data centers within a synchronous distance and one is an asynchronous distance. Is that correct? So you have a three data center set up which is essentially is as close to zero data loss as you can get. >> Yeah, exactly. The data center three we are using not only as a cold backup standby data center, we are putting all the non-productive environment to this data center so we have all three data centers up and running and they have on a certain perspective productive level meaning for the developer, of course data center three is absolutely highly critical because they develop in data center three, all the data is there. For the productive part, we have data center one and two which is in Basel which has the availability there, so. We're using both sides and they're all connected together. >> How often do you test recovery in that set up? >> We're trying now to test it twice a year. But we cannot switch the complete data center because we have productive and-- >> Dave: It's too risky. >> It's too risky so we built up a reference model, a reference service where we have included all the environments we need to make it for the auditors visible that our infrastructure in data center three is working in case of an emergency. >> Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about the data protection strategy. So we have a high-level, we understand the data center approach but what about protecting the apps? How do you use Veeam? How did you start with Veeam and where are you now? >> I mean we came from an absolutely traditional data standards so we had a legacy backup system running based on file locks and then we started a certain time with NetApp and using snapshot technologies there. Because we had huge databases which are not able to fulfill the SLA anymore in the recovery mode so we have to switch them to them to NetApp. And then we started with data center three and then we had another problem. How can we replicate these data into data center three in a certain time to get the SLA fulfilled in case of an emergency. And there we made a revelation and Veeam was actually the one who was fulfilling all the requirements and it was easy to deal with them. So we decided, okay, let's try it Veeam. And at a certain time, we thought well, it's not only about data application with Veeam it's also about the complete backup stack, we can replace by this software. So we grow slowly with the possibilities we saw during the implementation phase. We said, okay, we can use this model and this model and then VeeamON came on so we could use the report part also for the sizing of the virtual machines and now on we just backing up almost everything with Veeam, so. >> Can you speak to organizationally, you know, how many people you have managing kind of backup and DR and what that experience has been like? >> In the past we had about three people which were responsible for the complete backup process. But they're very focused on their tooling, they could not tell me if the backup was correct. If the data was backuped correctly. They only say, yeah, my system is running and it's backuping but is it really also consistent. I don't know so we had to ask the engineers. With Veeam now, we switched completely. We do not have any responsible anymore for backup purposes itself. We took this because of the ease of use, the tool, we gave them directly to the engineers of Linux, of Citrix, or of Windows and they are now responsible for their own data. So they can now do the backups itself and they can also assure to me that this, what they do with the backup is correct and it's restartable. Because they have to check each time. >> Yeah, so you're not only operationally more efficient but you actually know that what you have works. >> Markus: Exactly. (laughing) Yeah, yeah. >> Great. I believe it's your first time at the conference. What's the experience been so far? What value have you been getting? What brought you here? >> Actually I came here with the goal to learn more about the Veeam company itself and this was actually during the networking areas and the networking part was very helpful for me to meet directly the management of Veeam to see what is their strategy and it was also in the general session, they have a story to tell and that's what, I was coming in here to get this information and in the sessions, and today also with the talks with Baronov directly and McKay, that's really, there's a spirit in this company. That's what we are looking for. Because we have so many big companies, vendors in our thing, where you do not have the connection to the management directly and for me it's very important because we try really to grow with our business and therefore I need a partner behind where I can rely on them. With Veeam, absolutely the case. >> So you mentioned supporting physical endpoints is something that interest you. Anything else from the announcements that you heard that excites you? Anything not there, that you're looking for in the future, too? >> Yeah, for the future for me it's actually the cloud connection is very important. Because we are still in the high-regulated market but I think also the insurance and the financial sector in Switzerland, there are slightly opening for the cloud services and also for us, it's the Office365 and Amazon web services, they're coming slightly into our organization and to know that there is also a possibility with the same backup software using this in a cloud, this gives me the feeling and also the assurance that I can go to my management and tell them, hey guys, we're choosing the right vendor because we can also use them for the cloud. I do not have to evaluate another product there for fulfilling this requirement. That's good to hear. >> So you sell insurance, your company does. Backup is largely insurance. How do you make the business case, what business benefits have you seen? Can you share with any metrics, maybe they're largely cost cutting. Maybe it's enabling DR. What can you share with us? >> The one thing I can share with you is actually we had a, that's not only based on Veeam by the product, by the backup itself, but it's also based on the Veeam reporter. We had in a branch office in Belgium. We have an issue where we had several active directory controllers running there. And with VeeamON, they reported that there's two controllers broken during the weekend and there's only one active directory controller available. Meaning, if this will also fail, we have to replicate the complete staff to Basel meaning 1500 users have to wait. And they are very aware about these profiles because they are using Citrix in the background. So meaning, we will probably have an issue there for about four to five almost a whole working day where a complete branch could not work. Meaning, there we just rolled up these two active controls with Veeam in a certain time period and then nothing happened. And I mean, counted in money, this would cost us at least a half a million Euro, this outage, if it occurred. >> Markus, in the key note, you know, one of the terms that gets thrown out is digital transformation. We've talked to a lot of financial service companies that, that terms resonate. What does it mean to your organization? How has it impacted your job? >> Yeah, it has a huge impact because our business lines they are now looking for other type of insurance. Meaning, in the past, we just insured the car for one year. So, the experience of the users then, also my kids is actually, I don't want to have a car insurance for a whole year because I'm only driving twice a month, a car. So they would like to have an insurance like insure what you use. >> Stu: As a service? >> As a service. And therefore we have to adapt this into completely other models because with our legacy systems, it's impossible. So what is our business doing? They're going out, looking for startup companies. Bringing them in and the startup companies, they start, typically in a cloud environment. They're very agile. And then when they bring out the product, the first thing is they ask for a connection to the legacy systems, for customer relationship management systems and stuff like this. So I have to really change my organization completely. And so I have to go away from these silos organization parts, into DevOps. And I also have to change my data center because I have to provide these services also as a cloud service, as it is possible in the public cloud, so. Meaning, the digitalization in the business has absolutely direct impact to my organization. >> I'd buy that service. I've got four kids, three driving, two at college. They really only need it a couple of months out of the year. I'll switch insurance companies. Give me a call. (laughing) All right, excellent. Thanks very much for coming on The Cube. Markus, we really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome, all right, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back. Continuous coverage of continuous data protection, continuous content flow. VeeamON 2017. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)