(bright upbeat music) >> Reporter: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're coming to you today from our Palo Alto studios, talking about a really important topic. And that's data. And as we hear over and over and over, right data is the oil. Data is the new currency. Data is driving business decisions. Data drives AI. Data drives machine learning. Data is increasingly important. And we're still kind of waiting for it, to show up on balance sheets. Which is kind of implied in a lot of the big iterations, that we see in companies that are built on data. But one of the important things about data, is taking care of it. And we're excited to have our next guest here to talk about, some of the things you need to think about, and best practices in securing your data. Backing up your data, protecting your data. We're joined today by Tim Burlowski. He is the senior director, Product Management from Veritas. Joining us from remote. I believe you're in Minnesota. Tim, great to see you. >> Yep, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so let's just jump into it. So all we hear about is data these days. It's such an important topic, that is growing exponentially. And it's structured and it's unstructured. And it's so core to the business. And are you making database decisions? And are you getting enough data to drive your AI? And your machine learning algorithms? I mean, data is only exploding. You've been in this business for a long, a long, long time. I wonder if you can share your perspective, when you hear these things. more data is going to be created in the next 15 minutes. And wasn't the entire history of men before us? I'm making that up, but it's been quite an explosion. >> I know yeah, I know where you're coming from. And frankly, I don't even put that, in my presentation anymore. Because it's a lot like saying gravity exists, And things that you drop out, of a window will fall to the ground. Everyone's heard it. Everyone's aware of it. The numbers are just so staggering. You don't even know what to do with it. Like how many iPhones could you stack to the moon and back and then to Saturn? Doesn't make sense. But the truth is, we are seeing an explosion. Everyone knows it. We have to manage it better. Now for us, a lot of what we do, is in this data protection space. Where we want to make sure, that data is protected and always available. All of the data that's been created, and the growth in mission-critical applications. It's no longer seven to 20 mission-critical applications. It's hundreds and hundreds of mission-critical applications. Means you have to be ready, with a recent recovery if necessary. And you need to provide that data back to the consumer, as quickly as you possibly can. Because you've got people waiting on it. We've all got our apps on our phone, where we're looking at our bank account 24 seven. We don't wait until a teller appears at nine a.m anymore. It's not the world we live in. >> Right, I'm just curious if you've got some tailwinds, in terms of you're kind of, you've been in this market for a very long time. In terms of people finally realizing that their data, is really more of an asset and a liability. In the investments, to gather it, protect it, analyze it, have it ready for refresh it, If there's some problem. It's a positive investment towards, kind of revenue and strategic importance to the company, as opposed to kind of a back-office IT function, that we're kind of taking care of business because we have to. >> Boy that one really varies a lot by company. I see companies taking shortcuts and outsourcing, and then suddenly you'll see them in the news. And they discover that they had a major outage for a couple of days. And suddenly practices change very, very quickly. The relative comprehensive, sturdy and reliable infrastructure that people run today, sometimes lulls people into false security. And then you see a major airlines with a multi-day outage. And you go hmm, I think we missed a few steps in the process. So it sometimes takes those rude awakenings. But the companies who are really taking it seriously, and starting to practice pruning their data, examining their data for PII. So they meet various compliance regimes, and other in various states and countries. And starting to think about their backup stream, really being, how do we get a fast recovery? Instead of how do I make a copy, which I will never use again? Are really starting to drive a more efficient IT operation, when it comes to data protection. >> No, it's an interesting take, in reference to having some issue. Because we do a lot of stuff around security. Which is related to but not equal to this conversation. And one of the topics in security is that, most people have already been breached. It's just a function of how fast can you find out, and how fast can you minimize the damage? And how fast can you move on? Why are they breaching? They're breaching to get the data. So I would imagine, with this constant reading in the newspaper, of who was breached here there and everywhere, pretty much every day. That's got to be a huge driver, in terms of people kind of upping their game, and the sophistication, of the way they really think about data protection. >> It is and I'll tell you, I've had the misfortune, I would say. Of talking to customers who are in the middle of recovering, from a major ransomware malware attack. And it's a very difficult proposition. And what customers often discover is, they haven't practiced enough, they don't have enough of a DR plan present. We are certainly rising the occasion. Our products are sort of the last thing, that often stands between the customer, losing their data completely. And so we're looking at a number of technology innovations, that will enable them to store their data on immutable devices. And for the backup infrastructure, to be completely aware of that. Which we'll be announcing later this summer. Which we're very excited about. Of course, from our perspective of our appliance portfolio, we've always provided a couple of extra layers of security against intrusion detection, and intrusion prevention right out of the box. Because we know the backup infrastructure becomes this collection of the very most important data in your infrastructure. Because that's the thing you back up. And you want to restore. If there's ever any sort of manmade disaster or otherwise. >> Right. So I want to shift gears a little bit, and talk about kind of the evolution of the infrastructure kind of scene. If you will. With the rise of public clouds, with Amazon and Google and Microsoft, is sure. And then obviously, you tried into a data center. Lot of talk about HP discover, this week kind of going from edge to cloud and data center in the middle. So the environment in which these applications live, and these applications run, and where the data is, relative to those applications. Is evolved dramatically over the last, you probably have a much better time perspective than I do. Five years, 10 years. But it continues to accelerate, in this kind of Application-Centric World versus, kind of an Infrastructure Centric World. Just curious to get your take on, The kind of the challenges that presents to your company, and what you guys are trying to do to accomplish. And how do you see that continuing to evolve and get, not simpler but more complex over time? >> That is a very astute acknowledgement of what's going on in the industry. And I often call it the industry's getting weirder. I would have thought at some point, we'd sort of have Linux and Windows, and a couple of database vendors. And the truth is that database vendors exploded. And it's not just Linux anymore. It's containers. And it might be a container based on CentOS. And it might be container running in the cloud. Or it might be a simple function, like a lambda function running on nothing in AWS. And so this whole world has gotten a lot stranger. From my perspective, I think the biggest change for Veritas, has been a renewed focus on API's that we make public to customers, in ways that we can glue and stitch these systems together. Now, of course, it doesn't replace the deep integration, we do with companies like VMware, with Docker, as well as the the container ecosystem around. OpenShift and some of those technologies. But from our perspective, we've had to be a little bit more prolific, in what we support. And the truth is, it's all files, it's all objects, it's all things we've done before. But they just keep bubbling up in new and different ways. >> Right, but what's interesting though, is you touch on all kinds of stuff there with Kubernetes and clouds and in containers. Is a lot of it's kind of ethereal, right? The whole idea of of a cloud-based infrastructure, is that you can bring it up and bring it down as you need it. You can adjust it as you go. And literally turn it off when you don't need it. And bring it back up. And then you add to that serverless. And this kind of increasing atomization, of all the different parts of compute. Kind of an interesting thing for you guys, to try to back up as these things are created and destructed. We hear these crazy stories of, automating Kubernetes to spin up tons of these things at a time and then bring them back back down. And then I'm curious too. Within that is also the open source. kind of challenge in continuing to have evolution in open source technologies, API's, et cetera. So it is getting weirder and weirder, on a number of fronts as you guys continue to evolve with the market. >> Absolutely, and all I'll tell you, you have to think about all technologies as being on a bridge. As I remind people, we have washing machines. They work really well but washboards still exist, even though it's a technology from 18th century, or beforehand. Now, they may be used as still do exist. Now, my point in this is, people need a bridge. Most enterprises run on an amazing amount of technology, they've developed as a stack over the last 10 to 15 years. And they can't immediately rewrite that, and put it all in a cloud container. So we're actually seeing a lot of use of containers, and Kubernetes with fairly heavy application stacks. When you think about something as heavy as, all have Oracle inside of a container. You can understand that, that's a big lift for container. And it's not ephemeral at all. Then it reaches out to storage, that has that persistence value. And that's where we come in. 'Cause we want to make sure that persistent storage, is always protected. And easily available to the customer for any recovery needs. >> Is great, so I want to shift gears a little bit Tim, to talk about regulations and compliance. 'Cause, regulatory requirements drive a lot of behavior and activity, and really oftentimes, are ahead of maybe the business prerogative to do things like provide backups, provide quick and dirty, quick and easy access. Because you needed it for, a public Freedom of Information Act request. Or you need it for some type of court type of activity. So I wonder if you can kind of talk about, how the regulatory environment, continues to evolve over time. And how does that impact, what you guys are doing in the marketplace? >> Great question. The biggest place is It's affected us, is customers are starting to think about privacy. And where do I have data which relates to, personally identifying information. And that's really driven a lot, by the European regulations around GDPR. Then we're seeing the California Privacy Act come in. And a number of other states are considering legislation in this area. In some ways, it's actually been a good news story for data protection and data management. Because people are starting to say, I should identify where the data is, I should figure out where the PII is. And I should make sure, I'm actually using my backups for the right purposes. Which is something we've always believed in. We've always thought, Hey, Mr. Customer, I see you're backing up an Oracle database for 10 years. What are you going to do with it in 10 years? Are you going to install Oracle seven and reboot it? It doesn't really add up to me. So, how can you get to a true archive, for that data you really need archive? And then for your backup set, how can you keep it lean and mean. And just keep it for the length of time you actually need it? Which for many customers, could be as little as 14, 15 days, maybe six months, maybe a year. But it's often not those extreme retentions people were thinking of, when they were building their tape based infrastructure 10 years ago. >> Right, that's funny. 'Cause as you mentioned, also I'm thinking of, is big data. Right in this constant kind of conversation. In the Big Data world is they keep everything forever, with the hopes that at some point in time, there may be a different algorithm or a different kind of process, you might run on that, but you didn't think about. Right kind of scheme on read versus scheme on right. But to your point, is that necessarily something that has to be backed up, but it sounds like a lot of, kind of policy driven activity. Than to drive the software to define what to back up, what you don't back up, how you back it up, how long you back it up? And a lot of kind of business decisions as opposed to technology decisions. >> Absolutely, that's been on the back of, the price of storing a bit of data, has declined over the last 10 years. An average 15 percent year over year. For a very long time. So people have ignored the problem. But the truth is, when you're really working at scale, there's a tremendous amount of waste. And we've identified for customers, using our data analytics technology. Millions of dollars of cost savings, where they were, both had storing files on, expensive primary tier one storage. And they were backing up those same, that same bit of information every single week. Even though it hadn't changed, or hadn't been read in seven plus years, and they couldn't find an owner for the information in the company. They literally didn't know why they had it. And I think people are starting to consider that. Especially in budget constraint times. >> Right, it's so funny, right? Sometimes it's such a simple answer, a friend one time had a startup, and he was doing contract management. This is 20 years ago. And I was like, how do you manage the complexity of contracts inside software. Again 20 years ago. And he said, Jeff, that's not it at all. We just need to know like, where is the contract? who signed it and when does it expire? And they built the business, on answering simple questions like that. It's sometimes the simple stuff that's the hard stuff. I want to shift gears a little bit Tim, on what bear toss dude in the market in terms of still having appliances? I'm sure a lot of people like weight appliances. Why are we still using appliances? This is a software defined world. And everything just runs on x86 architecture. You guys still have appliances, tell us a little bit about the why. And some of the benefits of having, kind of a dedicated hardware, software piece of equipment, versus just a pure software solution that sits on anybody's box. >> That's a great question. Thanks for asking. When I think about that world, you have to understand Veritas at its core is absolutely a software company. We build software and we preserve the choice and how the customer implements. When I say we preserve choice. We obviously still support old school Unix. We certainly have enormous investment in the x86 world, both on Windows and various Linux flavors. And of course, you can run those same That same software in the cloud. And of course, you can run it inside of a virtualized infrastructure. So we always like to preserve choice. Now why did we create the appliance business, it's frankly because customers asked us to. The thing that made storing backups on disk affordable, was this technology known as deduplication. Which at its heart is just a fancy kind of compression, That's very, very good at copies of data, where there's a lot of blocks that are have been seen before. And so we don't store them if we've seen them before. We simply store the ones that are new and fresh. So from our perspective, customers said, "we want this technology." And the market really moved away, from general purpose solutions on servers to do that. Because it was very hard to build something, that could have a very high throughput, very high memory, and at the same time, could give excellent support for random access reads, when the customer actually needed to read that data. And so we created a purpose built appliances as a result. And what we discovered in the the process was, there were a lot of pieces that were actually fairly hard in the enterprise. So when a customer would describe, the purchasing process of their typical solution before appliances, they would talk about, filing tickets with the server team. Filing tickets with the storage team. Filing tickets with security team. And sometimes taking six or nine months, to get a piece of equipment ready to install the backup software on the floor. Whereas with ours, they placed an order, it showed up on the dock, as soon as it when it was in the rack, they were ready to go and working independently. Now while we have a great and thriving appliance business, we're very, very proud of, we always preserve choice at Veritas. And even though that's the business I represent, I would make sure our customers always understand, that we're interested in the best platform for the customer. So that's our basic perspective. If you want to go deeper, let me know where you have questions. (chuckles) >> Well, I'm curious on the process, when there's a fail, when there's attack, when there's ransomware, whatever. When you need to go back to your backup. What are some of the things that your approach enables, or what are kind of the typical stumbling blocks that are the hardest things to overcome. That people miss when they're planning for that. Or thinking about it. That kind of rear their ugly heads, when the time comes that, oh, I guess we need to go back to a backup version. >> Yeah, and I'll break that input into this disaster recovery or restore process. And then also the process of backup. So when you think about that disaster recovery, and I'll use ransomware as that piece of it. Because that's the real kind of disaster, when you're looking at equipment in the infrastructure, which has been wiped clean. That's a worst case scenario for most IT managers. When you think about that situation, we've built into our appliances first of all, a hardened Linux OS. Meaning we've shrank down that OS as much as we possibly could. Second, we've added role-based access protection. To make sure that you simply can't log in and perform activities which you're not privileged to perform. And then we have intrusion protection software, intrusion detection software. To ensure that even for those zero day attacks, that we may not even be aware of when we release our software, that the system is hardened. Of course, you have firewalls and STIG rules, STIG or rules are DoD standard, for hardening Linux based devices. So we've got a hardened device. And I was talking to a customer, in a different part of the world this week. Where they described having a data center, where everything had been wiped. And there's one thing left there, their NetBackup appliances. And they were then able to then take that, and use that for the restore. Because that was a real vault for their data. Now, the flipside is, that's a rare day. So that is truly a black swan event. When you think about day to day, and we're running a data protection operation, really think about speed of backup. And for us being able to take something that's neatly tuned for the hardware, the operating system, the tuning, the net backup software is all configured out of the box and ready to go. And the data protection folks, can be independently able to drive that is a great value. Because essentially, you have Lego style building blocks. Where you can order device, it always performs the same. And three years from now, you don't have to redesign it. And take your expensive IT staff and ask them to figure out what's the best solution. We've just got another one off the shelf for you, another series in the model. >> Right >> Now, as you said earlier, the world's getting weirder. It definitely is. So we'll be branching off into what kind of appliances we offer. And you'll see some announcements later, in the year where we'll be offering some reference architecture approaches, which will be a little different than what we offer today. Just to meet the customer demand that's out there. >> Yeah, that's great. I mean, 'cause as you said, it's all about customer choice. And meeting the customer where they want to meet. But before I let you go, this is pretty interesting conversation. I want to get your perspective, as someone who's been in the business, for a really long time. And as you look at opportunities around, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and you look at kind of the I'm going to steal your line about things getting weirder. And use over and over. But as they continue to get weirder and weirder, where do you see kind of the evolution is, you kind of sit back, not necessarily in the next six months or so. But where do you see growth opportunities and places you want to go? That better still out in front of you, even though you've been doing this for many, many years? >> Well, that's a great question. So this is yet another wave. And that's often how I look at it. Meaning, there's a wave of Unix. There's a wave of windows. There's wave of virtualization. And each of these technologies, brought some real shifts to our environment. I think, from my perspective, the next big wave is dealing with ransomware. And some of these compliance requirements we talked about earlier. And then I can't get away from this big data, AI piece and my son's studying computer science in college. And that's a weekly conversation for us. What's new in that front? Because I think we're going to see, a lot more technology developed there. We are just truly on the beginning of that curve. And frankly, when I think about the companies I work with, they have a tremendous amount of data. But that's really only going to increase, as they realize they can actually develop value from it. And as you mentioned, first thing once it shows up on the balance sheet, suddenly everyone's going to get very excited about that. >> Yeah, it's so funny, right? 'Cause it basically does show up on the balance sheet of Facebook, and it shows up on the balance sheet of Google. But it's just not a line item. And I keep waiting for the tipping point, to happen where that becomes, a line item on the balance sheet. Because increasingly, that is arguably, the most important asset. 0r certainly the information and learning that goes around that data. >> You're right. And frankly, it's an insurable asset at this point. You can go to a company in a number of commercial settings and get ransomware insurance, for instance. So people are definitely recognizing the value of it if they're willing to insure it. >> Right, right. All right, Tim. Well, thank you very much for stopping by. And giving us an update really interesting times in, kind of taking care of business and really the core of the business, which is the data inside the business. So, important work. And thanks for taking a few minutes. >> All right, thanks. I'll be glad to be back anytime you want me. >> Alright, He's Tim. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Reporter: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're coming to you today from our Palo Alto studios, talking about a really important topic. And that's data. And as we hear over and over and over, right data is the oil. Data is the new currency. Data is driving business decisions. Data drives AI. Data drives machine learning. Data is increasingly important. And we're still kind of waiting for it, to show up on balance sheets. Which is kind of implied in a lot of the big iterations, that we see in companies that are built on data. But one of the important things about data, is taking care of it. And we're excited to have our next guest here to talk about, some of the things you need to think about, and best practices in securing your data. Backing up your data, protecting your data. We're joined today by Tim Burlowski. He is the senior director, Product Management from Veritas. Joining us from remote. I believe you're in Minnesota. Tim, great to see you. >> Yep, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so let's just jump into it. So all we hear about is data these days. It's such an important topic, that is growing exponentially. And it's structured and it's unstructured. And it's so core to the business. And are you making database decisions? And are you getting enough data to drive your AI? And your machine learning algorithms? I mean, data is only exploding. You've been in this business for a long, a long, long time. I wonder if you can share your perspective, when you hear these things. more data is going to be created in the next 15 minutes. And wasn't the entire history of men before us? I'm making that up, but it's been quite an explosion. >> I know yeah, I know where you're coming from. And frankly, I don't even put that, in my presentation anymore. Because it's a lot like saying gravity exists, And things that you drop out, of a window will fall to the ground. Everyone's heard it. Everyone's aware of it. The numbers are just so staggering. You don't even know what to do with it. Like how many iPhones could you stack to the moon and back and then to Saturn? Doesn't make sense. But the truth is, we are seeing an explosion. Everyone knows it. We have to manage it better. Now for us, a lot of what we do, is in this data protection space. Where we want to make sure, that data is protected and always available. All of the data that's been created, and the growth in mission-critical applications. It's no longer seven to 20 mission-critical applications. It's hundreds and hundreds of mission-critical applications. Means you have to be ready, with a recent recovery if necessary. And you need to provide that data back to the consumer, as quickly as you possibly can. Because you've got people waiting on it. We've all got our apps on our phone, where we're looking at our bank account 24 seven. We don't wait until a teller appears at nine a.m anymore. It's not the world we live in. >> Right, I'm just curious if you've got some tailwinds, in terms of you're kind of, you've been in this market for a very long time. In terms of people finally realizing that their data, is really more of an asset and a liability. In the investments, to gather it, protect it, analyze it, have it ready for refresh it, If there's some problem. It's a positive investment towards, kind of revenue and strategic importance to the company, as opposed to kind of a back-office IT function, that we're kind of taking care of business because we have to. >> But that one really varies a lot by company. I see companies taking shortcuts and outsourcing, and then suddenly you'll see them in the news. And they discover that they had a major outage for a couple of days. And suddenly practices change very, very quickly. The relative comprehensive, sturdy and reliable infrastructure that people run today, sometimes lulls people into false security. And then you see a major airlines with a multi-day outage. And you go hmm, I think we missed a few steps in the process. So it sometimes takes those rude awakenings. But the companies who are really taking it seriously, and starting to practice pruning their data, examining their data for PII. So they meet various compliance regimes, and other in various states and countries. And starting to think about their backup stream, really being, how do we get a fast recovery? Instead of how do I make a copy, which I will never use again? Are really starting to drive a more efficient IT operation, when it comes to data protection. >> No, it's an interesting take, in reference to having some issue. Because we do a lot of stuff around security. Which is related to but not equal to this conversation. And one of the topics in security is that, most people have already been breached. It's just a function of how fast can you find out, and how fast can you minimize the damage? And how fast can you move on? Why are they breaching? They're breaching to get the data. So I would imagine, with this constant reading in the newspaper, of who was breached here there and everywhere, pretty much every day. That's got to be a huge driver, in terms of people kind of upping their game, and the sophistication, of the way they really think about data protection. >> It is and I'll tell you, I've had the misfortune, I would say. Of talking to customers who are in the middle of recovering, from a major ransomware malware attack. And it's a very difficult proposition. And what customers often discover is, they haven't practiced enough, they don't have enough of a DR plan present. We are certainly rising the occasion. Our products are sort of the last thing, that often stands between the customer, losing their data completely. And so we're looking at a number of technology innovations, that will enable them to store their data on immutable devices. And for the backup infrastructure, to be completely aware of that. Which we'll be announcing later this summer. Which we're very excited about. Of course, from our perspective of our appliance portfolio, we've always provided a couple of extra layers of security against intrusion detection, and intrusion prevention right out of the box. Because we know the backup infrastructure becomes this collection of the very most important data in your infrastructure. Because that's the thing you back up. And you want to restore. If there's ever any sort of manmade disaster or otherwise. >> Right. So I want to shift gears a little bit, and talk about kind of the evolution of the infrastructure kind of scene. If you will. With the rise of public clouds, with Amazon and Google and Microsoft, is sure. And then obviously, you tried into a data center. Lot of talk about HP discover, this week kind of going from edge to cloud and data center in the middle. So the environment in which these applications live, and these applications run, and where the data is, relative to those applications. Is evolved dramatically over the last, you probably have a much better time perspective than I do. Five years, 10 years. But it continues to accelerate, in this kind of Application-Centric World versus, kind of an Infrastructure Centric World. Just curious to get your take on, The kind of the challenges that presents to your company, and what you guys are trying to do to accomplish. And how do you see that continuing to evolve and get, not simpler but more complex over time? >> That is a very astute acknowledgement of what's going on in the industry. And I often call it the industry's getting weirder. I would have thought at some point, we'd sort of have Linux and Windows, and a couple of database vendors. And the truth is that database vendors exploded. And it's not just Linux anymore. It's containers. And it might be a container based on CentOS. And it might be container running in the cloud. Or it might be a simple function, like a lambda function running on nothing in AWS. And so this whole world has gotten a lot stranger. From my perspective, I think the biggest change for Veritas, has been a renewed focus on API's that we make public to customers, in ways that we can glue and stitch these systems together. Now, of course, it doesn't replace the deep integration, we do with companies like VMware, with Docker, as well as the the container ecosystem around. Open shift and some of those technologies. But from our perspective, we've had to be a little bit more prolific, in what we support. And the truth is, it's all files, it's all objects, it's all things we've done before. But they just keep bubbling up in new and different ways. >> Right, but what's interesting though, is you touch on all kinds of stuff there with Kubernetes and clouds and in containers. Is a lot of it's kind of ethereal, right? The whole idea of of a cloud-based infrastructure, is that you can bring it up and bring it down as you need it. You can adjust it as you go. And literally turn it off when you don't need it. And bring it back up. And then you add to that serverless. And this kind of increasing atomization, of all the different parts of compute. Kind of an interesting thing for you guys, to try to back up as these things are created and destructed. We hear these crazy stories of, automating Kubernetes to spin up tons of these things at a time and then bring them back back down. And then I'm curious too. Within that is also the open source. kind of challenge in continuing to have evolution in open source technologies, API's, et cetera. So it is getting weirder and weirder, on a number of fronts as you guys continue to evolve with the market. >> Absolutely, and all I'll tell you, you have to think about all technologies as being on a bridge. As I remind people, we have washing machines. They work really well but washboards still exist, even though it's a technology from 18th century, or beforehand. Now, they may be used as still do exist. Now, my point in this is, people need a bridge. Most enterprises run on an amazing amount of technology, they've developed as a stack over the last 10 to 15 years. And they can't immediately rewrite that, and put it all in a cloud container. So we're actually seeing a lot of use of containers, and Kubernetes with fairly heavy application stacks. When you think about something as heavy as, all have Oracle inside of a container. You can understand that, that's a big lift for container. And it's not ephemeral at all. Then it reaches out to storage, that has that persistence value. And that's where we come in. 'Cause we want to make sure that persistent storage, is always protected. And easily available to the customer for any recovery needs. >> Is great, so I want to shift gears a little bit Tim, to talk about regulations and compliance. 'Cause, regulatory requirements drive a lot of behavior and activity, and really oftentimes, are ahead of maybe the business prerogative to do things like provide backups, provide quick and dirty, quick and easy access. Because you needed it for, a public Freedom of Information Act request. Or you need it for some type of court type of activity. So I wonder if you can kind of talk about, how the regulatory environment, continues to evolve over time. And how does that impact, what you guys are doing in the marketplace? >> Great question. The biggest place is It's affected us, is customers are starting to think about privacy. And where do I have data which relates to, personally identifying information. And that's really driven a lot, by the European regulations around GDPR. Then we're seeing the California Privacy Act come in. And a number of other states are considering legislation in this area. In some ways, it's actually been a good news story for data protection and data management. Because people are starting to say, I should identify where the data is, I should figure out where the PII is. And I should make sure, I'm actually using my backups for the right purposes. Which is something we've always believed in. We've always thought, Hey, Mr. Customer, I see you're backing up an Oracle database for 10 years. What are you going to do with it in 10 years? Are you going to install Oracle seven and reboot it? It doesn't really add up to me. So, how can you get to a true archive, for that data you really need archive? And then for your backup set, how can you keep it lean and mean. And just keep it for the length of time you actually need it? Which for many customers, could be as little as 14, 15 days, maybe six months, maybe a year. But it's often not those extreme retentions people were thinking of, when they were building their tape based infrastructure 10 years ago. >> Right, that's funny. 'Cause as you mentioned, also I'm thinking of, is big data. Right in this constant kind of conversation. In the Big Data world is they keep everything forever, with the hopes that at some point in time, there may be a different algorithm or a different kind of process, you might run on that, but you didn't think about. Right kind of scheme on read versus scheme on right. But to your point, is that necessarily something that has to be backed up, but it sounds like a lot of, kind of policy driven activity. Than to drive the software to define what to back up, what you don't back up, how you back it up, how long you back it up? And a lot of kind of business decisions as opposed to technology decisions. >> Absolutely, that's been on the back of, the price of storing a bit of data, has declined over the last 10 years. An average 15 percent year over year. For a very long time. So people have ignored the problem. But the truth is, when you're really working at scale, there's a tremendous amount of waste. And we've identified for customers, using our data analytics technology. Millions of dollars of cost savings, where they were, both had storing files on, expensive primary tier one storage. And they were backing up those same, that same bit of information every single week. Even though it hadn't changed, or hadn't been read in seven plus years, and they couldn't find an owner for the information in the company. They literally didn't know why they had it. And I think people are starting to consider that. Especially in budget constraint times. >> Right, it's so funny, right? Sometimes it's such a simple answer, a friend one time had a startup, and he was doing contract management. This is 20 years ago. And I was like, how do you manage the complexity of contracts inside software. Again 20 years ago. And he said, Jeff, that's not it at all. We just need to know like, where is the contract? who signed it and when does it expire? And they built the business, on answering simple questions like that. It's sometimes the simple stuff that's the hard stuff. I want to shift gears a little bit Tim, on what bear toss dude in the market in terms of still having appliances? I'm sure a lot of people like weight appliances. Why are we still using appliances? This is a software defined world. And everything just runs on x86 architecture. You guys still have appliances, tell us a little bit about the why. And some of the benefits of having, kind of a dedicated hardware, software piece of equipment, versus just a pure software solution that sits on anybody's box. >> That's a great question. Thanks for asking. When I think about that world, you have to understand Veritas at its core is absolutely a software company. We build software and we preserve the choice and how the customer implements. When I say we preserve choice. We obviously still support old school Unix. We certainly have enormous investment in the x86 world, both on Windows and various Linux flavors. And of course, you can run those same That same software in the cloud. And of course, you can run it inside of a virtualized infrastructure. So we always like to preserve choice. Now why did we create the appliance business, it's frankly because customers asked us to. The thing that made storing backups on disk affordable, was this technology known as deduplication. Which at its heart is just a fancy kind of compression, That's very, very good at copies of data, where there's a lot of blocks that are have been seen before. And so we don't store them if we've seen them before. We simply store the ones that are new and fresh. So from our perspective, customers said, "we want this technology." And the market really moved away, from general purpose solutions on servers to do that. Because it was very hard to build something, that could have a very high throughput, very high memory, and at the same time, could give excellent support for random access reads, when the customer actually needed to read that data. And so we created a purpose built appliances as a result. And what we discovered in the the process was, there were a lot of pieces that were actually fairly hard in the enterprise. So when a customer would describe, the purchasing process of their typical solution before appliances, they would talk about, filing tickets with the server team. Filing tickets with the storage team. Filing tickets with security team. And sometimes taking six or nine months, to get a piece of equipment ready to install the backup software on the floor. Whereas with ours, they placed an order, it showed up on the dock, as soon as it when it was in the rack, they were ready to go and working independently. Now while we have a great and thriving appliance business, we're very, very proud of, we always preserve choice at Veritas. And even though that's the business I represent, I would make sure our customers always understand, that we're interested in the best platform for the customer. So that's our basic perspective. If you want to go deeper, let me know where you have questions. (chuckles) >> Well, I'm curious on the process, when there's a fail, when there's attack, when there's ransomware, whatever. When you need to go back to your backup. What are some of the things that your approach enables, or what are kind of the typical stumbling blocks that are the hardest things to overcome. That people miss when they're planning for that. Or thinking about it. That kind of rear their ugly heads, when the time comes that, oh, I guess we need to go back to a backup version. >> Yeah, and I'll break that input into this disaster recovery or restore process. And then also the process of backup. So when you think about that disaster recovery, and I'll use ransomware as that piece of it. Because that's the real kind of disaster, when you're looking at equipment in the infrastructure, which has been wiped clean. That's a worst case scenario for most IT managers. When you think about that situation, we've built into our appliances first of all, a hardened Linux OS. Meaning we've shrank down that OS as much as we possibly could. Second, we've added role-based access protection. To make sure that you simply can't log in and perform activities which you're not privileged to perform. And then we have intrusion protection software, intrusion detection software. To ensure that even for those zero day attacks, that we may not even be aware of when we release our software, that the system is hardened. Of course, you have firewalls and STIG rules, STIG or rules are DoD standard, for hardening Linux based devices. So we've got a hardened device. And I was talking to a customer, in a different part of the world this week. Where they described having a data center, where everything had been wiped. And there's one thing left there, their NetBackup appliances. And they were then able to then take that, and use that for the restore. Because that was a real vault for their data. Now, the flipside is, that's a rare day. So that is truly a black swan event. When you think about day to day, and we're running a data protection operation, really think about speed of backup. And for us being able to take something that's neatly tuned for the hardware, the operating system, the tuning, the net backup software is all configured out of the box and ready to go. And the data protection folks, can be independently able to drive that is a great value. Because essentially, you have Lego style building blocks. Where you can order device, it always performs the same. And three years from now, you don't have to redesign it. And take your expensive IT staff and ask them to figure out what's the best solution. We've just got another one off the shelf for you, another series in the model. >> Right >> Now, as you said earlier, the world's getting weirder. It definitely is. So we'll be branching off into what kind of appliances we offer. And you'll see some announcements later, in the year where we'll be offering some reference architecture approaches, which will be a little different than what we offer today. Just to meet the customer demand that's out there. >> Yeah, that's great. I mean, 'cause as you said, it's all about customer choice. And meeting the customer where they want to meet. But before I let you go, this is pretty interesting conversation. I want to get your perspective, as someone who's been in the business, for a really long time. And as you look at opportunities around, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and you look at kind of the I'm going to steal your line about things getting weirder. And use over and over. But as they continue to get weirder and weirder, where do you see kind of the evolution is, you kind of sit back, not necessarily in the next six months or so. But where do you see growth opportunities and places you want to go? That better still out in front of you, even though you've been doing this for many, many years? >> Well, that's a great question. So this is yet another wave. And that's often how I look at it. Meaning, there's a wave of Unix. There's a wave of windows. There's wave of virtualization. And each of these technologies, brought some real shifts to our environment. I think, from my perspective, the next big wave is dealing with ransomware. And some of these compliance requirements we talked about earlier. And then I can't get away from this big data, AI piece and my son's studying computer science in college. And that's a weekly conversation for us. What's new in that front? Because I think we're going to see, a lot more technology developed there. We are just truly on the beginning of that curve. And frankly, when I think about the companies I work with, they have a tremendous amount of data. But that's really only going to increase, as they realize they can actually develop value from it. And as you mentioned, first thing once it shows up on the balance sheet, suddenly everyone's going to get very excited about that. >> Yeah, it's so funny, right? 'Cause it basically does show up on the balance sheet of Facebook, and it shows up on the balance sheet of Google. But it's just not a line item. And I keep waiting for the tipping point, to happen where that becomes, a line item on the balance sheet. Because increasingly, that is arguably, the most important asset. 0r certainly the information and learning that goes around that data. >> You're right. And frankly, it's an insurable asset at this point. You can go to a company in a number of commercial settings and get ransomware insurance, for instance. So people are definitely recognizing the value of it if they're willing to insure it. >> Right, right. All right, Tim. Well, thank you very much for stopping by. And giving us an update really interesting times in, kind of taking care of business and really the core of the business, which is the data inside the business. So, important work. And thanks for taking a few minutes. >> All right, thanks. I'll be glad to be back anytime you want me. >> Alright, He's Tim. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)