(gentle upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Connections 21. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be hosting the program today. I want to start with a bit of an assessment on the keynotes that we heard this morning, but before I get into that, I want to set the framework for thinking about Commvault as a company. This company has been around for a long time, since the late 1980s, but really came into prominence in the client server era and it has ridden numerous waves, including network backup and recovery, data management, and now cloud data services. It's a company with more than $700 million in revenue and a market value of nearly $3 billion. Since coming on as CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani has embarked on moving the company towards a subscription model, focusing on optionality for on premises, hybrid and cloud workloads. It's launch of metallic and data management as a service are two components that underpin the strategy. At his keynote earlier today, Mirchandani drew on his experience as both a former CIO and current CEO roles to connect with his audience. His major themes hit on data, the value of data, and the imperative to get control of your data. Of course, data protection has become a fundamental component of digital transformations. For years, data protection was an afterthought or a bolt on, but today, organizations are forced to think about their digital stacks in their entirety, which means they have to build resilience into their platforms from the start. Mirchandani said that if we embrace, manage, and properly protect data, it will become the defining disruptive difference for an organization. But he talked about the gap between what the business wants to do and what the technology teams are actually equipped to do and when it comes to data, I couldn't agree more. He called this the business integrity gap and I'll come back to that. He also put out some fun facts and I'll share those here. According to IDC, 64 zettabytes of data was created and replicated in 2020. That's the equivalent of 2 trillion 4K movies. That's a lot of data. Gardner says by 2025, 85% of business will be delivered through SAS applications. Sophos, the security firm, estimates that the average cost of a ransomware attack is approaching nearly $2 million. The security company Proofpoint did a survey and 64% of surveyed CSOs felt that they were at risk of a material cyber attack in the next 12 months. I'm surprised that number was so, so low. I think the other 36% are busy responding to a cyber attack. Coming back to Sanjay's business integrity gap. Here's how I see it. Data by its very nature is distributed, decentralized, and it's becoming more so with hybrid connections, multicloud installations, and edge use cases. This is only going to accelerate in the future. As such, organizations need to rethink their approaches to getting value from data. Instead of building monolithic data architectures and hyper-specialized technical data teams, organizations are beginning to empower lines of business and domain owners to take end-to-end responsibility for data ownership. The underlying technology platform is becoming an operational detail that serves the data owners, where data protection and governance is computationally automated in a federated model. So the policy is centralized, but the implementation of that policy is done by software. This means that data governance, security, privacy, access, and policy are all adjudicated wherever possible by software and our automated, irrespective of physical location. Data silos are not just a technology problem. They're a symptom of flawed organizational constructs, steeped in the notion that highly technical data specialists and centralized teams should be the stewards of the data and serve multiple lines of business simultaneously, without proper business context. Now, this is changing. Data is being used to create a new class of products and services that can be directly or indirectly monetized, or drive other value, for instance, like saving lives. It's about the organizational mission. Now in this sense, data is undergoing a renaissance, where the responsibility for end-to-end data ownership is being distributed and decentralized, where highly specialized technical teams are becoming enablers for generalists that reside within the lines of business, i.e., those who are building data products and services. This is not shadow IT. It's decentralized management with federated governance. Now, by rethinking the data management paradigm, the responsibility for good data protection policy transcends technical teams and becomes a priority for the entire organization. To that end, Commvault laid out its strategy to deliver a comprehensive set of intelligent data services, spanning data protection, security, compliance, governance, data transformation, and data insights. In my view, a huge part of Commvault's strategy lies in automation. That's a key ingredient of cloud and any cloud strategy. In other words, supporting cloud native and cloud-like data management capabilities that can be programmatically deployed, secured, managed, and governed, and applied across an organization's sprawling data empire. The world of enterprise technology is complex and the winning technology companies are going to be those that can abstract the underlying complexity and assist organizations to implement sound data management practices, irrespective of data location, in the most efficient way. So as you hear the stories and examples here at Commvault Connections, you can decide for yourself if the company is on the right track and if what you hear aligns with your digital business skill goals. So let's now get a practitioner's perspective and hear how the CSO is thinking about data protection. Up next is Dave Martin, Chief Information Security Officer at ADP. You're watching theCUBE. (gentle upbeat music)