>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans it's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2017 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to The Big Easy everybody this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is our first day of coverage of VeeamON 2017. We'll be here for two days. Hamman Ferreira is here, he's the CTO of BankservAfrica from South Africa, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thank you gentlemen always a pleasure to be here. >> So, quite a tour for you, you've been over here for awhile, checking out a few different, technology events, and what do you think of VeeamON? >> Amazing experience, It's always great connecting with the partners, connecting with the vendors, and with my fellow customers. So it's only one of us that can tell war stories, and embarrass to one another, so it's always great connecting with people that knows what you're going through. >> So tell us about your organization, the bank, what you guys are focused on. >> Yeah so Bankserv is a mutual that aligns with South Africa, a payments clearing house. So we get owned by the banks, and we deliver services back into the banks. So therefore, as you guys would note, the payments industry is going through a bit of a modernization exercise. So, long gone the traditional cash and check it's now all the different digital channels, and with that also all the mobile wallets coming into play. That necessitated us to have a re-look at the architectures. What is the new always on service levels all about and how do I build architecture that will help me exceed my service levels to the customers? For the past year, I'm in the job for about a year now, we've been going through infrastructure refresh program looking at every layer of a technology stack, and they're going from a new converged architecture right through the Vmworld, of Linux, Microsoft, Oracle, SQL and then finally on top, the Veeam product. So it gives me that great opportunity to protect data. Data is the new currency, I suppose. And we all got to make sure that's always available, it's protected, data, intelligence is in place, so before the whole product suite actually fits quite nicely into providing that 24/7/365 availability. >> So the big driver in your business, is the question senior execs at banks always ask is do people need banks? So that's a question that you've got to ask. You're serving the banks, mobile, and the whole, like you say, digital payments, block chain is a potentially a very disruptive force. So how does that affect, and digital is data, we say that a million times on theCUBE. So how does that affect how you protect data, not only the volume, but just the. >> Yeah, and what we see is different channels coming on inside Africa, for instance, we got like 150 odd mobile wallets. How do I, how do I bolt the inter-operability between them that you can actually use your bank's wallet with another bank in the region, or anywhere globally? How do I connect to ApplePay and all of those sort of things? So it necessitated us re-looking at the total architectural stack. Going through the whole modernization of infrastructure, you build it out for resiliency, you build it out for that high availability, you make sure that it is covered from every single angle, and then you partner with the right guy. So I've mentioned EMC, Oracle, VMware, and then Veeam to make sure that I can provide the right information, to the right customer, at the right time. Should something go wrong then I have got that safe back door. It's almost like Veeam has transformed the old traditional backup world, where it was always that traditional grudge purchase that's almost like insurance policies, someday I might need you. I think with their new stack, they are now moving into the full architecture they are now part of plan A and no longer plan B. It's almost taking disaster recovery and turning into business continuity and that's really what we wanted. >> Infrastructure has always been critical for financial services companies, what's been really interesting to watch, you talk about digital transformation. Many of the companies I talk to, they're developers, they're becoming software companies themselves and that puts a whole different kind of stress and strain on the IT people. Can you give us a little bit of color on that? What you've been seeing from the business transforming are you a software company now? >> Well I think my CEO would have a problem if I call ourselves a technology company. >> Stu: We understand the core business. >> It is in a sense, it's that solution making sure the product, the end service that you sell goes to the right channels and for that we have to think differently about how we develop, what we develop what we partner in with people and what do I take back to the technology shop and say develop this one myself. >> Talk a little bit about how you approach architecture and how that's changing. And then I'm interested in where data protection fits in. I infer from your title that it's more than data protection and availability. Describe your philosophy of architecture and how you spend your time thinking about how to support this digital transformation. >> Well first of all you've got to understand customer needs. So what is it that you need to update? And how do you actually contract in this new digital world. We have a new generation always on, always available, always there, and once you understand what you are obliged to do, you can also then take that input into designing the architecture, to getting the infrastructure and the services build out that enables you to succeed in those ways. That's always the point for the customer. And understand that to pick the right technology solution the right technology partners and I was fortunate in the South African market, got great support from vendors, but also the resellers. I've got a partner at Silicon Sky in South Africa that came in, rolled it out for me at a remarkable pace. Once you understand the target, or that you're going to we all know with payments, it's now changing new ISIS standards, it's mortgage data so it's more storage, more dependent on actually managing so if you don't pick the right tools right now, then that confirmation will actually be more difficult in a couple years time. That is the reason why we selected it and why we built, and we almost chose to build a new target state infrastructure so that we can migrate onto it instead of going back in fixing some of the legacy stuff. You can imagine some of the check processing systems, EFD systems, it's all been around for 15-25 years all of those sort of things. It' time that we re-look at it, quicker, faster, better and simpler. >> One of the big things we're hearing from Veeam here is that it's not just about virtualized environments they have virtual, they have physical, they're supporting SaaS applications and public cloud. How does cloud fit into your strategy, do you use public cloud as part of your technology stack? >> I don't at the moment but being owned by the banks and sitting on a massive data center and owning the networks into the banks. I'm looking at us forming my business into a financial services cloud business. Our whole company philosophy is building mutual digital infrastructure to the benefit of financial services. Looking here and having a lot of chats with partners about how do I enable that secure cloud for financial services work in my region. >> And you don't envision that will be a public cloud is that right, it would be your cloud? >> Sort of all the benefits of a public cloud, in a protected data center but they already own the shares in. I am a mutual, therefore there's no profit objective so I think I can do things at a bit of a better price point, a better solution point. You know the banking services are always afraid of regulations so a personal information protection, PCI all of those sorts of things. Being certified in that, think I can transform it and give them the same quality of service partnering up with some of the big brand. >> High degrees of automation to succeed at that vision. What does that mean? You just laid out that vision of a cloud that serves your constituents, other banks. What does that mean for data protection? How would you re-architect your data protection strategy to accommodate them? >> From all the different angles. For picking the right database technology picking up the right transport layers into it that makes it efficient, but makes it real-time. Once it's in aa structured format, how do I control that, the base. So how does for replication work how does for backup work so one of the big advantages for me in the Veeam world is that my backup window is quite drastically decreased. So that gives me just that opportunity to do more and making new strides so I can be much more proactive in all the housekeeping. Earlier this week we had the ransomware exercise now instead of doing backups, I can make sure that the patch layer was 100% installed and that sort of thing. It doesn't just come with the data protection of I guarantee you that the information will be there. I took on the environment that the still type ETL all of those things off site storage, and the auditor always on your case about when last have you tested the backup and all those good things. And this solution suite gives me the opportunity to make sure that our last line of defense is now solid, it's tested, it's regularly tested and I know that I can provide the right data, to the right person, at the right time. >> Ransomware obviously is on everybody's mind you know the last couple of weeks. We don't have to ask if security is a top priority obviously it must be, but how has it changed in the last you know year or two in your environment? >> It's layer, upon layer, upon layer, and that's the only that one can do is just to build it out like an onion make sure there's another layer served with it From the tightest encryption to all the different ones. I spend about 37% of my technology budget just on IT security products. >> You said 37%? >> 37% yeah, so that gives us, It is my job to be the trusted utility I'm only the trusted utility, of course I am the trusted So I've got to make sure that I protect data and customer information to the absolute. >> Does that 37% excluding staff or that include staff? >> That includes for staffing. >> It does, okay, so that's a full budget view. >> Yes. >> That's a big number. >> That is a big number but. >> It's gone up in the past couple of years? >> If I tell you that I secure your critical information should you demand me to make sure that it's actually protected at the IP levels and layers and I protect it not only from external but also from my internal guys of making sure the database access to the data the developers all of those, masking the right information so it's the only chance that you've got to protect yourself is to layer up and to make sure that there's defense on defense making sure that you've got all the right management tools in place to make sure that one of the nicest feature sets that I saw now is that Veeam now also spots some trends or irregular traffic patterns on my network. It will form another layer on top of it. >> There's obviously, a company like Veeam's in a position to provide analytics on anomalous, because you're backing up changed data continuously and presumably if somebody's trying to do some nefarious things you could see some anomalies in there right. >> Absolutely, and if I can validate that out of two or three different ways then make sure that I've got all the basics in place then I sleep a bit aasier at night. >> Alright, we'll leave it there. Hamman thanks very much for coming into theCUBE it's good to meet you. Thank you enjoyed it. >> All right, keep it right there everybody Stu and I will be right back. We're live from VeeamON in New Orleans, right back.