>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's theCube. Covering VeeamOn 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back, Mahmoud Yassin is here, he's the Data Center Manager of the National Bank of Abu Dhabi. >> Good to see you. >> Nice to meet you. >> I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman, this is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. So, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you. >> Tell us about VeeamOn, what's your experience been like so far? >> Actually it is not the first time for me, I was here in the last few years. It's a very nice experience, mix it up with all IT companies, listening to people, leaders like Cisco, VMWare, Amazon, understanding what is the technology, how the market is moving, this is a great experience, great experience. >> Tell us about what's going on in the banking industry in your world in terms of the challenges and in particular, what's happening with the need for availability and uptime. >> I think you heard about what's happening last two days about Crayon, all the mobiles of all the IT people never stopped about the people and the need for restoring and restoring the machine cause of the people hit by crime virus or malware that encrypted the whole machine and you need to restore the data. This is happening all the time, there's not only banks in there, across different sections, three four days back, UK, the whole healthcare sector was stopped due to cyber attacks so availability and security has become so tight and of course banking means money, money is a big target for cyber-criminals. So we are caring about availability much much much more than before, it's not a matter of just fulfilling the checkbox and like what we have done in many years in IT, backup was a checkbox, just a checkbox, it's not anymore , no luxury to have the backup as a checkbox anymore. >> Checkbox meaning, okay I have-- >> I'm compliant, I have backup. >> We did it, we don't know if it failed or not but we did the backup. >> We did the backup, we tick it, we have the backup, we have the backup process, everything is okay. But have you never restored, restore in time, ensure the data availability is okay. How much data for how long? Regulation became as well very tough for the financial sector so you look at countries now that are asking for 15 to 20 years of data retention. So imagine your backups you need to maintain, multimedia, media is not sufficient anymore. Which tape drives will be sufficient for 15 to 20 years? After ten years, the tape will be rotten, it will not work, it will not be readable in the machine. And the data side as well is becoming a challenge so you need to offload the data to a desk, you need to offload the data to somewhere else that you ensure your availability and you need to ensure all that you can restore this data back. >> It's interesting you know, in IT we've known ransomware as something that's been discussed for a while, but now all of your customers know what it is. >> All of the customers, every one of them. >> So does that change the role? >> It's hitting the kids in the school, it's hitting everyone. >> You know, Dave's been talking for the last year that security has been like a board level discussion. Now it's your users, how much do your end users start coming and wanting to understand how secure money is. >> A lot, a lot. >> And how does that impact your role in IT? >> A lot, actually National Bank for Abu Dhabi security is one of our label, one of the safest banks, one of the 50 safest banks, this is one of our label. And we take security, we are the first customer in the Middle East to implement the RSA talking for login for online banking. This was eight years back. >> What about, I got to ask you, I follow a little bit of the banking executives and see what they're talking about and blockchain comes up a lot. This notion of trust between two parties and so forth. Do you see that as a mega-trend, is it something that's sort of an interesting trend? I mean what're your thoughts on that? >> It is the future, this is the future. >> It's the future? >> This is the future of the money. Money will be part to part with encryption and with the mechanism to get keys. And this is, people who don't want, this is where the money is moving in. >> So what happens to-- >> Actually what blocks this from happening on a wider scale is it's still, the regulation is not enough around this area, there is not enough regulation, so good money can mix with bad money and to be untraceables, he says this is one of the things. So people are starting putting a certain regulation across to start regulating, it will take time but it will be there. >> So blockchain is interesting, banking executives saying it's the future because everybody says oh blockchain's going to disrupt the banks but what I'm hearing from you is it's both, maybe it's a threat but it's also an opportunity because right now it's all done in secret, and so there needs to be. >> It's not in secret, it's done in Swift, the only platform for exchanging money worldwide is Swift. And sooner or later this will be changing, though some people are blockers, some people are, but it will be changing and the banks will realize this, adapt to blockchain technology. There's some legal services for blockchain and sooner you'll find central banks across the whole worldwide are starting regulating the blockchain. >> Yeah, okay it's very interesting because everybody says it's such a disruptive force which it is. >> It is a disruptive force. >> But it's also an, as you say, an opportunity. Where does Veeam fit with your availability strategy? >> It is in the center of our availability strategy, >> Really? >> Veeam is, I'm running my data centers and 90% of my data center is virtualized. So Veeam is running the whole virtual world in my data center, the 10% is running on traditional backup solution, which is, still we can't get rid of because you know in banking you have a critical system that measures 20 to 80 so you have running 80% of your system in virtual but actually the core system is the 20% so this is still not virtualized. Your core banking legacy application and some other stuff, so you have still to take the back up in traditional ways. And we mix both together, we mix back up data backing up the information, back up the virtual environment, this is very important for me. >> Dave: And you have a service catalog essentially? >> Mahmoud: We have service catalog for restore. >> For your data protection services right? >> For data protection of course. >> And what, like bronze, silver, gold levels or is it more granular than that or less granular? >> We have more, actually, in discussion with business we all were trying to meet the business requirements. So the most important for business in the banking section is the availability of the communication, mailboxes, availability of the critical detail in the databases. This is the things that we are taking care of. And Veeam has done a lot of development over the time, I'm first customer for Veeam from the Middle East by the way. >> Really? >> Yes. (laughter) >> Pioneer. (laughter) >> We are pioneer, and we've done it after trying them extensively in our environment and we decided that this is the best solution this time to go for virtual environment. It was extensive evaluation done across multiple vendor and we select them. >> And did that give you a competitive advantage? >> Of course, of course. >> How so? >> The ability to restore faster, the ability to do uptime faster, the ability to recover and ensure your back up is secure. This is something very valuable. >> Some of the other customers we've spoken to today have said that the announcements were meeting some of the wishlist that they have. Anything jump out at you with the announcements made so far? Things on your list that they-- >> Actually the continuous application is a very good feature. >> In the CDP, yeah. >> Yeah. It is one of the most important features we used as a traditional application of Vim backup. Last year, to move my data center from place to place, we were hosted somewhere and we moved the data center, the whole data center. It is good, but it was taking time, so continuous application will give you the availability of all those, just divert your backup somewhere and you'll be up and running. This is a very important feature. >> Anything that is on your wishlist that they haven't gotten to yet or things that you're looking for? >> I see, I see, Veeam should more personal devices, we are talking about IoT, internet of things, bring your own devices to work, so we should go more backing up the usual details on mobiles on at least the corporate one on the corporate bubble like Citrix, like whatever good solution, whatever solution is used. You can backing up design, backup solution for this, for end users this will be a huge thing. This will be, and part of the security of the organization cause you need all those to ensure if you add device of one employee you can restore this data back and ensure this data is restorable. >> This is the pain point for you today. >> It is. >> And it's going to get worse. I'll give you the last word, things have been exciting you at the show or conversations that you've had. >> No actually the keynote speech today was amazing, especially when you're understanding the direction of big companies like Cisco, VMWare, this is what's very valuable, very valuable. >> Excellent, well listen, thanks very much for coming we really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back rapid fire from VeeamOn 2017, be right back. (funky music) (tense music)