>>Mhm. Mhm. >>We're here with the Cube covering Calm Vault Connections 21. We're gonna look at the data protection space and how cloud computing has advanced the way we think about backup recovery and protecting our most critical data. Ranga Rajagopalan, who is the vice president of products at Con vault and Stephen Orban, who's the General manager of AWS marketplace and control services gents. Welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Thank you. Always A pleasure to see you here >>steve. Thanks for having us. Very >>welcome, Stephen, let's start with you. Look the cloud has become a staple of digital infrastructure. I don't know where we'd be right now without being able to access enterprise services I. T. Services remotely. Um But specifically how our customers looking at backup and recovery in the cloud, is it a kind of a replacement for existing strategies? Is it another layer of protection? How are they thinking about that? >>Yeah. Great question. David again, thank thanks for having me. And I think you know, look if you look back to 15 years ago when the founders of AWS had the hypothesis that many enterprises governments and developers we're gonna want access to on demand pay as you go I. T. Resources in the cloud. Uh None of us would have been able to predict that it would have Matured and um you know become the staple that it has today over the last 15 years. But the reality is that a lot of these enterprise customers, many of whom have been doing their own IT infrastructure for the last 10, 20 or multiple decades do have to kind of figure out how they deal with the change management of moving to the cloud. And while a lot of our customers um will initially come to us because they're looking to save money or costs, almost all of them decided to stay and go big because of the speed at which they are able to innovate on behalf of their customers and when it comes to storage and backup, that just plays right into where they're headed. And there's a variety of different techniques that customers use, whether it be, you know, a lift and shift for a particular set of applications or a data center where they do very much. Look at how can they replace the backup and recovery that they have on premises in the cloud using solutions like, but we're partnering with console to do or completely reimagining their architecture for net new developments that they can really move quickly for their customers. Um and and completely developing something brand new, where it is really a, you know, a brand new replacement and innovation for for for what they've done in the past. >>Great, thank you, Stephen Rachael, I want to ask you about the d were digital. Look, if you're not a digital business today, you're basically out of business. So, my question to you is how have you seen customers change the way they think about data protection during what I call the forced March to digital over the last 18, 19 months or customers, you know, thinking about data protection differently today >>definitely Dave and and thank you for having me and steven. Pleasure to join you on this cube interview first going back to stevens comments can't agree more. Almost every business that we talked with today has a cloud first strategy, a cloud transformation mandate and you know, the reality is back to your digital comment. There are many different paths to the hybrid multi cloud and different customers. You know, there are different parts of the journey. So I still was saying most often customers at least in the data protection perspective start the conversation by thinking here have all these tips. Can I start using cloud as my air gap long term retention target and before they realized they start moving their workloads into the cloud and none of the backup and record yesterday's are going to change. So you need to continue protecting the clothes, which is where the cloud native data protection comes in and then they start innovating around er, can I use cloud as media sites so that you know, I don't need to meet in the other side. So this year is all around us. Cloud transformation is all around us and and the real essence of this partnership between AWS and calm vault is essentially to dr and simplify all the paths to the club regardless of whether you're going to use it as a storage started or you know, your production data center, all your dear disaster recovery site. >>Yeah, it really is about providing that optionality for customers. I talked to a lot of customers and said, hey, our business resilience strategy was really too focused on D. R. I've talked to all the customers at the other end of the spectrum said we don't even have a D. R. Strategy now, we're using the cloud for that. So it's really all over the map and you want that optionality. So steven and then go ahead. >>Please, ransomware plays a big role in many of these considerations that greatly. It's unfortunately not a question of whether you're going to be hit by ransomware, it's almost we can like, what do you do when you're hit by ransomware and the ability to use the clothes scaled immediately, bring up the resources, use the cloud backups has become a very popular choice simply because of the speed with which you can bring the business back to normal our patients. The agility and the power that cloud brings to the table. >>Yeah, ransomware is scary. You don't, you don't even need a high school diploma to be a ransomware ist you can just go on the dark web and by ransomware as a service and do bad things and hopefully you'll end up in jail. Uh Stephen we know about the success of the AWS marketplace, uh you guys are partnering here. I'm interested in how that partnership, you know, kind of where it started and how it's evolving. >>Yeah, happy to highlight on that. So, look when >>we when we started >>Aws or when the founders of aws started aws, as I said 15 years ago we we realized very early on that while we were going to be able to provide a number of tools for customers to have on demand access to compute storage, networking databases that many, particularly enterprise and government government customers still use a wide range of tools and solutions from hundreds, if not in some cases thousands of different partners. I mean I talked to enterprises who literally use thousands of of different vendors to help them deliver their solutions for their customers. So almost 10 years ago, we're almost at our 10 year anniversary for AWS marketplace, we launched the first substantiation of AWS marketplace which allowed builders and customers to find try buy and then deploy third party software solutions running on amazon machine instances also noticed as armies natively right in their AWS and cloud accounts to complement what they were doing in the cloud. And over the last nearly 10 years we've evolved quite a bit to the point where we support software and multiple different packaging types, whether it be amazon machine instances, containers, machine learning models and of course SAS and the rise of software as a service. So customers don't have to manage the software themselves. But we also support data products through the AWS Data exchange and professional services for customers who want to get services to help them integrate the software into their environments. And we now do that across a wide range of procurement options. So what used to be pay as you go amazon machine instances now includes multiple different ways to contract directly, customer can do that directly with the vendor with their channel partner or using kind of our public e commerce capabilities. And we're super excited, um, over the last couple of months we've been partnering with calm vault to get their industry leading backup and recovery solutions listed on AWS marketplace, which is available for our collective customers now. So not only do they have access to convulse awesome solutions to help them protect against ransomware as we talked about and to manage their backup and recovery environments, but they can find and deploy that directly in one click right into their AWS accounts and consolidate their building relationship right on the AWS and voice. And it's been awesome to work with with Rhonda and the product teams and convo to really, um, expose those capabilities where converts using a lot of different AWS services to provide a really great native experience for our collective customers as they migrate to the cloud. >>Yeah, the marketplace has been amazing. We've watched it evolve over the past decade and, and, and it's a, it's a key characteristic of everybody has a cloud today. We're a cloud to butt marketplaces unique uh, in that it's the power of the ecosystem versus the resources of one and Ringo. I wonder from, from your perspective, if you could talk about the partnership with AWS from your view and then specifically you've got some hard news, I wonder if you could talk about that as well. >>Absolute. So the partnership has been extended for more than 12 years. Right. So aws and Commonwealth have been bringing together solutions that help customers solve the data management challenges and everything that we've been doing has been driven by the customer demand that we seek. Right customers are moving their workloads in the cloud. They're finding new ways of deploying their workloads and protecting them. Um, you know, earlier we introduced cloud native integration with the EBS API which has driven almost 70% performance improvements in backup and restores. And when you look at huge customers like coca cola who have standardized on AWS um, combo. That is the scale that they want to operate in. You manage around 1 50,000 snapshots 1200 ec, two instances across six regions. But with just one resource dedicated for the data management strategy. Right? So that's where the real built in integration comes into play and we've been extending it to make use of the cloud efficiencies like our management and auto scale and so on. Another aspect is our commitment to a radically simple customer experience and that's, you know, I'm sure Stephen would agree it's a big month for at AWS as well. That's really together with the customer demand which brought us together to introduce com ball into the AWS marketplace exactly the way Stephen described it. Now the heart announcement is coming back up and recovery is available in native this marketplace. So the exact four steps that Stephen mentioned, find, try buy and deploy everything simplified through the marketplace So that our aws customers can start using far more back of software in less than 20 minutes. A 60 year trial version is included in the product through marketplace and you know, it's a single click buy, we use the cloud formation templates to deploy. So it becomes a super simple approach to protect the AWS workloads and we protect a lot of them. Starting from easy to rds dynamodb document DB um, you know, the containers, the list just keeps going on. So it becomes a very natural extension for our customers to make it super simple to start using convert data protection for the w >>well the con vault stack is very robust. You have extremely mature stack. I want, I'm curious as to how this sort of came about and it had to be customer driven. I'm sure where your customers saying, hey, we're moving to the cloud, we had a lot of workloads in the cloud, we're calm vault customer. That intersection between calm vault and AWS customers. So again, I presume this was customer driven. but maybe you can give us a little insight and add some color to that. >>Everything in this collaboration has been customer driven. We were earlier talking about the multiple paths to chlorine vapor example and still might probably add more color from his own experience at our jones. But I'll bring it to reference Parsons who's a civil engineering leader. They started with the cloud first mandate saying we need to start moving all our backups to the cloud but we have wanted that bad actors might find it easy to go and access the backups edible is um, Conwell came together with the security features and com well brought in its own authorization controls and now we have moved more than 14 petabytes of backup data into the club and it's so robust that not even the backup administrator and go and touch the backups without multiple levels of authorization. Right. So the customer needs, whether it is from a security perspective performance perspective or in this case from a simplicity perspective is really what is driving this. And and the need came exactly like that. There are many customers who have no standardized on it because they want to find everything through the AWS marketplace. They want to use their existing, you know, the AWS contracts and also bring data strategy as part of that so that that's the real um, driver behind this. Um, Stephen and I hope actually announced some of the customers that I actively started using it. You know, many notable customers have been behind this uh, innovation, don't even, I don't know, I wanted to add more to that. >>I would just, I would, I would just add Dave, you know, look if I look back before I joined a W S seven years ago, I was the C I O at dow jones and I was leading a a fairly big cloud migration there over a number of years. And one of the impetus is for us moving to the cloud in the first place was when Hurricane Sandy hit, we had a real disaster recovery scenario in one of our New Jersey data centers um, and we had to act pretty quickly convert was, was part of that solution. And I remember very clearly Even back then, back in 2013, they're being options available to help us accelerate are moved to the cloud and just to reiterate some of the stuff that Rhonda was talking about consoles, done a great job over the last more than a decade, taking features from things like EBS and S three and EC two and some of our networking capabilities and embedding them directly into their services so that customers are able to more quickly move their backup and recovery workloads to the cloud. So each and every one of those features was as a result of, I'm sure combo working backwards from their customer needs just as we do at >>AWS >>and we're super excited to take that to the next level to give customers the option to then also by that right on their AWS invoice on AWS marketplace. >>Yeah, I mean, we're gonna have to leave it there steven, you've mentioned several times the sort of the early days of back then we were talking about gigabytes and terabytes and now we're talking about petabytes and beyond. Guys. Thanks so much. I really appreciate your time and sharing the news with us. >>Dave. Thanks for having us. >>All right. Keep it right there more from combat connections. 21. You're watching the >>cube. Mm hmm.

(Techno music plays in intro) >> We're here with theCUBE covering Commvault Connections 21. And we're going to look at the data protection space and how cloud computing has advanced the way we think about backup, recovery and protecting our most critical data. Ranga Rajagopalan who is the Vice President of products at Commvault, and Stephen Orban who's the General Manager of AWS Marketplace & Control Services. Gents! Welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thank you, always a pleasure to see you Dave. >> Dave, thanks for having us. Great to be here. >> You're very welcome. Stephen, let's start with you. Look, the cloud has become a staple of digital infrastructure. I don't know where we'd be right now without being able to access enterprise services, IT services remotely, Um, but specifically, how are customers looking at backup and recovery in the cloud? Is it a kind of a replacement for existing strategies? Is it another layer of protection? How are they thinking about that? >> Yeah. Great question, Dave. And again, thanks. Thanks for having me. And I think, you know, look. If you look back to 15 years ago, when the founders of AWS had the hypothesis that many enterprises, governments, and developers were going to want access to on demand, pay as you go, IT resources in the cloud. None of us would have been able to predict that it would have matured and, um, you know become the staple that it has today over the last 15 years. But the reality is that a lot of these are enterprise customers. Many of whom have been doing their own IT infrastructure for the last 10, 20 or or multiple decades do have to kind of figure out how they deal with it. The change management of moving to the cloud, and while a lot of our customers will initially come to us because they're looking to save money or costs. Almost all of them decide to stay and go big because of the speed at which they're able to innovate on behalf of their customers. And when it comes to storage and backup, that just plays right into where they're headed and there's a variety of different techniques that customers use. Whether it be, you know, a lift and shift for a particular set of applications. Or a data center or where it, where they do very much look at how can they replace the backup and recovery that they have on premises in the cloud using solutions like what we're partnering with Commvault to do. Or completely re-imagining their architecture for net new developments that they can really move quickly for, for their customers and, and completely developing something brand new, where it is really a, um, you know a brand new replacement and innovation for, for, for what they've done in the past. >> Great. Thank you, Stephen. Ranga, I want to ask you about the D word, digital. Look, if you're not a digital business today, you're basically out of business. So my question to you Ranga is, is how have you seen customers change the way they think about data protection during what I call the forced March to digital over the last 18, 19 months? Are customers thinking about data protection differently today? >> Definitely Dave, and and thank you for having me and Stephen pleasure to join you on this CUBE interview. First, going back to Stephen's comments, can't agree more. Almost every business that we talk with today has a cloud first strategy, a cloud transmission mandate. And, you know, the reality is back to your digital comment. There are many different paths to the hybrid micro cloud. And different customers. You know, there are different parts of the journey. So as Stephen was saying, most often customers, at least from a data protection perspective. Start the conversation their thinking, hey, I have all these tapes, can I start using cloud as my air gap, long-term retention target. And before they realize they start moving their workloads into the cloud, and none of the backup and recovery facilities are going to change. So you need to continue protecting the cloud, which is where the cloud meta data protection comes in. And then they start innovating around DR Can I use cloud as my DR sites so that, you know, I don't need to meet in another site. So this is all around us, cloud transmissions, all around us. And, and the real essence of this partnership between AWS and Commvault is essentially to drive, and simplify all the paths to the cloud Regardless of whether you're going to use it as a storage target or, you know, your production data center or your DR. Disaster Recovery site. >> Yeah. So really, it's about providing that optionality for customers. I talked to a lot of customers and said, hey, our business resilience strategy was really too focused on DR. I've talked to all the customers at the other end of the spectrum said, we didn't even have a DR strategy. Now we're using the cloud for that. So it's a, it's really all over the map and you want that optionality. So Stephen, >> (Ranga cuts in) >> Go ahead, please. >> And sorry. Ransomware plays a big role in many of these considerations as well, right? Like, it's unfortunately not a question of whether you're going to be hit by ransomware. It's almost become like, what do you do when you're hit by ransomware? And the ability to use the cloud scale to immediately bring up the resources. Use the cloud backers has become a very popular choice simply because of the speed with which you can bring the business back to normal operations. The agility and the power that cloud brings to the table. >> Yeah. Ransomware is scary. You don't, you don't even need a high school degree diploma to be a ransomware-ist. You could just go on the dark web and buy ransomware as a service and do bad things. And hopefully you'll end up in jail. Stephen, we know about the success of the AWS Marketplace. You guys are partnering here. I'm interested in how that partnership, you know, kind of where it started and how it's evolving. >> Yeah. And happy to highlight on that. So look, when we, when we started AWS or when the founders of AWS started AWS, as I said, 15 years ago. We realized very early on that while we were going to be able to provide a number of tools for customers to have on demand access to compute storage, networking databases, that many particularly, enterprise and government government customers still use a wide range of tools and solutions from hundreds, if not in some cases, thousands of different partners. I mean, I talked to enterprises who who literally used thousands of of different vendors to help them deliver those solutions for their customers. So almost 10 years ago, we're almost at our 10 year anniversary for AWS Marketplace. We launched the first instantiation of AWS Marketplace, which allowed builders and customers to find, try, buy, and then deploy third-party software solutions running on Amazon Machine Instances, also known as AMI's. Natively, right in their AWS and cloud accounts to compliment what they were doing in the cloud. And over the last, nearly 10 years, we've evolved quite a bit. To the point where we support software in multiple different packaging types. Whether it be Amazon Machine Instances, containers, machine learning models, and of course, SAS and the rise of software as a service, so customers don't have to manage the software themselves. But we also support a data products through the AWS data exchange and professional services for customers who want to get services to help them integrate the software into their environments. And we now do that across a wide range of procurement options. So what used to be pay as you go Amazon Machine Instances now includes multiple different ways to contract directly. The customer can do that directly with the vendor, with their channel partner or using kind of our, our public e-commerce capabilities. And we're super excited, um, over the last couple of months, we've been partnering with Commvault to get their industry leading backup and recovery solutions listed on AWS Marketplace. Which is available for our collective customers now. So not only do they have access to Commvault's awesome solutions to help them protect against ransomware, as we talked about and, and to manage their backup and recovery environments. But they can find and deploy that directly in one click right into their AWS accounts and consolidate their, their billing relationship right on the AWS invoice. And it's been awesome to work with with Ranga and the, and the product teams at Commvault to really expose those capabilities where Commvault's using a lot of different AWS services to, to provide a really great native experience for our collective customers as they migrate to the cloud. >> Yeah. The Marketplace has been amazing. We've watched it evolve over the past decade and it's just, it's a key characteristic of cloud. Everybody has a cloud today, right? Ah, we're a cloud too, but Marketplace is unique in, in, in that it's the power of the ecosystem versus the resources of one. And Ranga, I wonder if from your perspective, if you could talk about the partnership with AWS from your view, and and specifically you've got some hard news. Would, if you could, talk about that as well. >> Absolutely. So the partnership has been extending for more than 12 years, right? So AWS and Commvault have been bringing together solutions that help customers solve the data management challenges and everything that we've been doing has been driven by the customer demand that we see, right. Customers are moving their workloads to the cloud. They are finding new ways of deploying the workloads and protecting them. You know, earlier we introduced cloud native integration with the EBS AVI's which has driven almost 70% performance improvements in backup and restore. When you look at huge customers like Coca-Cola, who have standardized on AWS and Commvault, that is the scale that they want to operate on. They manage around one through 3,000 snapshots, 1200 easy, two instances across six regions, but with just one resource dedicated for the data management strategy, right? So that's where the real built-in integration comes into play. And we've been extending it to make use of the cloud efficiencies like power management and auto-scale, and so on. Another aspect is our commitment to a radically simple customer experience. And that's, you know, I'm sure Stephen would agree. It's a big mantra at AWS as well. That's really, together, the customer demand that's brought us together to introduce combo into the AWS Marketplace, exactly the way Stephen described it. Now the hot announcement is calmer, backup and recovery is available in AWS Marketplace. So the exact four steps that Stephen mentioned: find, try, buy, and deploy everything simplified to the Marketplace so that our AWS customers can start using our more backup software in less than 20 minutes. A 60 day trial version is included in the product through Marketplace. And, you know, it's a single click buy. We use the cloud formation templates to deploy. So it becomes a super simple approach to protect the AWS workloads. And we protect a lot of them starting from EC2, RDS DynamoDB, DocumentDB, you know, the, the containers, the list just keeps going on. So it becomes a very natural extension for our customers to make it super simple, to start using Commvault data protection for the AWS workloads. >> Well, the Commvault stack is very robust. You have an extremely mature stack. I want to, I'm curious as to how this sort of came about? I mean, it had to be customer driven, I'm sure. When your customers say, hey, we're moving to the cloud, we had a lot of workloads in the cloud. We're a Commvault customer, that intersection between Commvault and AWS customer. So, so again, I presume this was customer driven, but maybe you can give us a little insight and add some color to that, Ranga. >> Every everything, you know, in this collaboration has been customer driven. We were earlier talking about the multiple paths to cloud and a very good example, and Stephen might probably add more color from his own experience at Dow Jones, but I I'll, I'll bring it to reference Parsons. Who's, you know, civil engineering leader. They started with the cloud first mandate saying, we need to start moving all our backups to the cloud, but we averted that bad actors might find it easy to go and access the backups. AWS and Commvault came together with AWS security features and Commvault brought in its own authorization controls. And now we are moved more than 14 petabytes of backup data into the cloud, and it's sort of as that, not even the backup administrators can go and patch the backups without multiple levels of authorization, right? So the customer needs, whether it is from a security perspective, performance perspective, or in this case from a simplicity perspective is really what is driving us and, and the need came exactly like that. There are many customers who have now standardized on AWS, they want to find everything related to this Marketplace. They want to use their existing, you know, the AWS contracts and also bring data strategy as part of that. So that, that's the real driver behind this. Stephen and I were hoping that we could actually announce some of the customers that have actively started using it. You know, many notable customers have been behind this innovation. And Stephen I don't know if you wanted to add more to that. >> I would just, I would just add Dave, you know, like if I look back before I joined AWS seven years ago, I was the CIO at Dow Jones. And I was leading a, a fairly big cloud migration there over a number of years. And one of the impetuses for us moving to the cloud in the first place was when Hurricane Sandy hit, we had a real disaster recovery scenario in one of our New Jersey data centers. And we had to act pretty quickly. Commvault was, was part of that solution. And I remember very clearly, even back then, back in 2013, there being options available to help us accelerate our move to the cloud. And, and just to reiterate some of the stuff that Ranga was talking about, you know, Commvault's done a great job over the last, more than a decade. Taking features from things like EBS, and S3, and TC2 and some of our networking capabilities and embedding them directly into their services so that customers are able to, you know, more quickly move their backup and recovery workloads to the cloud. So each and every one of those features was, is a result of, I'm sure, Commvault working backwards from their customer needs just as we do at AWS. And we're super excited to take that to the next level, to give customers the option to then also buy that right on their AWS invoice on AWS Marketplace. >> Yeah. I mean, we're going to have to leave it there. Stephen you've mentioned this several times, there's sort of the early days of AWS. We went back then we were talking about gigabytes and terabytes, and now we're talking about petabytes and beyond. Guys thanks so much. We really appreciate your time and sharing the news with us. >> Dave, thanks for having us. >> All right, keep it right there more from Commvault Connections 21, you're watching theCUBE.

(royalty free music) >> Woman's voice: From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman coming to you from our Boston area studio and this is a special cube conversation. I have a special announcement from our friends at Commvault. So welcome back to the program. We have two of our cube alumni. First, we have Manoj Nair, he's actually the general manager of Metallic, which is a Commvault venture. First time Manoj on the program in your role with, with Commvault, welcome back. And also welcoming back Ranga Rajagopalan who's the vice president of products at Commvault. Ranga, caught up with you recently at the FutureReady event that we had over the summer. Thanks so much for joining us again. >> Sure. >> Alright. So Manoj, let's start. Metallic obviously was, you know, the standout you know, thing that everybody talked about last year at Commvault GO. Really helping to, you know, put Commvault clearly into the SaaS marketplace out there. Talking about how, you know, all the wonderful features for managing my data in a cloud environment. So there is an expansion to the portfolio that we're announcing today. Why don't you share the news? >> Yeah, absolutely Stu, you know, it's great to be back here with all of you and Metallic has come a long way from the launch. Just less than a year ago, we announced the creation of Metallic multiple different offerings whether it's protecting SaaS workloads like O365, remote endpoints and a hybrid cloud workloads. You know, the context that we're getting from our customers, especially in the last six months, increased cloud adoption and, you know, remote working collaboration suites being adopted. All of that has been a great accelerator for adoption of SaaS data protection, which is really what the Metallic is offering. We have gone to global countries and expanded to our Commvault customer base who was, you know, using both Commvault software and Metallic now. One of the key things that we're not, you know, today's announcement is focused on a Metallic cloud storage service that as a new service available for Commvault customers are looking to get a, you know, fully managed secure cloud-based SaaS target for protecting all of the data as an air gap copy and this is, you know, is more relevant than ever. >> So Manoj, using the cloud for data protection, for backup isn't new? Ranga, help us understand. I heard in there air gap, I heard, you know, leveraging the cloud. Absolutely, we've seen a huge tailwind for cloud adoption but there's that gap for making sure customers, you know, protect their data, secure their data. Do they have the skillset to be able to leverage that, so help help us drill in and understand what's different about this new service >> You're right Stu. Cloud is absolutely not new but what is really unique about today's announcement with metallic cloud storage service is that we are bringing cloud even closer to our Commvault customers. So thinking from a data management perspective, our customers want to more easily and securely get the benefits of cloud storage. What we are doing today is integrating Metallic cloud storage service as a cloud storage target into our Commvault software as well as our HyperScale X plans. And that lets our customers to seamlessly use cloud storage for their data protection, backup and archival use cases without needing to understand a lot about the cloud, without needing to get through any of the complexities. Think of it as the easy button that is now introduced into the Commvault software and HyperScale X. >> All right, so, if I heard you right, this is a managed service that Commvault is offering. Did I get that right? >> That's fast. >> Yeah >> So, you know, it's a managed service. It's public cloud storage. It's, as Ranga said, the easy button to be able to create your air gap copies in the cloud. And, you know, with everything that we keep hearing about ransomware, and we believe this is one of the, the, the most important steps in ransomware readiness, a lot of our customers are already doing it by bringing their own cloud storage on all the clouds we protect, but it's still not easy. And this is a skills gap, you know, the procurement process and all of that, you know, the management of the credentials, the setting up of the networking, all of that is encapsulated. So now, it's just, you know, it's like a built-in feature, just, you know plug it in and now you've got an on-ramp to the cloud. Make sure you have your air gap copy. >> Yeah, maybe it would help if you'd, if you'd talk about the easy button, give us a little compare contrast 'cause, right, I could go, I could spin up instance of the cloud, but, you know, who has access? What are the security settings? There's a whole litany of things that I need to make sure I've got the right identity management. It's kind of easy, but not necessarily simple to, to be able to do that. So from what you're describing I don't even need to really think, you know, yes, it's in the cloud, I'm leveraging all the wonderful things of the cloud, but I don't have to have that, that ramp up of skillset if I don't already have that in house as... Ranga, sounds like I'm understanding that. >> Yeah >> You know. >> Yeah, you're perfectly understanding and that's all there is to it. And let me expand on the PC part there, right? For us, simplicity is into end-customer experience. So I'm going to break this down from a customer life cycle perspective. Think of a Commvault customer who's backing up pretty much all the workloads in the data center. The first question they have is, you know, "For security reasons "for easy, or because I'm in a transformation project "I need to make, I need to start using cloud storage." So the first complexity they would face is understanding which cloud provider to use, what kind of cloud profile to use? or who their cloud or chasing model, which is very different from how they normally procure their hardware and software. So that's really the first dimension of simplicity that this Metallic cloud storage offer. Our customers can procure their cloud storage along with any other Commvault software and hardware just like they would do any other Commvault software. So that's the first level of simplicity. The second one is "How do I bring "that into my data management life cycle." And again, as I mentioned before, MCSS is fully integrated into Commvault software. So through the simplicity of command center, which is the one UI that brings all our products together, customers can just click to the cloud storage target and start backing up, moving copies, archiving, doing all the data management use cases, the second dimension of simplicity. And the third one really is the predictability. You know, cloud is beautiful, It brings a lot of flexibility, but it also brings in a lot of new terms. What are the egress charges? What does ingress mean? What does egress mean? What happens when I have the V store? What happens when I have the Ricola? So all of that complexity is taken away. We handle all of that in the backend. From the customer's perspective, just like they use CAP, just like they use the Desk, now, they can use cloud. We handled all the egress and all those kind of stuff in the backend. From the customer's perspective, they get a simple, predictable price point. So from the time of choosing, procuring it, using it and continuously getting the best benefits out of it, the easy button extends across that entire dimension. And the beauty in all of this is customers getting all the benefits of cloud without having to really understand much about cloud. So that's really the benefit we bring to the table with MCSS. >> Yeah. Manoj, Commvault has a long history of being able to live on, you know, various infrastructures that customers have. Are you able to share who the, I'm assuming there's a cloud partner for part of this, so who is the, the underlying IS? >> Yeah, so still, you know, end of June doing, we announced the next phase of our strategic partnership with Microsoft. So this is a, you know, one of the first big, new things that is coming out of the giant partnership between Commvault and Microsoft around Metallic and Microsoft Azure. There's a lot of things that, you know, we're jointly doing that are unique that make all of the simplicity Ranga, you know, just mentioned, come to life and, you know, that's, you know, power of the end as I call it. It's Commvault and Metallic and Microsoft, you know, coming together to make this really easy for our customers to start getting the value out of leveraging cloud for the data protection. Yeah. >> Well, Manoj, it seems natural extension of what you've already talked about for what Metallic can protect. Of course, you've got the, you know, the business suite from Microsoft, can you help frame it for us, you know, where this new, the MCSS fits in the Metallic portfolio today? >> Yeah absolutely. So if you look at, you know, what... I'll give you a customer journey and what's been happening. If you are not a Commvault customer today and you're looking at "What's my best 0365 data protection option," if you go to microsoft.com, you'll actually find Metallic in there as the recommended offer. And they, they might start the journey there or you're an existing Commvault customer and you start rapidly adopting teams and O365, you know, post COVID. The, the, you know, Metallic is the default option. So it doesn't matter how you enter in, you're now getting a full, you know, SaaS actual backup as a service, no storage costs, no egress costs. And so our Commvault customers have been asking, "We love that part of it, why not make that available "for all of the other data that is being protected "by Commvault, either appliance or software on-prem?" and, you know, in a very simple way, it's, you know, the best things are driven by customers. And in this case, our customers came to us and said, "We love the simple button "not just what's included in the Metallic service, "we would like that that to be available, even for, "you know, the existing software you're protecting on-prem "for the air gap copy use case is kind of the biggest one." And you know, all of the things that Ranga said in terms of simplicity now comes to bear. And it's something that we were including inside the Metallic SaaS offerings. Now, it's available for software and appliance customers. >> Yeah. I definitely, I've heard of the industry now. Microsoft seems a little bit more amenable to, you know, not charging for egress, with some of their partners, when they put together these solutions. Ranga, Manoj has mentioned air gap a couple of times, can you help us frame, you know, what that means today? You know, I even think back, you know, ape that most people are familiar with. Even, I think about, you know, Google, you know, use ape for many years even in the public cloud to give that air gap. Of course, we've talked to your customers lots about how to protect against ransomware. So how does, how does this fit in the new solution? >> You know, unfortunately, Stu today. It's, it's important reality for us to discuss the ransomware readiness. Number of attacks are going up depending on, you know, which your source you are listening to. So security is a very important concern in top of our customers' minds. Now, MCSS is cloud storage, so it is off site storage. So it comes with all the natural layered security that it's built into cloud storage. Additionally, Commvault brings a complete ransomware protection, protection and recovery framework, which becomes inherently available with the MCSS. And let me explain that in a few very simple quotes. Now, the entire journey from on-prem to the cloud storage is completely encrypted. So that's, you know, a very important part of the order on security mechanism, but here is where it really becomes cool Commvault software is managing the cloud credentials, the cloud keys. So the entire access to MCSS as a cloud storage target is managed to Commvault. So there isn't an independent cloud admin accessing that storage, which opens it up for any kind of an intentional or unintentional access. Anything can happen when you allow that access. So Commvault completely manages that access the keys are owned by the customer, but managed by a Commvault. So it's a really air gap security, layered security mechanism that you get in combination with the entire framework of air gap isolation, anomaly protection, the authentication, everything that is built into the Commvault framework. So when you, when you bring in the simplicity that we talked about earlier, you can apply that to the security angle as well here. Instead of making the customer manage yet another piece in the jigsaw, we are managing it for them. So from their perspective, it is a seamless extension to their data management strategy while it also adds an extra layer of security and a readiness to recover from ransomware attacks. >> While it's being launched today, we already have customers that have, you know, we have accelerated into adoption of MCSS and it's coming exactly for the scenarios Ranga just said. You know, they, they have a requirement for a cloud copy. If you have seen that on the Metallic SaaS side that some of the customers might be in pilot mode. And because they were in pilot mode, they were quickly able to recover from attacks that happened. Unfortunately, those, those things are reality. And we have had customers who after the attack go and say "I want to make sure it's much easier to recover from that." And so we already have our first customers who are starting to adopt the service even as we launch it today. >> Well. I'm so glad you brought up the customer examples. Manoj, give us a little bit just the high level view, you talked about the growth and adoption of Metallic overall, and you just talked about kind of the, the single management. You got any SaaS for us, you know, how much data do you have in the cloud now and, you know, what's the growth looking like? And talk a little bit about, you know, what we can expect going forward from this portfolio. >> Yeah, I, you know, I don't know how many people disclose this or not, but we have disclosed it in the past, we have over an exabyte of data today in the cloud that, you know, our customers are, you know, either using a Metallic or bringing their own cloud with Commvault and writing to the cloud. So, you know, that's probably, you know, best in class out there. What we are also seeing is the acceleration of that, you know, so we look at it's, you know, it's exponential growth over a hundred percent, you know, we're, we're seeing that, that rise in leverage yet it's something that when you look at the overall industry percentages, it depends on whose stats you use, it's probably only 5%, maybe 10% that are leveraging the cloud for anything, whether it's, you know, in this case, it's data, cloud data as a secondary target. So there's a lot of untapped potential. And the things that Ranga said I think really are the ones our customers are telling us as we tested this out. And those are the biggest reasons. Right cost, you know, I'm concerned about it. I've heard that it's unpredictable. It goes up, people start spinning up other things that they shouldn't be. And so I want predictable costs, you know, security and the whole model around it, the, the governance of the keys, and finally skills, everyone's busy, no one's trying to not be, you know, upping their cloud skills yet it's not something that is very, you know, very easy for most people to, you know, become an expert. And if you're not an expert while you're protecting your data, that's not, you know, that's not something you want to do, so you kind of hold back. And I think this is really the biggest thing that customers are looking at, like our cloud expertise packaged in an offering solving all those things? >> And Stu, we discussed this at FutureReady of how the Commvault portfolio continues to come closer and closer together in order to deliver that increased value to our customers. In July, when we were having a similar conversation, we saw how Hedvig came in as the scale load storage in our HyperScale X integrated data protection plans. And we can see that we have Metallic Cloud Storage Service coming in as a cloud extension to our software, as well as HyperScale X. So it's kind of bringing the best of both worlds, customers who want to continue to stay on for them, protect their on-prem workloads with on-prem footprint. You have HyperScale X as a very nice scale, which integrated our plans. And as the capacity needs increase, as the security needs increase, you have MCSS now as a managed storage extension, bringing together those pieces of the portfolio. Now, the thing that is now available already as of September 15 is our ability to manage Metallic as part of command center. So while you want that SaaS flexibility and you're using Metallic to protect the SaaS workloads let's also realize that there are a bunch of other workloads that you might be protecting using Commvault software all through HyperScale. We can now bring all of them together into the simplicity of command center. So it, again, takes away another point of complexity for the customer. Just one UI, go ahead, do protect the workloads the way you want. With the form factor you want. SaaS software, or our plans, and we bring it all together into a single management framework for you. So you're going to continue seeing the portfolio coming closer together because our prime concern is to provide flexibility of choice to customers. Flexibility of choice in so many different ways, you know, you can use software, our plans or SaaS. You can bring your own on-prem storage, cloud storage, or if you want to hit the simple button, use Metallic clouds for it. So, so you're going to see that happen as we move forward. >> Well. Manoj, Ranga, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the launch. Love little tagline leading it. We're we're making the cloud just a little bit closer to us. >> It is, >> It is a lot closer. >> Thank you. Thank you Stu for your time. >> Thank you. >> I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (royalty free music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, one of the hosts of theCUBE, and I just finished a conversation with Manoj Nair, who's the General Manager of Metallic, which is a Commvault venture and Ranga Rajagopalan, who's the Vice President of products with Commvault, and I can't give too much away, but great conversation, and let's just say that tomorrow the cloud is becoming a little bit closer to you. So, we will be releasing the video on our YouTube channel for SiliconANGLE at 11:30 Eastern on Tuesday, October 6, so tune in, make sure you watch it, look for the activity on social media, and thanks so much for joining, I'm Stu Miniman. (upbeat music)