from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation welcome to the cube lisa martin here i'm having the opportunity to speak with one of dell technologies customers joining me from all the way down under in melbourne australia is kevin pritchard the head of it and business systems from janna investment advisors hi kevin nice to have you on the program thanks lisa a pleasure to be here so tell us about jonah investments who you guys are what you do all the types of data that you're dealing with jana is uh an asset consultant uh we consult to what we call in australia the superannuation industry which is the equivalent of your 401 k our clients are the actual funds themselves the pension funds we advise on both the accumulation and then the pension stage of those to those funds we have under advice across all our clients approximately 500 billion aud so that's a significant responsibility our decisions our research our recommendations probably affects between two to three out of five australians retirement outcomes all right so business critical data kevin i imagine there's compliance requirements not just in australia but if you're doing business with any clients in the americas or in uh europe primarily our markets australia but the regulatory overlays that we and our clients face into are significant and growing the superannuation sector in australia is now at around three trillion dollars it's a significant amount of money i think it's the second or third largest in the world um don't quote me on that but it's a significant amount of money so let's talk about data as a business critical asset and also from a brand reputation perspective talk to me about your it environment how you were managing data before and what some of the challenges were that you wanted to resolve i've been with jana for 14 years and in that time the demands and the complexity of our environment have increased we have to address a growing accumulation of business critical data our data forms our ip it's the core of our advice and it's not just what we're doing today it's what we've done five years ago 10 years ago it has to be there for ready reference it's a critical business asset i like how you said it's really your data is really your ip so talk to me about your it environment before on-prem cloud virtualize what does that landscape look like so we run a a data center we have a it's it's a more economical footprint but nevertheless it's the core of what we do as a business on a day-to-day some data we can't put in the cloud the regulatory overlays really don't permit it and privacy and you know we can better protect in a data center uh we we occupy a space in a dedicated space in a tier 4 data center in australia but that said we are increasingly moving into cloud now the cloud is super important to us it's but it's not easy to migrate into people just say oh let's just go to the cloud you really do have to think about things you have to think about how it's implemented you have to think about data security uh they're very good the cloud providers but it's all care no responsibility it ultimately comes back to you but the the nexus between cloud and on-prem is something that you have to think about and if i'm thinking about backup and dr and i can think of it from a number of perspectives you know it's not just backing up in case we've got failure of hardware but it's about cyber security it's about protection from things like air gapping ensuring um you know that your backups are actually aware of the malware for example uh we've we've had incidents uh and i'm sure the u.s had as well in australia where organizations have found six months down the track that their backups have been compromised we can't afford to do that our regulators our clients i myself have to give assurances to our clients that we're resilient that we're meeting the increasingly stringent benchmarks in your case study i was reading about uh really jonah was on a quest to become more data driven and also it sounded to me like the board was heavily invested and had a vested interest in data protection talk to me about how dell technologies is helping you meet some of those goals becoming more data driven and enabling you to ensure to your cfo et cetera the board that our data is secure yeah as i was saying [Music] at the beginning of this journey i would have thought back up how hard can it be right you you take a backup it's a tape it's a disc you put it into a secure repository something somewhere offside you have a problem you phone someone up they bring it take back and you restore those days have gone and when you really look into it it's a very specialist area how do you back up data especially the size of the data that we have how do you restore it in a timely manner how do you protect it against as i'm saying compromise you need to test it you need easy ways to test it it's complex now when i looked at this problem three years ago i think well okay we're no longer part of a big bank um we've got to stand on our own feet what's the best solution do you research the market um i i've worked with dell for a long time and they're in the mix in the end dell offered the best solution and they showed that they had the understanding of my environment and more broadly where industry is going so that data protection mix of products between the the visibility the dashboards and what happens in the cloud in terms of testing your workloads that are up there because testing is something that my board really really insists upon we have a an annual testing program it runs the full 12 months where we're testing various aspects of uh recovery so talk to me about you're talking about the complexity of a person in the beginning i thought back up in recovery how how difficult can that be you talked about the complexity though and as we talked about with with probably i would say increasing scrutiny from a regulations perspective aboard the cfo how did dell technologies how did power protect actually help you simplify because i actually saw a quote from you in your case study about it being easy help us understand how that was possible yeah you've always got to be careful using the word easy but let's take that perspective from what it would be if it wasn't easy so our prior solution was essentially relying on the dis backup multi-volume disk backup that was stored by a suitable company now i was looking at the dell uh the power protect data protect dashboard the other day and i was surprised we have 27 terabytes of data stored in the cloud which is sent up there daily i get a report card each day it's all green thankfully i can see that on average you know the change the delta of what the data we store on particular servers is on average around seven to ten percent a day those statistics are really important and uh and the deduplication compression ratios you know 97 98 are outstanding um that is really helpful so the point i was trying to make in my previous comments is that visibility is very important that's where it gets easy because i don't have to rely on an expert who's sitting over there he may be in or out telling me what's the status of where we are in day-to-day backup it's it's a critical part of bau it's a pretty critical part of data protection and our clients are greatly comforted by it absolutely when you were describing your previous environment i thought wow one of the things you probably you couldn't have had is complete visibility let alone maybe even good visibility so now with the dell uh power protect series can you look through like a single pane of glass management and see all the backups on file servers virtual machines all of that iep that you talked about that's core to the business uh the short answer is yes now there was another part of our previous setup where we used you what would be classical we had a warm site and we would replicate data one of the problems with that is i didn't know if replication was occurring i didn't know if you know if i if i had had a and we haven't but if we had a ransomware attack then it infects the server and it actually it replicates to your secondary side there was no air gap air gap your backup protected these old solutions of running a you know for an organization outside the the expanding the maintenance required to run a secondary side are just too much one of the things that sounds like you now have is confidence that what you're protecting with dell is in fact protected it's secure and you talked about ransomware a second ago and now in the age of kobe i read the other day that there's a ransomware attack happens every 11 seconds phishing is getting more personal and more sophisticated so that's a big challenge now that sounds like you've got a pretty resilient infrastructure that i i'm going to speak for you gives you the confidence that you're in a pretty good situation with respect to ensuring that that data is indeed safe i have a great deal more confidence and i'm being cautious and cynical i'm you'd never want to say 100. all right because the backup gods will frown upon you but i'm now more confident i can provide my c-suite i can provide the board with a ready snapshot view of where we stand are there any issues um not just cost effectiveness but the visibility of what's going on and look i i was absolutely surprised that an organization outside had 27 terabytes of data that's a lot of data for someone outside and that's important because really at the end of the day this boils down to brand reputation the ability to guarantee to the regulators your clients that all of the data that you talked about it's a lot for a company of your size is indeed secure and protected and that you can as you said you have pretty strong confidence i agree with you saying 100 is always one of those challenging kind of areas to be in but but i think from from a business outcomes perspective this isn't just about protecting the data that's sitting on file servers and virtual machines this is protecting and helping to reinforce the reputation of the brand of janna yes reputation our reputation is so important and we need to ensure to to guarantee to our clients that we stand head and shoulders above i've had funds come to me we we do our uh audits they've come in they've looked at our processes procedures you are miles ahead of us you put us to shame what's your advice to those folks who are coming in saying what you're doing kevin is putting us to shame you say here's how i would advise you to modernize your environment what's your advice well backup is no longer in d i's just look at the bcp and the dr thing it's no longer just about anticipating a hardware failure hub is very reliable but it can still fail network failure malware and malware is increasingly something we have to protect again that your your database is must be insured so you've got to think about it what's the best strategy and that and so you start with those primary objectives standing vms up in the cloud is you know you've got to understand cloud environments so seek good advice really research and and go for the solution that really offers hide the complexity if you can because at least if you guys make sure you can have someone over there that does all the the cloud stuff someone over there that knows all the hardware and then they can all get into a room and we can but most companies now are looking for that single pane of glass and you if you plan right and size your requirements then you you'll be okay in that respect and and it is an endorsement to dell [Music] um implementation phase well they're very good through the through the investigation phase their proposals were very very sound the um the costings the financial benefits were all laid out for me i was able to take a very firm recommendation to my board and we were able to secure that funding and then the implementation kevin that's great advice do do your due diligence and i'm sure now in this very dynamic different world that you're in you're in a much better position than you would have been had this not been able to be moved forward under your leadership we thank you so much for joining us on thecube today and sharing the successes that you're having at janna pleasure for kevin pritchard i'm lisa martin you're watching the cube