>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. >> All right, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. This is Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Day 4 of coverage MWC 23. We've been talking all week about the disaggregation of the telco networks, how telcos need to increase revenue how they're not going to let the over the top providers do it again. They want to charge Netflix, right? And Netflix is punching back. There maybe are better ways to do revenue acceleration. We're going to talk to that topic with Dave Trigg who's the Global Vice President of Telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. And Ken Burns, who's a global telecom partner, sales lead. Guys, good to see you. >> Good to see you. Great to be here. >> Dave, you heard my, you're welcome. You heard my intro. It's got to be better ways to, for the telcos to make money. How can they accelerate revenue beyond taxing Netflix? >> Yeah, well, well first of all, sort of the promise of 5G, and a lot of people talk about 5G as the enterprise G. Right? So the promise of 5G is to really help drive revenue enterprise use cases. And so, it's sort of the promise of the next generation of technology, but it's not easy to figure out how we monetize that. And so we think Dell has a pretty significant role to play. It's a CEO conversation for every telco and how they accelerate. And so it's an area we're investing heavily into three different areas for telcos. One is the IT space. Dell's done that forever. 90% of the companies leaning in on that. The other places network, network's more about cost takeout. And the third area where we're investing in is working with what we call their line of businesses, but it's really their business units, right? How can we sit down with them and really understand what services do they take to market? Where do they go? So, we're making significant investments. So one way they can do it is working with Dell and and we're making big investments 'cause in most Geos we have a fairly significant sales force. We've brought in an industry leader to help us put it together. And we're getting very focused on this space and, you know, looking forward to talking more about it. >> So Ken, you know, the space inside and out, we just had at AT&T on... >> Dave Trigg: Yep. >> And they were saying we have to be hypersensitive because of our platinum brand to the use of personal information. >> Ken: Yeah. >> So we're not going to go there yet. We're not going to go directly monetize, but yet I'm thinking well, Netflix knows what I'm watching and they're making recommendations and they're, and and that's how they make money. And so the, the telcos are, are shy about doing that for right reasons, but they want to make better offers. They want to put, put forth better bundles. You know, they don't, they don't want to spend all their time trying to figure that out and not being able to change when they need to change. So, so what is the answer? If they're not going to go toward that direct monetization of data? >> Ken: Yeah. >> How do they get there? >> So I, I joined Dell in- at the end of June and brought on, as David said, to, to build and lead this what we call the line of business strategy, right? And ultimately what it is is tying together Dell technology solutions and the best of breed of what the telecoms bring to bear to solve the business outcomes of our joint customers. And there's a few jewels inside of Dell. One of it is that we have 35,000 sellers out there all touching enterprise business customers. And we have a really good understanding of what those customer needs are and you know what their outcomes needs to be. The other jewel is we have a really good understanding of how to solve those business outcomes. Dell is an open company. We work with thousands of integrators, and we have a really good insight in terms of how to solve those business outcomes, right? And so in my conversations with the telecom companies when you talk about, you know combining the best assets of Dell with their capabilities and we're all talking to the same customers, right? And if we're giving them the same story on these solutions solving business outcomes it's a beautiful thing. It's a time to market. >> What's an example of a, of a, of a situation where you'll partner with telcos that's going to drive revenue for, for both of you and value for the customer? >> Yeah, great question. So we've been laser focused on four key areas, cyber, well, let me start off with connected laptops, cyber, private mobility, and edge. Right? Now, the last two are a little bit squishy, but I'll I'll get to that in a bit, right? Because ultimately I feel like with this 5G market, we could actually make the market. And the way that we've been positioning this is almost, almost on a journey for IOT. When we talk about laptops, right? Dell is the, is the number one company in the world to sell business laptops. Well, if we start selling connected laptops the telcos are starting to say, well, you know what? If all of those laptops get connected to my network, that's a ton of 5G activations, right? We have the used cases on why having a connected workforce makes sense, right? So we're sharing that with the telcos to not simply sell a laptop, but to sell the company on why it makes sense to have that connected workforce. >> Dave Vellante: Why does it make sense? It could change the end customer. >> Ken: Yeah. So, you know, I'm probably not the best to answer that one right? But, but ultimately, you know Dell is selling millions and millions of laptops out there. And, and again, the Verizon's, the AT&T's, the T-mobile's, they're seeing the opportunity that, you know, connecting those laptops, give those the 5G activations right? But Dave, you know, the way that we've been positioning this is it's not simply a laptop could be really a Trojan horse into this IOT journey. Because ultimately, if you sell a thousand laptops to an enterprise company and you're connecting a thousand of their employees, you're connecting people, right? And we can give the analytics around that, what they're using it for, you know, making sure that the security, the bios, all of that is up to date. So now that you're connecting their people you could open up the conversation to why don't we we connect your place and, you know, allowing the telecom companies to come in and educate customers and the Dell sales force on why a private 5G mobility network makes sense to connecting places. That's a great opportunity. When you connect the place, the next part of that journey is connecting things in that place. Robotics, sensors, et cetera, right? And, and so really, so we're on the journey of people, places, things. >> So they got the cyber angle angle in there, Dave. That, that's clear benefit. If you, you know, if you got all these bespoke laptops and they're all at different levels you're going to get, you know, you're going to get hacked anyway. >> Ken: That's right. >> You're going to get hacked worse. >> Yeah. I'm curious, as you go to market, do you see significant differences? You don't have to name any names, but I imagine that there are behemoths that could be laggards because essentially they feel like they're the toll booth and all they have to do is collect, keep collecting the tolls. Whereas some of the smaller, more nimble, more agile entities that you might deal with might be more receptive to this message. That seems to be the sort of way the circle of life are. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing the big ones? Are you seeing the, you know, the aircraft carriers realizing that we got to turn into the wind guys and if we don't start turning into the wind now we're going to be in trouble. >> So this conference has been absolutely fantastic allowing us to speak with, you know, probably 30 plus telecom operators around this strategy, right? And all of the big guys, they've invested hundreds of billions of dollars in their 5G network and they haven't really seen the ROI. So when we're coming into them with a story about how Dell can help monetize their 5G network I got to tell you they're pretty excited >> Dave Nicholson: So they're receptive? >> Oh my God. They are very receptive >> So that's the big question, right? I mean is, who's, is anybody ever going to make any money off of 5G? And Ken, you were saying that private mobility and edge are a little fuzzy but I think from a strategy standpoint I mean that is a potential gold mine. >> Yeah, but it, for, for lot of the telcos and most telcos it's a pretty significant shift in mentality, right? Cause they are used to selling sim cards to some degree and how many sim cards are they selling and how many, what other used cases? And really to get to the point where they understand the use case, 'cause to get into the enterprise to really get into what can they do to help power a enterprise business more wholly. They've got to understand the use case. They got to understand the more complete solution. You know, Dell's been doing that for years. And that's where we can bring our Salesforce, our capabilities, our understanding of the customer. 'cause even your original question around AT&T and trying to understand the data, that's just really a how do you get better understanding of your customer, right? >> Right. Absolutely. >> And, and combined we're better together 'cause we bring a more complete picture of understanding our customers and then how can we help them understand what the edge is. Cause nobody's ever bought an Edge, right? They're buying an Edge to get a business outcome. You know, back in the day, nobody ever bought a data lake, right? Like, you know, they're buying an outcome. They want to use, use that data lake or they want to use the edge to deliver something. They want to use 5G. And 5G has very real capabilities. It's got intrinsic security, which, you know a lot of the wifi doesn't. It's got guaranteed on time, you know, for areas where you can't lose connectivity: autonomous vehicles, et cetera. So it's got very real capabilities that helps deliver that outcome. But you got to be able to translate that into the en- enterprise language to help them solve a problem. And that's where we think we need the help of the telcos. I think the telcos we can help them as well and, and really go drive that outcome. >> So Dell's bringing its go to market expertise and its technology. The telcos obviously have the the connectivity piece and what they do. There's no overlap in terms of the... >> Yeah. >> The, the equipment and the software that you're selling. I mean, they're going to, they're going to take your equipment and create new networks. Beautiful. And, and it's interesting you, like, you think about how Dell has transformed prior to EMC, Dell was, you know, PC maker with a subpar enterprise business, right? Kind of a wannabe enterprise business. Sorry Dell, it's the truth. And then EMC was largely, you know, a company sold storage boxes, but you owned VMware and then brought those two together. Now all of a sudden you had Dell powerhouse leader and Michael Dell, you had VMware incredibly strategic and important and it got EMC with amazing go to market. All of a sudden this Dell, Dell technologies became incredibly attractive to CIOs, C-level executives, board level. And you've come out of that transition VMware's now a separate company, right? And now, but now you have these relationships and you got the shops to be able to go into these edge locations at companies And actually go partner with the telcos. And you got a very compelling value proposition. >> Well, it's been interesting as in, in this show, again most telcos think of Dell as a server provider, you know? Important, but not overly strategic in their journey. But as we've started to invest in this business we've started to invest in things like automation. We've brought together things in our Infra Blocks and then we help them develop revenue. We're not only helping 'em take costs out of their network we're not helping 'em take risk out of deploying that network. We're helping them accelerate the deployment of that network. And then we're helping 'em drive revenue. We are having, you know, they're starting to see us in a new light. Not done yet, but, you know, you can start to see, one, how they're looking at Dell and two, and then how we can go to market. And you know, a big part of that is helping 'em drive and generate revenue. >> Yeah. Well, as, as a, as a former EMC person myself, >> Yeah? >> I will assert that that strategic DNA was injected into Dell by the acquisition of, of EMC. And I'm sticking... >> I won't say that. Okay I'll believe you on that. >> I'm sticking with the story. And it makes sense when you think about moving up market, that's the natural thing. What's, what's what's nearly impossible is to say, we sell semi-trucks but we want to get into the personal pickup truck market. That's that, that doesn't work. Going the other way works. >> Dave Trigg: Yeah. >> Now, now back to the conversation that you had with, with, with AT&T. I'm not buying this whole, no offense to AT&T, but I'm not buying this whole story that, you know, oh we're concerned about our branded customer data. That sounds like someone who's a little bit too comfortable with their existing revenue stream. If I'm out there, I want to be out partnering with folks who are truly aggressive about, about coming up with the next cool thing. You guys are talking about being connected in a laptop. Someone would say, well I got wifi. No, no, no. I'm thinking I want to sim in my laptop cause I don't want to screw around with wifi. Okay, fine. If I know I'm going to be somewhere with excellent wifi connectivity, great. But most of the time it's not excellent. >> That's right. >> So the idea that I could maybe hit F2 and have it switch over to my sim and know that anywhere that I've got coverage, I have high speed connections. Just the convenience of that. >> Ken: Absolutely. >> I'd pay extra for that as an end user consumer. >> Absolutely. >> And I pay for the service. >> Like I tell you, if it interests AT&T I think it's more not, they ask, they're comfortable. They don't know how to monetize that data. Now, of course, AT&T has a media >> Dave Nicholson: Business necessity is the mother of invention. If they don't see the necessity then they're not going to think about it. >> It's a mentality shift. Yes, but, but when you start talking about private mobility and edge, there's there's no concern about personal information there. You're going in with basically a business transformation. Hey, your, your business is, is not, not digital. It's not automated. Now we're going to automate that and digitize that. It's like the, the Dell booth with the beer guys. >> Right. >> You saw that, right? >> I mean that's, I mean that's a simple application. Yeah, a perfect example of how you network and use this technology. >> I mean, how many non-digital businesses are that that need to go digital? >> Dave Nicholson: Like, hundred percent of them. >> Everyone. >> Dave Nicholson: Pretty much. >> Yeah. And this, and this jewel that we have inside of Dell our global industries group, right, where we're investing really heavily in terms of what is the manufacturing industry looking for retail, finance, et cetera. So we have a CTO that came in, that it would be the CTO of manufacturing that gives us a really good opportunity to go to at AT&T or to Verizon or any telco out there, right? To, to say, these are the outcomes. There's Dell technology already in place. How do we connect it to your network? How do we leverage your assets, your manager professional services to provide a richer experience? So it's, there's, you said before Dave, there's really no overlap between Dell and, and our telecom partners. >> You guys making some serious investments here. I mean I, I've been, I was been critical over the years of, hey, you can't just take an X86 block, put a name on it that says edge something and throw it over the fence because that's what you were doing. >> Dave Trigg: And we would agree. >> Yeah. Right. But, of course, but that's all you had at the time. And so you put some... >> We may not have agreed then, but we would agree. >> You bought, brought some people in, you know, like Ken, who really know the business. You brought people into the technical side and you can really see it happening. It's not going to happen overnight. You know, I mean, you know if I were an investor in Dell, I'd be like, okay when are you going to start making money at this business? I'd be like, be patient. You know, it's going to take some time but look at the TAM. >> Yep. >> You know, you guys do a good, good TAM. Tennis is a pro at this stuff. >> We've been at, we've been at this two, three years and we're just now coming with some real material products. You've seen our server line really start to get more purpose-built, really start to get in there as we've started to put out some software that allows for quicker automation, quicker deployments. We have some telcos that are using it to deploy at 10,000 locations. They're literally turning up thousands of locations a week. And so yeah, we're starting to put out some real capability. Got a long way to go. A lot of exciting things on the roadmap. But to your point, it doesn't, you know the ship doesn't turn overnight, you know. >> It could be a really meaningful portion of Dell's business. I'm, I'm excited for the day that Tom Sweet starts reporting on it. Here's our telco business. Yeah. The telco business. But that's not going to happen overnight. But you know, Dell's pretty good at things like ROI. And so you guys do a lot of planning a lot of TAM analysis, a lot of technical analysis, bringing the ecosystem together. That's what this business needs. I, I just don't, it's, it feels unstoppable. You know, you're at this show everybody recognizes the need to open up. Some telcos are moving faster than others. The ones that move faster are going to disrupt. They're going to probably make some mistakes, you know but they're going to get there first. >> Well we've, we've seen the disruptors are making some mistakes and are kind of re- they're already at the phase where they're reevaluating, you know, their approach. Which is great. You know, you, you learn and adjust. You know, you run into a wall, you, you make a turn. And the interesting thing, one of the biggest learnings I've taken out of the show is talking to a bunch of the telcos that are a little bit more of the laggards. They're like, Nope, we, we don't believe in open. We don't think we can do it. We don't have the skillset. They're maybe in a geo that it's hard to find the skillset. As they've been talking to us, and we've been talking about, there's almost a glimmer of hope. They're not convinced yet, but they're like, well wait, maybe we can do this. Maybe open, you know, does give us choice. Maybe it can help us accelerate revenue. So it's been interesting to see a little bit of the, just a little bit, but a little bit of that shift. >> We all remember at 2010, 2011, you talked to banks and financial services companies about, the heck, the Cloud is happening, the Cloud's going to take over the world. We're never going to go into the Cloud. Now they're the biggest, you know Capital One's launching Cloud businesses, Western Union, I mean, they're all in the cloud, right? I mean, it's the same thing's going to happen here. Might, it might take a different pattern. Maybe it takes a little longer, but it's, it's it's a fate are completely >> I was in high school then, so I don't remember all that. >> Sorry, Dave. >> Wow, that was a low blow, like you know? >> But, but the, but the one thing that is for sure there's money to be made convincing people to get off of the backs of the dinosaurs they're riding. >> Dave Vellante: That's right. >> And also, the other thing that's a certainty is that it's not easy. And because it's not easy, there's opportunity there. So I know, I know it's, it, it, it, it, it all sounds great to talk about the the wonderful vision of the future, but I know how hard the the road is that you have to go down to get people, especially if you're comfortable with the revenue stream, if you're comfortable running the plumbing. If you're so comfortable that you can get up on stage and say, I want more money from you to pump your con- your content across my network. I love the Netflix retort, right Dave? >> Yeah, totally Dave. And, but the, the other thing is, telco's a great business. It's, they got monopolies that print money. So... >> Dave Nicholson: It's rational. It's rational. I understand. >> There's less of an incentive to move but what's going to be the incentive is guys like Dish Network coming in saying, we're going to, we're going to disrupt, we're going to build new apps. >> That's right. >> Yeah. >> Well and it's, you know, revenue acceleration, the board level, the CEO level know that they have to, you know, do things different. But to your point, it's just hard, and there's so much gravity there. There's hundreds of years literally of gravity of how they've operated their business. To your point, a lot of them, you know, lot- most of 'em were regulated and most Geos around the world at one point, right? They were government owned or government regulated entities. It's, it's a big ship to turn and it's really hard. We're not claiming we can help them turn the ship overnight but we think we can help evolve them. We think we can go along with the journey and we do think we are better together. >> IT the network and the line of business. Love the strategy. Guys, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> All right, for Dave, Nicholson, Dave Vellante here, John Furrier is in our Palo Alto studio banging out all the news, keep it right there. TheCUBE's coverage of MWC 23. We'll be right back.

(bright music) >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante, welcome back to Supercloud 2. Last August, at the first Supercloud event, we invited the broader community to help further define Supercloud, we assessed its viability, and identified the critical elements and deployment models of the concept. The objectives here at Supercloud too are, first of all, to continue to tighten and test the concept, the second is, we want to get real world input from practitioners on the problems that they're facing and the viability of Supercloud in terms of applying it to their business. So on the program, we got companies like Walmart, Sachs, Western Union, Ionis Pharmaceuticals, NASDAQ, and others. And the third thing that we want to do is we want to drill into the intersection of cloud and data to project what the future looks like in the context of Supercloud. So in this segment, we want to explore the concept of data architectures and what's going to be required for Supercloud. And I'm pleased to welcome one of our Supercloud sponsors, ChaosSearch, Ed Walsh is the CEO of the company, with Thomas Hazel, who's the Founder, CTO, and Chief Scientist. Guys, good to see you again, thanks for coming into our Marlborough studio. >> Always great. >> Great to be here. >> Okay, so there's a little debate, I'm going to put you right in the spot. (Ed chuckling) A little debate going on in the community started by Bob Muglia, a former CEO of Snowflake, and he was at Microsoft for a long time, and he looked at the Supercloud definition, said, "I think you need to tighten it up a little bit." So, here's what he came up with. He said, "A Supercloud is a platform that provides a programmatically consistent set of services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." So he's calling it a platform, not an architecture, which was kind of interesting. And so presumably the platform owner is going to be responsible for the architecture, but Dr. Nelu Mihai, who's a computer scientist behind the Cloud of Clouds Project, he chimed in and responded with the following. He said, "Cloud is a programming paradigm supporting the entire lifecycle of applications with data and logic natively distributed. Supercloud is an open architecture that integrates heterogeneous clouds in an agnostic manner." So, Ed, words matter. Is this an architecture or is it a platform? >> Put us on the spot. So, I'm sure you have concepts, I would say it's an architectural or design principle. Listen, I look at Supercloud as a mega trend, just like cloud, just like data analytics. And some companies are using the principle, design principles, to literally get dramatically ahead of everyone else. I mean, things you couldn't possibly do if you didn't use cloud principles, right? So I think it's a Supercloud effect, you're able to do things you're not able to. So I think it's more a design principle, but if you do it right, you get dramatic effect as far as customer value. >> So the conversation that we were having with Muglia, and Tristan Handy of dbt Labs, was, I'll set it up as the following, and, Thomas, would love to get your thoughts, if you have a CRM, think about applications today, it's all about forms and codifying business processes, you type a bunch of stuff into Salesforce, and all the salespeople do it, and this machine generates a forecast. What if you have this new type of data app that pulls data from the transaction system, the e-commerce, the supply chain, the partner ecosystem, et cetera, and then, without humans, actually comes up with a plan. That's their vision. And Muglia was saying, in order to do that, you need to rethink data architectures and database architectures specifically, you need to get down to the level of how the data is stored on the disc. What are your thoughts on that? Well, first of all, I'm going to cop out, I think it's actually both. I do think it's a design principle, I think it's not open technology, but open APIs, open access, and you can build a platform on that design principle architecture. Now, I'm a database person, I love solving the database problems. >> I'm waited for you to launch into this. >> Yeah, so I mean, you know, Snowflake is a database, right? It's a distributed database. And we wanted to crack those codes, because, multi-region, multi-cloud, customers wanted access to their data, and their data is in a variety of forms, all these services that you're talked about. And so what I saw as a core principle was cloud object storage, everyone streams their data to cloud object storage. From there we said, well, how about we rethink database architecture, rethink file format, so that we can take each one of these services and bring them together, whether distributively or centrally, such that customers can access and get answers, whether it's operational data, whether it's business data, AKA search, or SQL, complex distributed joins. But we had to rethink the architecture. I like to say we're not a first generation, or a second, we're a third generation distributed database on pure, pure cloud storage, no caching, no SSDs. Why? Because all that availability, the cost of time, is a struggle, and cloud object storage, we think, is the answer. >> So when you're saying no caching, so when I think about how companies are solving some, you know, pretty hairy problems, take MySQL Heatwave, everybody thought Oracle was going to just forget about MySQL, well, they come out with Heatwave. And the way they solve problems, and you see their benchmarks against Amazon, "Oh, we crush everybody," is they put it all in memory. So you said no caching? You're not getting performance through caching? How is that true, and how are you getting performance? >> Well, so five, six years ago, right? When you realize that cloud object storage is going to be everywhere, and it's going to be a core foundational, if you will, fabric, what would you do? Well, a lot of times the second generation say, "We'll take it out of cloud storage, put in SSDs or something, and put into cache." And that adds a lot of time, adds a lot of costs. But I said, what if, what if we could actually make the first read hot, the first read distributed joins and searching? And so what we went out to do was said, we can't cache, because that's adds time, that adds cost. We have to make cloud object storage high performance, like it feels like a caching SSD. That's where our patents are, that's where our technology is, and we've spent many years working towards this. So, to me, if you can crack that code, a lot of these issues we're talking about, multi-region, multicloud, different services, everybody wants to send their data to the data lake, but then they move it out, we said, "Keep it right there." >> You nailed it, the data gravity. So, Bob's right, the data's coming in, and you need to get the data from everywhere, but you need an environment that you can deal with all that different schema, all the different type of technology, but also at scale. Bob's right, you cannot use memory or SSDs to cache that, that doesn't scale, it doesn't scale cost effectively. But if you could, and what you did, is you made object storage, S3 first, but object storage, the only persistence by doing that. And then we get performance, we should talk about it, it's literally, you know, hundreds of terabytes of queries, and it's done in seconds, it's done without memory caching. We have concepts of caching, but the only caching, the only persistence, is actually when we're doing caching, we're just keeping another side-eye track of things on the S3 itself. So we're using, actually, the object storage to be a database, which is kind of where Bob was saying, we agree, but that's what you started at, people thought you were crazy. >> And maybe make it live. Don't think of it as archival or temporary space, make it live, real time streaming, operational data. What we do is make it smart, we see the data coming in, we uniquely index it such that you can get your use cases, that are search, observability, security, or backend operational. But we don't have to have this, I dunno, static, fixed, siloed type of architecture technologies that were traditionally built prior to Supercloud thinking. >> And you don't have to move everything, essentially, you can do it wherever the data lands, whatever cloud across the globe, you're able to bring it together, you get the cost effectiveness, because the only persistence is the cheapest storage persistent layer you can buy. But the key thing is you cracked the code. >> We had to crack the code, right? That was the key thing. >> That's where the plans are. >> And then once you do that, then everything else gets easier to scale, your architecture, across regions, across cloud. >> Now, it's a general purpose database, as Bob was saying, but we use that database to solve a particular issue, which is around operational data, right? So, we agree with Bob's. >> Interesting. So this brings me to this concept of data, Jimata Gan is one of our speakers, you know, we talk about data fabric, which is a NetApp, originally NetApp concept, Gartner's kind of co-opted it. But so, the basic concept is, data lives everywhere, whether it's an S3 bucket, or a SQL database, or a data lake, it's just a node on the data mesh. So in your view, how does this fit in with Supercloud? Ed, you've said that you've built, essentially, an enabler for that, for the data mesh, I think you're an enabler for the Supercloud-like principles. This is a big, chewy opportunity, and it requires, you know, a team approach. There's got to be an ecosystem, there's not going to be one Supercloud to rule them all, so where does the ecosystem fit into the discussion, and where do you fit into the ecosystem? >> Right, so we agree completely, there's not one Supercloud in effect, but we use Supercloud principles to build our platform, and then, you know, the ecosystem's going to be built on leveraging what everyone else's secret powers are, right? So our power, our superpower, based upon what we built is, we deal with, if you're having any scale, or cost effective scale issues, with data, machine generated data, like business observability or security data, we are your force multiplier, we will take that in singularly, just let it, simply put it in your object storage wherever it sits, and we give you uniformity access to that using OpenAPI access, SQL, or you know, Elasticsearch API. So, that's what we do, that's our superpower. So I'll play it into data mesh, that's a perfect, we are a node on a data mesh, but I'll play it in the soup about how, the ecosystem, we see it kind of playing, and we talked about it in just in the last couple days, how we see this kind of possibly. Short term, our superpowers, we deal with this data that's coming at these environments, people, customers, building out observability or security environments, or vendors that are selling their own Supercloud, I do observability, the Datadogs of the world, dot dot dot, the Splunks of the world, dot dot dot, and security. So what we do is we fit in naturally. What we do is a cost effective scale, just land it anywhere in the world, we deal with ingest, and it's a cost effective, an order of magnitude, or two or three order magnitudes more cost effective. Allows them, their customers are asking them to do the impossible, "Give me fast monitoring alerting. I want it snappy, but I want it to keep two years of data, (laughs) and I want it cost effective." It doesn't work. They're good at the fast monitoring alerting, we're good at the long-term retention. And yet there's some gray area between those two, but one to one is actually cheaper, so we would partner. So the first ecosystem plays, who wants to have the ability to, really, all the data's in those same environments, the security observability players, they can literally, just through API, drag our data into their point to grab. We can make it seamless for customers. Right now, we make it helpful to customers. Your Datadog, we make a button, easy go from Datadog to us for logs, save you money. Same thing with Grafana. But you can also look at ecosystem, those same vendors, it used to be a year ago it was, you know, its all about how can you grow, like it's growth at all costs, now it's about cogs. So literally we can go an environment, you supply what your customer wants, but we can help with cogs. And one-on one in a partnership is better than you trying to build on your own. >> Thomas, you were saying you make the first read fast, so you think about Snowflake. Everybody wants to talk about Snowflake and Databricks. So, Snowflake, great, but you got to get the data in there. All right, so that's, can you help with that problem? >> I mean we want simple in, right? And if you have to have structure in, you're not simple. So the idea that you have a simple in, data lake, schema read type philosophy, but schema right type performance. And so what I wanted to do, what we have done, is have that simple lake, and stream that data real time, and those access points of Search or SQL, to go after whatever business case you need, security observability, warehouse integration. But the key thing is, how do I make that click, click, click answer, and do it quickly? And so what we want to do is, that first read has to be fast. Why? 'Cause then you're going to do all this siloing, layers, complexity. If your first read's not fast, you're at a disadvantage, particularly in cost. And nobody says I want less data, but everyone has to, whether they say we're going to shorten the window, we're going to use AI to choose, but in a security moment, when you don't have that answer, you're in trouble. And that's why we are this service, this Supercloud service, if you will, providing access, well-known search, well-known SQL type access, that if you just have one access point, you're at a disadvantage. >> We actually talked about Snowflake and BigQuery, and a different platform, Data Bricks. That's kind of where we see the phase two of ecosystem. One is easy, the low-hanging fruit is observability and security firms. But the next one is, what we do, our super power is dealing with this messy data that schema is changing like night and day. Pipelines are tough, and it's changing all the time, but you want these things fast, and it's big data around the world. That's the next point, just use us alongside, or inside, one of their platforms, and now we get the best of both worlds. Our superpower is keeping this messy data as a streaming, okay, not a batch thing, allow you to do that. So, that's the second one. And then to be honest, the third one, which plays you to Supercloud, it also plays perfectly in the data mesh, is if you really go to the ultimate thing, what we have done is made object storage, S3, GCS, and blob storage, we made it a database. Put, get, complex query with big joins. You know, so back to your original thing, and Muglia teed it up perfectly, we've done that. Now imagine if that's an ecosystem, who would want that? If it's, again, it's uniform available across all the regions, across all the clouds, and it's right next to where you are building a service, or a client's trying, that's where the ecosystem, I think people are going to use Superclouds for their superpowers. We're really good at this, allows that short term. I think the Snowflakes and the Data Bricks are the medium term, you know? And then I think eventually gets to, hey, listen if you can make object storage fast, you can just go after it with simple SQL queries, or elastic. Who would want that? I think that's where people are going to leverage it. It's not going to be one Supercloud, and we leverage the super clouds. >> Our viewpoint is smart object storage can be programmable, and so we agree with Bob, but we're not saying do it here, do it here. This core, fundamental layer across regions, across clouds, that everyone has? Simple in. Right now, it's hard to get data in for access for analysis. So we said, simply, we'll automate the entire process, give you API access across regions, across clouds. And again, how do you do a distributed join that's fast? How do you do a distributed join that doesn't cost you an arm or a leg? And how do you do it at scale? And that's where we've been focused. >> So prior, the cloud object store was a niche. >> Yeah. >> S3 obviously changed that. How standard is, essentially, object store across the different cloud platforms? Is that a problem for you? Is that an easy thing to solve? >> Well, let's talk about it. I mean we've fundamentally, yeah we've extracted it, but fundamentally, cloud object storage, put, get, and list. That's why it's so scalable, 'cause it doesn't have all these other components. That complexity is where we have moved up, and provide direct analytical API access. So because of its simplicity, and costs, and security, and reliability, it can scale naturally. I mean, really, distributed object storage is easy, it's put-get anywhere, now what we've done is we put a layer of intelligence, you know, call it smart object storage, where access is simple. So whether it's multi-region, do a query across, or multicloud, do a query across, or hunting, searching. >> We've had clients doing Amazon and Google, we have some Azure, but we see Amazon and Google more, and it's a consistent service across all of them. Just literally put your data in the bucket of choice, or folder of choice, click a couple buttons, literally click that to say "that's hot," and after that, it's hot, you can see it. But we're not moving data, the data gravity issue, that's the other. That it's already natively flowing to these pools of object storage across different regions and clouds. We don't move it, we index it right there, we're spinning up stateless compute, back to the Supercloud concept. But now that allows us to do all these other things, right? >> And it's no longer just cheap and deep object storage. Right? >> Yeah, we make it the same, like you have an analytic platform regardless of where you're at, you don't have to worry about that. Yeah, we deal with that, we deal with a stateless compute coming up -- >> And make it programmable. Be able to say, "I want this bucket to provide these answers." Right, that's really the hope, the vision. And the complexity to build the entire stack, and then connect them together, we said, the fabric is cloud storage, we just provide the intelligence on top. >> Let's bring it back to the customers, and one of the things we're exploring in Supercloud too is, you know, is Supercloud a solution looking for a problem? Is a multicloud really a problem? I mean, you hear, you know, a lot of the vendor marketing says, "Oh, it's a disaster, because it's all different across the clouds." And I talked to a lot of customers even as part of Supercloud too, they're like, "Well, I solved that problem by just going mono cloud." Well, but then you're not able to take advantage of a lot of the capabilities and the primitives that, you know, like Google's data, or you like Microsoft's simplicity, their RPA, whatever it is. So what are customers telling you, what are their near term problems that they're trying to solve today, and how are they thinking about the future? >> Listen, it's a real problem. I think it started, I think this is a a mega trend, just like cloud. Just, cloud data, and I always add, analytics, are the mega trends. If you're looking at those, if you're not considering using the Supercloud principles, in other words, leveraging what I have, abstracting it out, and getting the most out of that, and then build value on top, I think you're not going to be able to keep up, In fact, no way you're going to keep up with this data volume. It's a geometric challenge, and you're trying to do linear things. So clients aren't necessarily asking, hey, for Supercloud, but they're really saying, I need to have a better mechanism to simplify this and get value across it, and how do you abstract that out to do that? And that's where they're obviously, our conversations are more amazed what we're able to do, and what they're able to do with our platform, because if you think of what we've done, the S3, or GCS, or object storage, is they can't imagine the ingest, they can't imagine how easy, time to glass, one minute, no matter where it lands in the world, querying this in seconds for hundreds of terabytes squared. People are amazed, but that's kind of, so they're not asking for that, but they are amazed. And then when you start talking on it, if you're an enterprise person, you're building a big cloud data platform, or doing data or analytics, if you're not trying to leverage the public clouds, and somehow leverage all of them, and then build on top, then I think you're missing it. So they might not be asking for it, but they're doing it. >> And they're looking for a lens, you mentioned all these different services, how do I bring those together quickly? You know, our viewpoint, our service, is I have all these streams of data, create a lens where they want to go after it via search, go after via SQL, bring them together instantly, no e-tailing out, no define this table, put into this database. We said, let's have a service that creates a lens across all these streams, and then make those connections. I want to take my CRM with my Google AdWords, and maybe my Salesforce, how do I do analysis? Maybe I want to hunt first, maybe I want to join, maybe I want to add another stream to it. And so our viewpoint is, it's so natural to get into these lake platforms and then provide lenses to get that access. >> And they don't want it separate, they don't want something different here, and different there. They want it basically -- >> So this is our industry, right? If something new comes out, remember virtualization came out, "Oh my God, this is so great, it's going to solve all these problems." And all of a sudden it just got to be this big, more complex thing. Same thing with cloud, you know? It started out with S3, and then EC2, and now hundreds and hundreds of different services. So, it's a complex matter for a lot of people, and this creates problems for customers, especially when you got divisions that are using different clouds, and you're saying that the solution, or a solution for the part of the problem, is to really allow the data to stay in place on S3, use that standard, super simple, but then give it what, Ed, you've called superpower a couple of times, to make it fast, make it inexpensive, and allow you to do that across clouds. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I'll give you guys the last word on that. >> No, listen, I think, we think Supercloud allows you to do a lot more. And for us, data, everyone says more data, more problems, more budget issue, everyone knows more data is better, and we show you how to do it cost effectively at scale. And we couldn't have done it without the design principles of we're leveraging the Supercloud to get capabilities, and because we use super, just the object storage, we're able to get these capabilities of ingest, scale, cost effectiveness, and then we built on top of this. In the end, a database is a data platform that allows you to go after everything distributed, and to get one platform for analytics, no matter where it lands, that's where we think the Supercloud concepts are perfect, that's where our clients are seeing it, and we're kind of excited about it. >> Yeah a third generation database, Supercloud database, however we want to phrase it, and make it simple, but provide the value, and make it instant. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming into the studio today, I really thank you for your support of theCUBE, and theCUBE community, it allows us to provide events like this and free content. I really appreciate it. >> Oh, thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, this is Dave Vellante for John Furrier in theCUBE community, thanks for being with us today. You're watching Supercloud 2, keep it right there for more thought provoking discussions around the future of cloud and data. (bright music)

(bright upbeat melody) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, here at theCUBE in Palo Alto, California, for our live stage performance all day for Supercloud2. Unpacking this next generation movement in cloud computing. Dave, Supercloud1 was in August. We had great response and acceleration of that momentum. We had some haters too. We had some folks out there throwing shade on this. But at the same time, a lot of leaders came out of the woodwork, a lot of practitioners. And this Supercloud2 event I think will expose and illustrate some of the examples of what's happening in the industry and more importantly, kind of where it's going. >> Well it's great to be back in our studios in Palo Alto, John. Seems like just yesterday was August 9th, where the community was really refining the definition of Super Cloud. We were identifying the essential characteristics, with some of the leading technologists in Silicon Valley. We were digging into the deployment models. Whereas this Supercloud, Supercloud2 is really taking a practitioner view. We're going to hear from Walmart today. They've built a Supercloud. They called it the Walmart Cloud native platform. We're going to hear from other data practitioners, like Saks. We're going to hear from Western Union. They've got 200 locations around the world, how they're dealing with data sovereignty. And of course we've got some local technologists and practitioners coming in, analysts, consultants, theCUBE community. I'm really excited to be here. >> And we've got some great keynotes from executives at VMware. We're going to expose some of the things that they're working on around cross cloud services, which leads into multicloud. I think the practitioner angle highlights my favorite part of this program, 'cause you're starting to see the builders, a term coined by Andy Jassy, early days of AWS. That builder movement has been continuing to go. And you're seeing the enterprise, global enterprises adopt this builder mentality with Cloud Native. This is going to power the next generation global economy. And I think the role of the cloud computing vendors like AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba are going to be the source engine of innovation. And what gets built on top of and with the clouds will be a big significant market value for all businesses and their business models. So I think the market wants the supercloud, the business models are pointing to Supercloud. The technology needs supercloud. And society, from an economic standpoint and from a use case standpoint, needs supercloud. You're seeing it today. Everyone's talking about chat GPT. This is an example of what will come out of this next generation and it's just getting started. So to me, you're either on the supercloud side of the camp or you're on the old school, hugging onto the old school mentality of wait a minute, that's cloud computing. So I think if you're not on the super cloud wave, you're going to be driftwood. And that's a term coined by Pat Gelsinger. And this is really the reality. Are you on the super cloud side? Or are you on the old huggin' the old model? And that's going to be a determinant. And you're going to see who's going to be the players on that, Dave. This is going to be a real big year. >> Everybody's heard the phrase follow the money. Well, my philosophy is follow the data. And that's a big part of what Supercloud2 is, because the data is where the money is across the clouds. And people want more simplicity, or greater simplicity across the clouds. So it's really, there's two forces here. You've got the ecosystem that's saying, hey the hyperscalers, they've done a great job but there's problems that they're not solving. So we're going to lean in and solve those problems. At the same time, you have the practitioners saying we have multicloud, we have to deal with this, help us. It's got to be simpler. Because we want to share data across clouds. We want to build data products, we want to monetize and drive revenue and cut costs. >> This is the key thing. The builder movement is hitting a wall, and that wall will be broken down because the business models of the companies themselves are demanding that the value from the data with security has to be embedded. So I think you're going to see a big year this next year or so where the builders will accelerate through this next generation, supercloud wave, will be a builder's wave for business. And I think that's going to be the nuance here. And all the people that are on the side of Supercloud are all pro-business, pro-technology. The ones that aren't are like, wait a minute I used to do things differently. They're stuck. And so I think this is going to be a question of are we stuck? Are builders accelerating? Will the business models develop around it? That's digital transformation. At the end of the day, the market's speaking, Dave. The market wants more. Chat GPT, you're seeing AI starting to flourish, powered by data. It's unstoppable, supercloud's unstoppable. >> One of our headliners today is Zhamak Dehghani, the creator of Data Mesh. We've got some news around her. She's going to be live in studio. Super excited about that. Kit Colbert in Supercloud, the first Supercloud in last August, laid out an initial architecture for Supercloud. He's going to advance that today, tell us what's changed, and really dig into and really talk about the meat on the bone, if you will. And we've got some other technologists that are coming in saying, Hey, is it a platform? Is it an architecture? What's the right model here? So we're going to debate that a little bit today. >> And before we close, I'll just say look at the guests, look at the talk tracks. You're seeing a diversity of startups doing cloud networking, you're seeing big practitioners building their own thing, being builders for business value and business model advantages. And you got companies like VMware, who have been on the wave of virtualization. So the, everyone who's involved in super cloud, they're seeing it, they're on the front lines. They're seeing the trend. They are riding that wave. And they have, they're bringing data to the table. So to me, you look at who's involved and you judge it that way. To me, that's the way I look at this. And because we're making it open, Supercloud is going to continue to be debated. But more importantly, the results are going to come in. The market supports it, the business needs it, tech's there, and will it happen? So I think the builders movement, Dave, is going to be big to watch. And then ultimately how that business transformation kicks in, and I think those are the two variables that I would watch on Supercloud. >> Our mission has always been around free content, giving back to the community. So I really want to thank our sponsors today. We've had a great partnership with VMware, who's not only contributed some financial support, but also great content. Alkira, ChaosSearch, prosimo, all phenomenal, allowing us to achieve our mission of serving our audiences and really trying to give more than we take from. >> Free content, that's our mission. Dave, great to kick it off. Kickin' off Supercloud2 all day, we've got some great programs here. We've got VMware coming up next. We have Victoria Viering, who's been on before. He's got a great vision for cross cloud service. We're getting also a keynote with Kit Colbert, who's going to lay out the fragmentation and the benefits that that solves, from solvent fragmentation and silos, breaking down the silos and bringing multicloud future to the table via Super Cloud. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. (bright upbeat music) (music fades)

(gentle music) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto, California for our live stage performance. Supercloud 2 is our second Supercloud event. We're going to get these out as fast as we can every couple months. It's our second one, you'll see two and three this year. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Dave Vellante. A panel here to break down the Supercloud momentum, the wave, and the developer impact that we bringing back Vittorio Viarengo, who's a VP for Cross-Cloud Services at VMware. Sarbjeet Johal, industry influencer and Analyst at StackPayne, his company, Cube alumni and Influencer. Sarbjeet, great to see you. Vittorio, thanks for coming back. >> Nice to be here. >> My pleasure. >> Vittorio, you just gave a keynote where we unpacked the cross-cloud services, what VMware is doing, how you guys see it, not just from VMware's perspective, but VMware looking out broadly at the industry and developers came up and you were like, "Developers, developer, developers", kind of a goof on the Steve Ballmer famous meme that everyone's seen. This is a huge star, sorry, I mean a big piece of it. The developers are the canary in the coal mines. They're the ones who are being asked to code the digital transformation, which is fully business transformation and with the market the way it is right now in terms of the accelerated technology, every enterprise grade business model's changing. The technology is evolving, the builders are kind of, they want go faster. I'm saying they're stuck in a way, but that's my opinion, but there's a lot of growth. >> Yeah. >> The impact, they got to get released up and let it go. Those developers need to accelerate faster. It's been a big part of productivity, and the conversations we've had. So developer impact is huge in Supercloud. What's your, what do you guys think about this? We'll start with you, Sarbjeet. >> Yeah, actually, developers are the masons of the digital empires I call 'em, right? They lay every brick and build all these big empires. On the left side of the SDLC, or the, you know, when you look at the system operations, developer is number one cost from economic side of things, and from technology side of things, they are tech hungry people. They are developers for that reason because developer nights are long, hours are long, they forget about when to eat, you know, like, I've been a developer, I still code. So you want to keep them happy, you want to hug your developers. We always say that, right? Vittorio said that right earlier. The key is to, in this context, in the Supercloud context, is that developers don't mind mucking around with platforms or APIs or new languages, but they hate the infrastructure part. That's a fact. They don't want to muck around with servers. It's friction for them, it is like they don't want to muck around even with the VMs. So they want the programmability to the nth degree. They want to automate everything, so that's how they think and cloud is the programmable infrastructure, industrialization of infrastructure in many ways. So they are happy with where we are going, and we need more abstraction layers for some developers. By the way, I have this sort of thinking frame for last year or so, not all developers are same, right? So if you are a developer at an ISV, you behave differently. If you are a developer at a typical enterprise, you behave differently or you are forced to behave differently because you're not writing software.- >> Well, developers, developers have changed, I mean, Vittorio, you and I were talking earlier on the keynote, and this is kind of the key point is what is a developer these days? If everything is software enabled, I mean, even hardware interviews we do with Nvidia, and Amazon and other people building silicon, they all say the same thing, "It's software on a chip." So you're seeing the role of software up and down the stack and the role of the stack is changing. The old days of full stack developer, what does that even mean? I mean, the cloud is a half a stack kind of right there. So, you know, developers are certainly more agile, but cloud native, I mean VMware is epitome of operations, IT operations, and the Tan Zoo initiative, you guys started, you went after the developers to look at them, and ask them questions, "What do you need?", "How do you transform the Ops from virtualization?" Again, back to your point, so this hardware abstraction, what is software, what is cloud native? It's kind of messy equation these days. How do you guys grokel with that? >> I would argue that developers don't want the Supercloud. I dropped that up there, so, >> Dave: Why not? >> Because developers, they, once they get comfortable in AWS or Google, because they're doing some AI stuff, which is, you know, very trendy right now, or they are in IBM, any of the IPA scaler, professional developers, system developers, they love that stuff, right? Yeah, they don't, the infrastructure gets in the way, but they're just, the problem is, and I think the Supercloud should be driven by the operators because as we discussed, the operators have been left behind because they're busy with day-to-day jobs, and in most cases IT is centralized, developers are in the business units. >> John: Yeah. >> Right? So they get the mandate from the top, say, "Our bank, they're competing against". They gave teenagers or like young people the ability to do all these new things online, and Venmo and all this integration, where are we? "Oh yeah, we can do it", and then build it, and then deploy it, "Okay, we caught up." but now the operators are back in the private cloud trying to keep the backend system running and so I think the Supercloud is needed for the primarily, initially, for the operators to get in front of the developers, fit in the workflow, but lay the foundation so it is secure.- >> So, so I love this thinking because I love the rift, because the rift points to what is the target audience for the value proposition and if you're a developer, Supercloud enables you so you shouldn't have to deal with Supercloud. >> Exactly. >> What you're saying is get the operating environment or operating system done properly, whether it's architecture, building the platform, this comes back to architecture platform conversations. What is the future platform? Is it a vendor supplied or is it customer created platform? >> Dave: So developers want best to breed, is what you just said. >> Vittorio: Yeah. >> Right and operators, they, 'cause developers don't want to deal with governance, they don't want to deal with security, >> No. >> They don't want to deal with spinning up infrastructure. That's the role of the operator, but that's where Supercloud enables, to John's point, the developer, so to your question, is it a platform where the platform vendor is responsible for the architecture, or there is it an architectural standard that spans multiple clouds that has to emerge? Based on what you just presented earlier, Vittorio, you are the determinant of the architecture. It's got to be open, but you guys determine that, whereas the nirvana is, "Oh no, it's all open, and it just kind of works." >> Yeah, so first of all, let's all level set on one thing. You cannot tell developers what to do. >> Dave: Right, great >> At least great developers, right? Cannot tell them what to do. >> Dave: So that's what, that's the way I want to sort of, >> You can tell 'em what's possible. >> There's a bottle on that >> If you tell 'em what's possible, they'll test it, they'll look at it, but if you try to jam it down their throat, >> Yeah. >> Dave: You can't tell 'em how to do it, just like your point >> Let me answer your answer the question. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So I think we need to build an architect, help them build an architecture, but it cannot be proprietary, has to be built on what works in the cloud and so what works in the cloud today is Kubernetes, is you know, number of different open source project that you need to enable and then provide, use this, but when I first got exposed to Kubernetes, I said, "Hallelujah!" We had a runtime that works the same everywhere only to realize there are 12 different distributions. So that's where we come in, right? And other vendors come in to say, "Hey, no, we can make them all look the same. So you still use Kubernetes, but we give you a place to build, to set those operation policy once so that you don't create friction for the developers because that's the last thing you want to do." >> Yeah, actually, coming back to the same point, not all developers are same, right? So if you're ISV developer, you want to go to the lowest sort of level of the infrastructure and you want to shave off the milliseconds from to get that performance, right? If you're working at AWS, you are doing that. If you're working at scale at Facebook, you're doing that. At Twitter, you're doing that, but when you go to DMV and Kansas City, you're not doing that, right? So your developers are different in nature. They are given certain parameters to work with, certain sort of constraints on the budget side. They are educated at a different level as well. Like they don't go to that end of the degree of sort of automation, if you will. So you cannot have the broad stroking of developers. We are talking about a citizen developer these days. That's a extreme low, >> You mean Low-Code. >> Yeah, Low-Code, No-code, yeah, on the extreme side. On one side, that's citizen developers. On the left side is the professional developers, when you say developers, your mind goes to the professional developers, like the hardcore developers, they love the flexibility, you know, >> John: Well app, developers too, I mean. >> App developers, yeah. >> You're right a lot of, >> Sarbjeet: Infrastructure platform developers, app developers, yes. >> But there are a lot of customers, its a spectrum, you're saying. >> Yes, it's a spectrum >> There's a lot of customers don't want deal with that muck. >> Yeah. >> You know, like you said, AWS, Twitter, the sophisticated developers do, but there's a whole suite of developers out there >> Yeah >> That just want tools that are abstracted. >> Within a company, within a company. Like how I see the Supercloud is there shouldn't be anything which blocks the developers, like their view of the world, of the future. Like if you're blocked as a developer, like something comes in front of you, you are not developer anymore, believe me, (John laughing) so you'll go somewhere else >> John: First of all, I'm, >> You'll leave the company by the way. >> Dave: Yeah, you got to quit >> Yeah, you will quit, you will go where the action is, where there's no sort of blockage there. So like if you put in front of them like a huge amount of a distraction, they don't like it, so they don't, >> Well, the idea of a developer, >> Coming back to that >> Let's get into 'cause you mentioned platform. Get year in the term platform engineering now. >> Yeah. >> Platform developer. You know, I remember back in, and I think there's still a term used today, but when I graduated my computer science degree, we were called "Software engineers," right? Do people use that term "Software engineering", or is it "Software development", or they the same, are they different? >> Well, >> I think there's a, >> So, who's engineering what? Are they engineering or are they developing? Or both? Well, I think it the, you made a great point. There is a factor of, I had the, I was blessed to work with Adam Bosworth, that is the guy that created some of the abstraction layer, like Visual Basic and Microsoft Access and he had so, he made his whole career thinking about this layer, and he always talk about the professional developers, the developers that, you know, give him a user manual, maybe just go at the APIs, he'll build anything, right, from system engine, go down there, and then through obstruction, you get the more the procedural logic type of engineers, the people that used to be able to write procedural logic and visual basic and so on and so forth. I think those developers right now are a little cut out of the picture. There's some No-code, Low-Code environment that are maybe gain some traction, I caught up with Adam Bosworth two weeks ago in New York and I asked him "What's happening to this higher level developers?" and you know what he is told me, and he is always a little bit out there, so I'm going to use his thought process here. He says, "ChapGPT", I mean, they will get to a point where this high level procedural logic will be written by, >> John: Computers. >> Computers, and so we may not need as many at the high level, but we still need the engineers down there. The point is the operation needs to get in front of them >> But, wait, wait, you seen the ChatGPT meme, I dunno if it's a Dilbert thing where it's like, "Time to tic" >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did that >> "Time to develop the code >> Five minutes, time to decode", you know, to debug the codes like five hours. So you know, the whole equation >> Well, this ChatGPT is a hot wave, everyone's been talking about it because I think it illustrates something that's NextGen, feels NextGen, and it's just getting started so it's going to get better. I mean people are throwing stones at it, but I think it's amazing. It's the equivalent of me seeing the browser for the first time, you know, like, "Wow, this is really compelling." This is game-changing, it's not just keyword chat bots. It's like this is real, this is next level, and I think the Supercloud wave that people are getting behind points to that and I think the question of Ops and Dev comes up because I think if you limit the infrastructure opportunity for a developer, I think they're going to be handicapped. I mean that's a general, my opinion, the thesis is you give more aperture to developers, more choice, more capabilities, more good things could happen, policy, and that's why you're seeing the convergence of networking people, virtualization talent, operational talent, get into the conversation because I think it's an infrastructure engineering opportunity. I think this is a seminal moment in a new stack that's emerging from an infrastructure, software virtualization, low-code, no-code layer that will be completely programmable by things like the next Chat GPT or something different, but yet still the mechanics and the plumbing will still need engineering. >> Sarbjeet: Oh yeah. >> So there's still going to be more stuff coming on. >> Yeah, we have, with the cloud, we have made the infrastructure programmable and you give the programmability to the programmer, they will be very creative with that and so we are being very creative with our infrastructure now and on top of that, we are being very creative with the silicone now, right? So we talk about that. That's part of it, by the way. So you write the code to the particle's silicone now, and on the flip side, the silicone is built for certain use cases for AI Inference and all that. >> You saw this at CES? >> Yeah, I saw at CES, the scenario is this, the Bosch, I spoke to Bosch, I spoke to John Deere, I spoke to AWS guys, >> Yeah. >> They were showcasing their technology there and I was spoke to Azure guys as well. So the Bosch is a good example. So they are building, they are right now using AWS. I have that interview on camera, I will put it some sometime later on there online. So they're using AWS on the back end now, but Bosch is the number one, number one or number two depending on what day it is of the year, supplier of the componentry to the auto industry, and they are creating a platform for our auto industry, so is Qualcomm actually by the way, with the Snapdragon. So they told me that customers, their customers, BMW, Audi, all the manufacturers, they demand the diversity of the backend. Like they don't want all, they, all of them don't want to go to AWS. So they want the choice on the backend. So whatever they cook in the middle has to work, they have to sprinkle the data for the data sovereign side because they have Chinese car makers as well, and for, you know, for other reasons, competitive reasons and like use. >> People don't go to, aw, people don't go to AWS either for political reasons or like competitive reasons or specific use cases, but for the most part, generally, I haven't met anyone who hasn't gone first choice with either, but that's me personally. >> No, but they're building. >> Point is the developer wants choice at the back end is what I'm hearing, but then finish that thought. >> Their developers want the choice, they want the choice on the back end, number one, because the customers are asking for, in this case, the customers are asking for it, right? But the customers requirements actually drive, their economics drives that decision making, right? So in the middle they have to, they're forced to cook up some solution which is vendor neutral on the backend or multicloud in nature. So >> Yeah, >> Every >> I mean I think that's nirvana. I don't think, I personally don't see that happening right now. I mean, I don't see the parody with clouds. So I think that's a challenge. I mean, >> Yeah, true. >> I mean the fact of the matter is if the development teams get fragmented, we had this chat with Kit Colbert last time, I think he's going to come on and I think he's going to talk about his keynote in a few, in an hour or so, development teams is this, the cloud is heterogenous, which is great. It's complex, which is challenging. You need skilled engineering to manage these clouds. So if you're a CIO and you go all in on AWS, it's hard. Then to then go out and say, "I want to be completely multi-vendor neutral" that's a tall order on many levels and this is the multicloud challenge, right? So, the question is, what's the strategy for me, the CIO or CISO, what do I do? I mean, to me, I would go all in on one and start getting hedges and start playing and then look at some >> Crystal clear. Crystal clear to me. >> Go ahead. >> If you're a CIO today, you have to build a platform engineering team, no question. 'Cause if we agree that we cannot tell the great developers what to do, we have to create a platform engineering team that using pieces of the Supercloud can build, and let's make this very pragmatic and give examples. First you need to be able to lay down the run time, okay? So you need a way to deploy multiple different Kubernetes environment in depending on the cloud. Okay, now we got that. The second part >> That's like table stakes. >> That are table stake, right? But now what is the advantage of having a Supercloud service to do that is that now you can put a policy in one place and it gets distributed everywhere consistently. So for example, you want to say, "If anybody in this organization across all these different buildings, all these developers don't even know, build a PCI compliant microservice, They can only talk to PCI compliant microservice." Now, I sleep tight. The developers still do that. Of course they're going to get their hands slapped if they don't encrypt some messages and say, "Oh, that should have been encrypted." So number one. The second thing I want to be able to say, "This service that this developer built over there better satisfy this SLA." So if the SLA is not satisfied, boom, I automatically spin up multiple instances to certify the SLA. Developers unencumbered, they don't even know. So this for me is like, CIO build a platform engineering team using one of the many Supercloud services that allow you to do that and lay down. >> And part of that is that the vendor behavior is such, 'cause the incentive is that they don't necessarily always work together. (John chuckling) I'll give you an example, we're going to hear today from Western Union. They're AWS shop, but they want to go to Google, they want to use some of Google's AI tools 'cause they're good and maybe they're even arguably better, but they're also a Snowflake customer and what you'll hear from them is Amazon and Snowflake are working together so that SageMaker can be integrated with Snowflake but Google said, "No, you want to use our AI tools, you got to use BigQuery." >> Yeah. >> Okay. So they say, "Ah, forget it." So if you have a platform engineering team, you can maybe solve some of that vendor friction and get competitive advantage. >> I think that the future proximity concept that I talk about is like, when you're doing one thing, you want to do another thing. Where do you go to get that thing, right? So that is very important. Like your question, John, is that your point is that AWS is ahead of the pack, which is true, right? They have the >> breadth of >> Infrastructure by a lot >> infrastructure service, right? They breadth of services, right? So, how do you, When do you bring in other cloud providers, right? So I believe that you should standardize on one cloud provider, like that's your primary, and for others, bring them in on as needed basis, in the subsection or sub portfolio of your applications or your platforms, what ever you can. >> So yeah, the Google AI example >> Yeah, I mean, >> Or the Microsoft collaboration software example. I mean there's always or the M and A. >> Yeah, but- >> You're going to get to run Windows, you can run Windows on Amazon, so. >> By the way, Supercloud doesn't mean that you cannot do that. So the perfect example is say that you're using Azure because you have a SQL server intensive workload. >> Yep >> And you're using Google for ML, great. If you are using some differentiated feature of this cloud, you'll have to go somewhere and configure this widget, but what you can abstract with the Supercloud is the lifecycle manage of the service that runs on top, right? So how does the service get deployed, right? How do you monitor performance? How do you lifecycle it? How you secure it that you can abstract and that's the value and eventually value will win. So the customers will find what is the values, obstructing in making it uniform or going deeper? >> How about identity? Like take identity for instance, you know, that's an opportunity to abstract. Whether I use Microsoft Identity or Okta, and I can abstract that. >> Yeah, and then we have APIs and standards that we can use so eventually I think where there is enough pain, the right open source will emerge to solve that problem. >> Dave: Yeah, I can use abstract things like object store, right? That's pretty simple. >> But back to the engineering question though, is that developers, developers, developers, one thing about developers psychology is if something's not right, they say, "Go get fixing. I'm not touching it until you fix it." They're very sticky about, if something's not working, they're not going to do it again, right? So you got to get it right for developers. I mean, they'll maybe tolerate something new, but is the "juice worth the squeeze" as they say, right? So you can't go to direct say, "Hey, it's, what's a work in progress? We're going to get our infrastructure together and the world's going to be great for you, but just hang tight." They're going to be like, "Get your shit together then talk to me." So I think that to me is the question. It's an Ops question, but where's that value for the developer in Supercloud where the capabilities are there, there's less friction, it's simpler, it solves the complexity problem. I don't need these high skilled labor to manage Amazon. I got services exposed. >> That's what we talked about earlier. It's like the Walmart example. They basically, they took away from the developer the need to spin up infrastructure and worry about all the governance. I mean, it's not completely there yet. So the developer could focus on what he or she wanted to do. >> But there's a big, like in our industry, there's a big sort of flaw or the contention between developers and operators. Developers want to be on the cutting edge, right? And operators want to be on the stability, you know, like we want governance. >> Yeah, totally. >> Right, so they want to control, developers are like these little bratty kids, right? And they want Legos, like they want toys, right? Some of them want toys by way. They want Legos, they want to build there and they want make a mess out of it. So you got to make sure. My number one advice in this context is that do it up your application portfolio and, or your platform portfolio if you are an ISV, right? So if you are ISV you most probably, you're building a platform these days, do it up in a way that you can say this portion of our applications and our platform will adhere to what you are saying, standardization, you know, like Kubernetes, like slam dunk, you know, it works across clouds and in your data center hybrid, you know, whole nine yards, but there is some subset on the next door systems of innovation. Everybody has, it doesn't matter if you're DMV of Kansas or you are, you know, metaverse, right? Or Meta company, right, which is Facebook, they have it, they are building something new. For that, give them some freedom to choose different things like play with non-standard things. So that is the mantra for moving forward, for any enterprise. >> Do you think developers are happy with the infrastructure now or are they wanting people to get their act together? I mean, what's your reaction, or you think. >> Developers are happy as long as they can do their stuff, which is running code. They want to write code and innovate. So to me, when Ballmer said, "Developer, develop, Developer, what he meant was, all you other people get your act together so these developers can do their thing, and to me the Supercloud is the way for IT to get there and let developer be creative and go fast. Why not, without getting in trouble. >> Okay, let's wrap up this segment with a super clip. Okay, we're going to do a sound bite that we're going to make into a short video for each of you >> All right >> On you guys summarizing why Supercloud's important, why this next wave is relevant for the practitioners, for the industry and we'll turn this into an Instagram reel, YouTube short. So we'll call it a "Super clip. >> Alright, >> Sarbjeet, you want, you want some time to think about it? You want to go first? Vittorio, you want. >> I just didn't mind. (all laughing) >> No, okay, okay. >> I'll do it again. >> Go back. No, we got a fresh one. We'll going to already got that one in the can. >> I'll go. >> Sarbjeet, you go first. >> I'll go >> What's your super clip? >> In software systems, abstraction is your friend. I always say that. Abstraction is your friend, even if you're super professional developer, abstraction is your friend. We saw from the MFC library from C++ days till today. Abstract, use abstraction. Do not try to reinvent what's already being invented. Leverage cloud, leverage the platform side of the cloud. Not just infrastructure service, but platform as a service side of the cloud as well, and Supercloud is a meta platform built on top of these infrastructure services from three or four or five cloud providers. So use that and embrace the programmability, embrace the abstraction layer. That's the key actually, and developers who are true developers or professional developers as you said, they know that. >> Awesome. Great super clip. Vittorio, another shot at the plate here for super clip. Go. >> Multicloud is awesome. There's a reason why multicloud happened, is because gave our developers the ability to innovate fast and ever before. So if you are embarking on a digital transformation journey, which I call a survival journey, if you're not innovating and transforming, you're not going to be around in business three, five years from now. You have to adopt the Supercloud so the developer can be developer and keep building great, innovating digital experiences for your customers and IT can get in front of it and not get in trouble together. >> Building those super apps with Supercloud. That was a great super clip. Vittorio, thank you for sharing. >> Thanks guys. >> Sarbjeet, thanks for coming on talking about the developer impact Supercloud 2. On our next segment, coming up right now, we're going to hear from Walmart enterprise architect, how they are building and they are continuing to innovate, to build their own Supercloud. Really informative, instructive from a practitioner doing it in real time. Be right back with Walmart here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Welcome back everyone to the closing remarks here before we kick off our ecosystem portion of the program. We're live in Palo Alto for theCUBE special presentation of Supercloud 2. It's the second edition, the first one was in August. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Here to wrap up with our special guest analyst George Gilbert, investor and industry legend former colleague of ours, analyst at Wikibon. George great to see you. Dave, you know, wrapping up this day what in a phenomenal program. We had a contribution from industry vendors, industry experts, practitioners and customers building and redefining their company's business model. Rolling out technology for Supercloud and multicloud and ultimately changing how they do data. And data was the theme today. So very, very great program. Before we jump into our favorite parts let's give a shout out to the folks who make this possible. Free contents our mission. We'll always stay true to that mission. We want to thank VMware, alkira, ChaosSearch, prosimo for being sponsors of this great program. We will have Supercloud 3 coming up in a month or so, or two months. We'll see. Or sooner, we don't know. But it'll be more about security, but a lot more momentum. Okay, so that's... >> And don't forget too that this program not going to end now. We've got a whole ecosystem speaks track so stay tuned for that. >> John: Yeah, we got another 20 interviews. Feels like it. >> Well, you're going to hear from Saks, Veronika Durgin. You're going to hear from Western Union, Harveer Singh. You're going to hear from Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Nick Taylor. Brian Gracely chimes in on Supecloud. So he's the man behind the cloud cast. >> Yeah, and you know, the practitioners again, pay attention to also to the cloud networking interviews. Lot of change going on there that's going to be disruptive and actually change the landscape as well. Again, as Supercloud progresses to be the next big thing. If you're not on this next wave, you'll drift what, as Pat Gelsinger says. >> Yep. >> To kick off the closing segments, George, Dave, this is a wave that's been identified. Again, people debate the word all you want Supercloud. It is a gateway to multicloud eventually it is the standard for new applications, new ways to do data. There's new computer science being generated and customer requirements being addressed. So it's the confluence of, you know, tectonic plates shifting in the industry, new computer science seeing things like AI and machine learning and data at the center of it and new infrastructure all kind of coming together. So, to me, that's my takeaway so far. That is the big story and it's going to change society and ultimately the business models of these companies. >> Well, we've had 10, you know, you think about it we came out of the financial crisis. We've had 10, 12 years despite the Covid of tech success, right? And just now CIOs are starting to hit the brakes. And so my point is you've had all this innovation building up for a decade and you've got this massive ecosystem that is running on the cloud and the ecosystem is saying, hey, we can have even more value by tapping best of of breed across clouds. And you've got customers saying, hey, we need help. We want to do more and we want to point our business and our intellectual property, our software tooling at our customers and monetize our data. So you have all these forces coming together and it's sort of entering a new era. >> George, I want to go to you for a second because you are big contributor to this event. Your interview with Bob Moglia with Dave was I thought a watershed moment for me to hear that the data apps, how databases are being rethought because we've been seeing a diversity of databases with Amazon Web services, you know, promoting no one database rules of the world. Now it's not one database kind of architecture that's puling these new apps. What's your takeaway from this event? >> So if you keep your eye on this North Star where instead of building apps that are based on code you're building apps that are defined by data coming off of things that are linked to the real world like people, places, things and activities. Then the idea is, and the example we use is, you know, Uber but it could be, you know, amazon.com is defined by stuff coming off data in the Amazon ecosystem or marketplace. And then the question is, and everyone was talking at different angles on this, which was, where's the data live? How much do you hide from the developer? You know, and when can you offer that? You know, and you started with Walmart which was describing apps, traditional apps that are just code. And frankly that's easier to make that cross cloud and you know, essentially location independent. As soon as you have data you need data management technology that a customer does not have the sophistication to build. And then the argument was like, so how much can you hide from the developer who's building data apps? Tristan's version was you take the modern data stack and you start adding these APIs that define business concepts like bookings, billings and revenue, you know, or in the Uber example like drivers and riders, you know, and ETA's and prices. But those things execute still on the data warehouse or data lakehouse. Then Bob Muglia was saying you're not really hiding enough from the developer because you still got to say how to do all that. And his vision is not only do you hide where the data is but you hide how to sort of get at all that code by just saying what you want. You define how a car and how a driver and how a rider works. And then those things automatically figure out underneath the cover. >> So huge challenges, right? There's governance, there's security, they could be big blockers to, you know, the Supercloud but the industry's going to be attacking that problem. >> Well, what's your take? What's your favorite segment? Zhamak Dehghani came on, she's starting in that company, exclusive news. That was big notable moment for theCUBE. She launched her company. She pioneered the data mesh concept. And I think what George is saying and what data mesh points to is something that we've been saying for a long time. That data is now going to flip the script on how apps behave. And the Uber example I think is illustrated 'cause people can relate to Uber. But imagine that for every business whether it's a manufacturing business or retail or oil and gas or FinTech, they can look at their business like a game almost gamify it with data, riders, cars you know, moving data around the value of data. This is something that Adam Selipsky teased out at AWS, Dave. So what's your takeaway from this Supercloud? Where are we in your mind? Well big thing is data products and decentralizing your data architecture, but putting data in the hands of domain experts who can actually monetize the data. And I think that's, to me that's really exciting. Because look, data products financial industry has always been doing building data products. Mortgage backed securities is a data product. But why should the financial industry have all the fun? I mean virtually every organization can tap its ecosystem build data products, take its internal IP and processes and software and point it to the world and actually begin to make money out of it. >> Okay, so let's go around the horn. I'll start, I'll get you guys some time to think. Next question, what did you learn today? I learned that I think it's an infrastructure game and talking to Kit Colbert at VMware, I think it's all about infrastructure refactoring and I think the data's going to be an ingredient that's going to be operating system like. I think you're going to see the infrastructure influencing operations that will enable Superclouds to be real. And developers won't even know what a Supercloud is because they'll be using it. It's the operations focus is going to be very critical. Just like DevOps movements started Cloud native I think you're going to see a data native movement and I think infrastructure is critical as people go to the next level. That's my big takeaway today. And I'll say the data conversation is at the center. I think security, data are going to be always active horizontally scalable concepts, but every company's going to reset their infrastructure, how it looks and if it's not set up for data and or things that there need to be agile on, it's going to be a non-starter. So I think that's the cloud NextGen, distributed computing. >> I mean, what came into focus for me was I think the hyperscaler is going to continue to do their thing, you know, and be very, very successful and they're each coming at it from different approaches. We talk about this all the time in theCUBE. Amazon the best infrastructure, you know, Google's got its you know, data and AI thing and it's playing catch up and Microsoft's got this massive estate. Okay, cool. Check. The next wave of innovation which is coming from data, I've always said follow the data. That's where the where the money's going to be is going to come from other places. People want to be able to, organizations want to be able to share data across clouds across their organization, outside of their ecosystem and make money with that data sharing. They don't want to FTP it anymore. I got it. You take it. They want to work with live data in real time and I think the edge, we didn't talk much about the edge today is going to even take that to a new level real time inferencing at the edge, AI and and being able to do new things with data that we haven't even seen. But playing around with ChatGPT, it's blowing our mind. And I think you're right, it's like when we first saw the browser, holy crap, this is going to change the world. >> Yeah. And the ChatGPT by the way is going to create a wave of machine learning and data refactoring for sure. But also Howie Liu had an interesting comment, he was asked by a VC how much to replicate that and he said it's in the hundreds of millions, not billions. Now if you asked that same question how much does it cost to replicate AWS? The CapEx alone is unstoppable, they're already done. So, you know, the hyperscalers are going to continue to boom. I think they're going to drive the infrastructure. I think Amazon's going to be really strong at silicon and physics and squeeze every ounce atom out of every physical thing and then get latency as your bottleneck and the rest is all going to be... >> That never blew me away, a hundred million to create kind of an open AI, you know, competitor. Look at companies like Lacework. >> John: Some people have that much cash on the balance sheet. >> These are security companies that have raised a billion dollars, right? To compete. You know, so... >> If you're not shifting left what do you do with data, shift up? >> But, you know. >> What did you learn, George? >> I'm listening to you and I think you're helping me crystallize something which is the software infrastructure to enable the data apps is wide open. The way Zhamak described it is like if you want a data product like a sales and operation plan, that is built on other data products, like a sales plan which has a forecast in it, it has a production plan, it has a procurement plan and then a sales and operation plan is actually a composition of all those and they call each other. Now in her current platform, you need to expose to the developer a certain amount of mechanics on how to move all that data, when to move it. Like what happens if something fails. Now Muglia is saying I can hide that completely. So all you have to say is what you want and the underlying machinery takes care of everything. The problem is Muglia stuff is still a few years off. And Tristan is saying, I can give you much of that today but it's got to run in the data warehouse. So this trade offs all different ways. But again, I agree with you that the Cloud platform vendors or the ecosystem participants who can run across Cloud platforms and private infrastructure will be the next platform. And then the cloud platform is sort of where you run the big honking centralized stuff where someone else manages the operations. >> Sounds like middleware to me, Dave >> And key is, I'll just end with this. The key is being able to get to the data, whether it's in a data warehouse or a data lake or a S3 bucket or an object store, Oracle database, whatever. It's got to be inclusive that is critical to execute on the vision that you just talked about 'cause that data's in different systems and you're not going to put it all into some new system. >> So creating middleware in the cloud that sounds what it sounds like to me. >> It's like, you discovered PaaS >> It's a super PaaS. >> But it's platform services 'cause PaaS connotes like a tightly integrated platform. >> Well this is the real thing that's going on. We're going to see how this evolves. George, great to have you on, Dave. Thanks for the summary. I enjoyed this segment a lot today. This ends our stage performance live here in Palo Alto. As you know, we're live stage performance and syndicate out virtually. Our afternoon program's going to kick in now you're going to hear some great interviews. We got ChaosSearch. Defining the network Supercloud from prosimo. Future of Cloud Network, alkira. We got Saks, a retail company here, Veronika Durgin. We got Dave with Western Union. So a lot of customers, a pharmaceutical company Warner Brothers, Discovery, media company. And then you know, what is really needed for Supercloud, good panels. So stay with us for the afternoon program. That's part two of Supercloud 2. This is a wrap up for our stage live performance. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante and George Gilbert here wrapping up. Thanks for watching and enjoy the program. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante >> Enterprise tech practitioners, like most of us they want to make their lives easier so they can focus on delivering more value to their businesses. And to do so, they want to tap best of breed services in the public cloud, but at the same time connect their on-prem intellectual property to emerging applications which drive top line revenue and bottom line profits. But creating a consistent experience across clouds and on-prem estates has been an elusive capability for most organizations, forcing trade-offs and injecting friction into the system. The need to create seamless experiences is clear and the technology industry is starting to respond with platforms, architectures, and visions of what we've called the Supercloud. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we give you a preview of Supercloud 2, the second event of its kind that we've had on the topic. Yes, folks that's right Supercloud 2 is here. As of this recording, it's just about four days away 33 guests, 21 sessions, combining live discussions and fireside chats from theCUBE's Palo Alto Studio with prerecorded conversations on the future of cloud and data. You can register for free at supercloud.world. And we are super excited about the Supercloud 2 lineup of guests whereas Supercloud 22 in August, was all about refining the definition of Supercloud testing its technical feasibility and understanding various deployment models. Supercloud 2 features practitioners, technologists and analysts discussing what customers need with real-world examples of Supercloud and will expose thinking around a new breed of cross-cloud apps, data apps, if you will that change the way machines and humans interact with each other. Now the example we'd use if you think about applications today, say a CRM system, sales reps, what are they doing? They're entering data into opportunities they're choosing products they're importing contacts, et cetera. And sure the machine can then take all that data and spit out a forecast by rep, by region, by product, et cetera. But today's applications are largely about filling in forms and or codifying processes. In the future, the Supercloud community sees a new breed of applications emerging where data resides on different clouds, in different data storages, databases, Lakehouse, et cetera. And the machine uses AI to inspect the e-commerce system the inventory data, supply chain information and other systems, and puts together a plan without any human intervention whatsoever. Think about a system that orchestrates people, places and things like an Uber for business. So at Supercloud 2, you'll hear about this vision along with some of today's challenges facing practitioners. Zhamak Dehghani, the founder of Data Mesh is a headliner. Kit Colbert also is headlining. He laid out at the first Supercloud an initial architecture for what that's going to look like. That was last August. And he's going to present his most current thinking on the topic. Veronika Durgin of Sachs will be featured and talk about data sharing across clouds and you know what she needs in the future. One of the main highlights of Supercloud 2 is a dive into Walmart's Supercloud. Other featured practitioners include Western Union Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Warner Media. We've got deep, deep technology dives with folks like Bob Muglia, David Flynn Tristan Handy of DBT Labs, Nir Zuk, the founder of Palo Alto Networks focused on security. Thomas Hazel, who's going to talk about a new type of database for Supercloud. It's several analysts including Keith Townsend Maribel Lopez, George Gilbert, Sanjeev Mohan and so many more guests, we don't have time to list them all. They're all up on supercloud.world with a full agenda, so you can check that out. Now let's take a look at some of the things that we're exploring in more detail starting with the Walmart Cloud native platform, they call it WCNP. We definitely see this as a Supercloud and we dig into it with Jack Greenfield. He's the head of architecture at Walmart. Here's a quote from Jack. "WCNP is an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. We've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source." By the way, they do the same thing with OpenStack. "And we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything." And so what Walmart chose to do, they took a do-it-yourself approach to build a Supercloud for a variety of reasons that Jack will explain, along with Walmart's so-called triplet architecture connecting on-prem, Azure and GCP. No surprise, there's no Amazon at Walmart for obvious reasons. And what they do is they create a common experience for devs across clouds. Jack is going to talk about how Walmart is evolving its Supercloud in the future. You don't want to miss that. Now, next, let's take a look at how Veronica Durgin of SAKS thinks about data sharing across clouds. Data sharing we think is a potential killer use case for Supercloud. In fact, let's hear it in Veronica's own words. Please play the clip. >> How do we talk to each other? And more importantly, how do we data share? You know, I work with data, you know this is what I do. So if you know I want to get data from a company that's using, say Google, how do we share it in a smooth way where it doesn't have to be this crazy I don't know, SFTP file moving? So that's where I think Supercloud comes to me in my mind, is like practical applications. How do we create that mesh, that network that we can easily share data with each other? >> Now data mesh is a possible architectural approach that will enable more facile data sharing and the monetization of data products. You'll hear Zhamak Dehghani live in studio talking about what standards are missing to make this vision a reality across the Supercloud. Now one of the other things that we're really excited about is digging deeper into the right approach for Supercloud adoption. And we're going to share a preview of a debate that's going on right now in the community. Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake and Microsoft Exec was kind enough to spend some time looking at the community's supercloud definition and he felt that it needed to be simplified. So in near real time he came up with the following definition that we're showing here. I'll read it. "A Supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." So not only did Bob simplify the initial definition he's stressed that the Supercloud is a platform versus an architecture implying that the platform provider eg Snowflake, VMware, Databricks, Cohesity, et cetera is responsible for determining the architecture. Now interestingly in the shared Google doc that the working group uses to collaborate on the supercloud de definition, Dr. Nelu Mihai who is actually building a Supercloud responded as follows to Bob's assertion "We need to avoid creating many Supercloud platforms with their own architectures. If we do that, then we create other proprietary clouds on top of existing ones. We need to define an architecture of how Supercloud interfaces with all other clouds. What is the information model? What is the execution model and how users will interact with Supercloud?" What does this seemingly nuanced point tell us and why does it matter? Well, history suggests that de facto standards will emerge more quickly to resolve real world practitioner problems and catch on more quickly than consensus-based architectures and standards-based architectures. But in the long run, the ladder may serve customers better. So we'll be exploring this topic in more detail in Supercloud 2, and of course we'd love to hear what you think platform, architecture, both? Now one of the real technical gurus that we'll have in studio at Supercloud two is David Flynn. He's one of the people behind the the movement that enabled enterprise flash adoption, that craze. And he did that with Fusion IO and he is now working on a system to enable read write data access to any user in any application in any data center or on any cloud anywhere. So think of this company as a Supercloud enabler. Allow me to share an excerpt from a conversation David Flore and I had with David Flynn last year. He as well gave a lot of thought to the Supercloud definition and was really helpful with an opinionated point of view. He said something to us that was, we thought relevant. "What is the operating system for a decentralized cloud? The main two functions of an operating system or an operating environment are one the process scheduler and two, the file system. The strongest argument for supercloud is made when you go down to the platform layer and talk about it as an operating environment on which you can run all forms of applications." So a couple of implications here that will be exploring with David Flynn in studio. First we're inferring from his comment that he's in the platform camp where the platform owner is responsible for the architecture and there are obviously trade-offs there and benefits but we'll have to clarify that with him. And second, he's basically saying, you kill the concept the further you move up the stack. So the weak, the further you move the stack the weaker the supercloud argument becomes because it's just becoming SaaS. Now this is something we're going to explore to better understand is thinking on this, but also whether the existing notion of SaaS is changing and whether or not a new breed of Supercloud apps will emerge. Which brings us to this really interesting fellow that George Gilbert and I RIFed with ahead of Supercloud two. Tristan Handy, he's the founder and CEO of DBT Labs and he has a highly opinionated and technical mind. Here's what he said, "One of the things that we still don't know how to API-ify is concepts that live inside of your data warehouse inside of your data lake. These are core concepts that the business should be able to create applications around very easily. In fact, that's not the case because it involves a lot of data engineering pipeline and other work to make these available. So if you really want to make it easy to create these data experiences for users you need to have an ability to describe these metrics and then to turn them into APIs to make them accessible to application developers who have literally no idea how they're calculated behind the scenes and they don't need to." A lot of implications to this statement that will explore at Supercloud two versus Jamma Dani's data mesh comes into play here with her critique of hyper specialized data pipeline experts with little or no domain knowledge. Also the need for simplified self-service infrastructure which Kit Colbert is likely going to touch upon. Veronica Durgin of SAKS and her ideal state for data shearing along with Harveer Singh of Western Union. They got to deal with 200 locations around the world in data privacy issues, data sovereignty how do you share data safely? Same with Nick Taylor of Ionis Pharmaceutical. And not to blow your mind but Thomas Hazel and Bob Muglia deposit that to make data apps a reality across the Supercloud you have to rethink everything. You can't just let in memory databases and caching architectures take care of everything in a brute force manner. Rather you have to get down to really detailed levels even things like how data is laid out on disk, ie flash and think about rewriting applications for the Supercloud and the MLAI era. All of this and more at Supercloud two which wouldn't be complete without some data. So we pinged our friends from ETR Eric Bradley and Darren Bramberm to see if they had any data on Supercloud that we could tap. And so we're going to be analyzing a number of the players as well at Supercloud two. Now, many of you are familiar with this graphic here we show some of the players involved in delivering or enabling Supercloud-like capabilities. On the Y axis is spending momentum and on the horizontal accesses market presence or pervasiveness in the data. So netscore versus what they call overlap or end in the data. And the table insert shows how the dots are plotted now not to steal ETR's thunder but the first point is you really can't have supercloud without the hyperscale cloud platforms which is shown on this graphic. But the exciting aspect of Supercloud is the opportunity to build value on top of that hyperscale infrastructure. Snowflake here continues to show strong spending velocity as those Databricks, Hashi, Rubrik. VMware Tanzu, which we all put under the magnifying glass after the Broadcom announcements, is also showing momentum. Unfortunately due to a scheduling conflict we weren't able to get Red Hat on the program but they're clearly a player here. And we've put Cohesity and Veeam on the chart as well because backup is a likely use case across clouds and on-premises. And now one other call out that we drill down on at Supercloud two is CloudFlare, which actually uses the term supercloud maybe in a different way. They look at Supercloud really as you know, serverless on steroids. And so the data brains at ETR will have more to say on this topic at Supercloud two along with many others. Okay, so why should you attend Supercloud two? What's in it for me kind of thing? So first of all, if you're a practitioner and you want to understand what the possibilities are for doing cross-cloud services for monetizing data how your peers are doing data sharing, how some of your peers are actually building out a Supercloud you're going to get real world input from practitioners. If you're a technologist, you're trying to figure out various ways to solve problems around data, data sharing, cross-cloud service deployment there's going to be a number of deep technology experts that are going to share how they're doing it. We're also going to drill down with Walmart into a practical example of Supercloud with some other examples of how practitioners are dealing with cross-cloud complexity. Some of them, by the way, are kind of thrown up their hands and saying, Hey, we're going mono cloud. And we'll talk about the potential implications and dangers and risks of doing that. And also some of the benefits. You know, there's a question, right? Is Supercloud the same wine new bottle or is it truly something different that can drive substantive business value? So look, go to Supercloud.world it's January 17th at 9:00 AM Pacific. You can register for free and participate directly in the program. Okay, that's a wrap. I want to give a shout out to the Supercloud supporters. VMware has been a great partner as our anchor sponsor Chaos Search Proximo, and Alura as well. For contributing to the effort I want to thank Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman is his supporting cast as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight to help get the word out on social media and at our newsletters. And Rob Ho is our editor-in-chief over at Silicon Angle. Thank you all. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcast. Wherever you listen we really appreciate the support that you've given. We just saw some stats from from Buzz Sprout, we hit the top 25% we're almost at 400,000 downloads last year. So really appreciate your participation. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast and you'll find those I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or if you want to get ahold of me you can email me directly at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com or dm me DVellante or comment on our LinkedIn post. I want you to check out etr.ai. They've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Supercloud two or next time on breaking analysis. (light music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 2, which is an open industry collaboration between technologists, consultants, analysts, and of course, practitioners, to help shape the future of cloud. And at this event, one of the key areas we're exploring is the intersection of cloud and data, and how building value on top of hyperscale clouds and across clouds is evolving, a concept we call supercloud. And we're pleased to welcome Harvir Singh, who's the chief data architect and global head of data at Western Union. Harvir, it's good to see you again. Thanks for coming on the program. >> Thanks, David, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. >> So many things stand out from when we first met, and one of the most gripping for me was when you said to me, "When data moves, money moves." And that's the world we live in today, and really have for a long time. Money has moved as bits, and when it has to move, we want it to move quickly, securely, and in a governed manner. And the pressure to do so is only growing. So tell us how that trend is evolved over the past decade in the context of your industry generally, and Western Union, specifically. Look, I always say to people that we are probably the first ones to introduce digital currency around the world because, hey, somebody around the world needs money, we move data to make that happen. That trend has actually accelerated quite a bit. If you look at the last 10 years, and you look at all these payment companies, digital companies, credit card companies that have evolved, majority of them are working on the same principle. When data moves, money moves. When data is stale, the money goes away, right? I think that trend is continuing, and it's not just the trend is in this space, it's also continuing in other spaces, specifically around, you know, acquisition of customers, communication with customers. It's all becoming digital, and it's, at the end of the day, it's all data being moved from one place or another. At the end of the day, you're not seeing the customer, but you're looking at, you know, the data that he's consuming, and you're making actionable items on it, and be able to respond to what they need. So I think 10 years, it's really, really evolved. >> Hmm, you operate, Western Union operates in more than 200 countries, and you you have what I would call a pseudo federated organization. You're trying to standardize wherever possible on the infrastructure, and you're curating the tooling and doing the heavy lifting in the data stack, which of course lessens the burden on the developers and the line of business consumers, so my question is, in operating in 200 countries, how do you deal with all the diversity of laws and regulations across those regions? I know you're heavily involved in AWS, but AWS isn't everywhere, you still have some on-prem infrastructure. Can you paint a picture of, you know, what that looks like? >> Yeah, a few years ago , we were primarily mostly on-prem, and one of the biggest pain points has been managing that infrastructure around the world in those countries. Yes, we operate in 200 countries, but we don't have infrastructure in 200 countries, but we do have agent locations in 200 countries. United Nations says we only have like 183 are countries, but there are countries which, you know, declare themselves countries, and we are there as well because somebody wants to send money there, right? Somebody has an agent location down there as well. So that infrastructure is obviously very hard to manage and maintain. We have to comply by numerous laws, you know. And the last few years, specifically with GDPR, CCPA, data localization laws in different countries, it's been a challenge, right? And one of the things that we did a few years ago, we decided that we want to be in the business of helping our customers move money faster, security, and with complete trust in us. We don't want to be able to, we don't want to be in the business of managing infrastructure. And that's one of the reasons we started to, you know, migrate and move our journey to the cloud. AWS, obviously chosen first because of its, you know, first in the game, has more locations, and more data centers around the world where we operate. But we still have, you know, existing infrastructure, which is in some countries, which is still localized because AWS hasn't reached there, or we don't have a comparable provider there. We still manage those. And we have to comply by those laws. Our data privacy and our data localization tech stack is pretty good, I would say. We manage our data very well, we manage our customer data very well, but it comes with a lot of complexity. You know, we get a lot of requests from European Union, we get a lot of requests from Asia Pacific every pretty much on a weekly basis to explain, you know, how we are taking controls and putting measures in place to make sure that the data is secured and is in the right place. So it's a complex environment. We do have exposure to other clouds as well, like Google and Azure. And as much as we would love to be completely, you know, very, very hybrid kind of an organization, it's still at a stage where we are still very heavily focused on AWS yet, but at some point, you know, we would love to see a world which is not reliant on a single provider, but it's more a little bit more democratized, you know, as and when what I want to use, I should be able to use, and pay-per-use. And the concept started like that, but it's obviously it's now, again, there are like three big players in the market, and, you know, they're doing their own thing. Would love to see them come collaborate at some point. >> Yeah, wouldn't we all. I want to double-click on the whole multi-cloud strategy, but if I understand it correctly, and in a perfect world, everything on-premises would be in the cloud is, first of all, is that a correct statement? Is that nirvana for you or not necessarily? >> I would say it is nirvana for us, but I would also put a caveat, is it's very tricky because from a regulatory perspective, we are a regulated entity in many countries. The regulators would want to see some control if something happens with a relationship with AWS in one country, or with Google in another country, and it keeps happening, right? For example, Russia was a good example where we had to switch things off. We should be able to do that. But if let's say somewhere in Asia, this country decides that they don't want to partner with AWS, and majority of our stuff is on AWS, where do I go from there? So we have to have some level of confidence in our own infrastructure, so we do maintain some to be able to fail back into and move things it needs to be. So it's a tricky question. Yes, it's nirvana state that I don't have to manage infrastructure, but I think it's far less practical than it said. We will still own something that we call it our own where we have complete control, being a financial entity. >> And so do you try to, I'm sure you do, standardize between all the different on-premise, and in this case, the AWS cloud or maybe even other clouds. How do you do that? Do you work with, you know, different vendors at the various places of the stack to try to do that? Some of the vendors, you know, like a Snowflake is only in the cloud. You know, others, you know, whether it's whatever, analytics, or storage, or database, might be hybrid. What's your strategy with regard to creating as common an experience as possible between your on-prem and your clouds? >> You asked a question which I asked when I joined as well, right? Which question, this is one of the most important questions is how soon when I fail back, if I need to fail back? And how quickly can I, because not everything that is sitting on the cloud is comparable to on-prem or is backward compatible. And the reason I say backward compatible is, you know, there are, our on-prem cloud is obviously behind. We haven't taken enough time to kind of put it to a state where, because we started to migrate and now we have access to infrastructure on the cloud, most of the new things are being built there. But for critical application, I would say we have chronology that could be used to move back if need to be. So, you know, technologies like Couchbase, technologies like PostgreSQL, technologies like Db2, et cetera. We still have and maintain a fairly large portion of it on-prem where critical applications could potentially be serviced. We'll give you one example. We use Neo4j very heavily for our AML use cases. And that's an important one because if Neo4j on the cloud goes down, and it's happened in the past, again, even with three clusters, having all three clusters going down with a DR, we still need some accessibility of that because that's one of the biggest, you know, fraud and risk application it supports. So we do still maintain some comparable technology. Snowflake is an odd one. It's obviously there is none on-prem. But then, you know, Snowflake, I also feel it's more analytical based technology, not a transactional-based technology, at least in our ecosystem. So for me to replicate that, yes, it'll probably take time, but I can live with that. But my business will not stop because our transactional applications can potentially move over if need to. >> Yeah, and of course, you know, all these big market cap companies, so the Snowflake or Databricks, which is not public yet, but they've got big aspirations. And so, you know, we've seen things like Snowflake do a deal with Dell for on-prem object store. I think they do the same thing with Pure. And so over time, you see, Mongo, you know, extending its estate. And so over time all these things are coming together. I want to step out of this conversation for a second. I just ask you, given the current macroeconomic climate, what are the priorities? You know, obviously, people are, CIOs are tapping the breaks on spending, we've reported on that, but what is it? Is it security? Is it analytics? Is it modernization of the on-prem stack, which you were saying a little bit behind. Where are the priorities today given the economic headwinds? >> So the most important priority right now is growing the business, I would say. It's a different, I know this is more, this is not a very techy or a tech answer that, you know, you would expect, but it's growing the business. We want to acquire more customers and be able to service them as best needed. So the majority of our investment is going in the space where tech can support that initiative. During our earnings call, we released the new pillars of our organization where we will focus on, you know, omnichannel digital experience, and then one experience for customer, whether it's retail, whether it's digital. We want to open up our own experience stores, et cetera. So we are investing in technology where it's going to support those pillars. But the spend is in a way that we are obviously taking away from the things that do not support those. So it's, I would say it's flat for us. We are not like in heavily investing or aggressively increasing our tech budget, but it's more like, hey, switch this off because it doesn't make us money, but now switch this on because this is going to support what we can do with money, right? So that's kind of where we are heading towards. So it's not not driven by technology, but it's driven by business and how it supports our customers and our ability to compete in the market. >> You know, I think Harvir, that's consistent with what we heard in some other work that we've done, our ETR partner who does these types of surveys. We're hearing the same thing, is that, you know, we might not be spending on modernizing our on-prem stack. Yeah, we want to get to the cloud at some point and modernize that. But if it supports revenue, you know, we'll invest in that, and get the, you know, instant ROI. I want to ask you about, you know, this concept of supercloud, this abstracted layer of value on top of hyperscale infrastructure, and maybe on-prem. But we were talking about the integration, for instance, between Snowflake and Salesforce, where you got different data sources and you were explaining that you had great interest in being able to, you know, have a kind of, I'll say seamless, sorry, I know it's an overused word, but integration between the data sources and those two different platforms. Can you explain that and why that's attractive to you? >> Yeah, I'm a big supporter of action where the data is, right? Because the minute you start to move, things are already lost in translation. The time is lost, you can't get to it fast enough. So if, for example, for us, Snowflake, Salesforce, is our actionable platform where we action, we send marketing campaigns, we send customer communication via SMS, in app, as well as via email. Now, we would like to be able to interact with our customers pretty much on a, I would say near real time, but the concept of real time doesn't work well with me because I always feel that if you're observing something, it's not real time, it's already happened. But how soon can I react? That's the question. And given that I have to move that data all the way from our, let's say, engagement platforms like Adobe, and particles of the world into Snowflake first, and then do my modeling in some way, and be able to then put it back into Salesforce, it takes time. Yes, you know, I can do it in a few hours, but that few hours makes a lot of difference. Somebody sitting on my website, you know, couldn't find something, walked away, how soon do you think he will lose interest? Three hours, four hours, he'll probably gone, he will never come back. I think if I can react to that as fast as possible without too much data movement, I think that's a lot of good benefit that this kind of integration will bring. Yes, I can potentially take data directly into Salesforce, but I then now have two copies of data, which is, again, something that I'm not a big (indistinct) of. Let's keep the source of the data simple, clean, and a single source. I think this kind of integration will help a lot if the actions can be brought very close to where the data resides. >> Thank you for that. And so, you know, it's funny, we sometimes try to define real time as before you lose the customer, so that's kind of real time. But I want to come back to this idea of governed data sharing. You mentioned some other clouds, a little bit of Azure, a little bit of Google. In a world where, let's say you go more aggressively, and we know that for instance, if you want to use Google's AI tools, you got to use BigQuery. You know, today, anyway, they're not sort of so friendly with Snowflake, maybe different for the AWS, maybe Microsoft's going to be different as well. But in an ideal world, what I'm hearing is you want to keep the data in place. You don't want to move the data. Moving data is expensive, making copies is badness. It's expensive, and it's also, you know, changes the state, right? So you got governance issues. So this idea of supercloud is that you can leave the data in place and actually have a common experience across clouds. Let's just say, let's assume for a minute Google kind of wakes up, my words, not yours, and says, "Hey, maybe, you know what, partnering with a Snowflake or a Databricks is better for our business. It's better for the customers," how would that affect your business and the value that you can bring to your customers? >> Again, I would say that would be the nirvana state that, you know, we want to get to. Because I would say not everyone's perfect. They have great engineers and great products that they're developing, but that's where they compete as well, right? I would like to use the best of breed as much as possible. And I've been a person who has done this in the past as well. I've used, you know, tools to integrate. And the reason why this integration has worked is primarily because sometimes you do pick the best thing for that job. And Google's AI products are definitely doing really well, but, you know, that accessibility, if it's a problem, then I really can't depend on them, right? I would love to move some of that down there, but they have to make it possible for us. Azure is doing really, really good at investing, so I think they're a little bit more and more closer to getting to that state, and I know seeking our attention than Google at this point of time. But I think there will be a revelation moment because more and more people that I talk to like myself, they're also talking about the same thing. I'd like to be able to use Google's AdSense, I would like to be able to use Google's advertising platform, but you know what? I already have all this data, why do I need to move it? Can't they just go and access it? That question will keep haunting them (indistinct). >> You know, I think, obviously, Microsoft has always known, you know, understood ecosystems. I mean, AWS is nailing it, when you go to re:Invent, it's all about the ecosystem. And they think they realized they can make a lot more money, you know, together, than trying to have, and Google's got to figure that out. I think Google thinks, "All right, hey, we got to have the best tech." And that tech, they do have the great tech, and that's our competitive advantage. They got to wake up to the ecosystem and what's happening in the field and the go-to-market. I want to ask you about how you see data and cloud evolving in the future. You mentioned that things that are driving revenue are the priorities, and maybe you're already doing this today, but my question is, do you see a day when companies like yours are increasingly offering data and software services? You've been around for a long time as a company, you've got, you know, first party data, you've got proprietary knowledge, and maybe tooling that you've developed, and you're becoming more, you're already a technology company. Do you see someday pointing that at customers, or again, maybe you're doing it already, or is that not practical in your view? >> So data monetization has always been on the charts. The reason why it hasn't seen the light is regulatory pressure at this point of time. We are partnering up with certain agencies, again, you know, some pilots are happening to see the value of that and be able to offer that. But I think, you know, eventually, we'll get to a state where our, because we are trying to build accessible financial services, we will be in a state that we will be offering those to partners, which could then extended to their customers as well. So we are definitely exploring that. We are definitely exploring how to enrich our data with other data, and be able to complete a super set of data that can be used. Because frankly speaking, the data that we have is very interesting. We have trends of people migrating, we have trends of people migrating within the US, right? So if a new, let's say there's a new, like, I'll give you an example. Let's say New York City, I can tell you, at any given point of time, with my data, what is, you know, a dominant population in that area from migrant perspective. And if I see a change in that data, I can tell you where that is moving towards. I think it's going to be very interesting. We're a little bit, obviously, sometimes, you know, you're scared of sharing too much detail because there's too much data. So, but at the end of the day, I think at some point, we'll get to a state where we are confident that the data can be used for good. One simple example is, you know, pharmacies. They would love to get, you know, we've been talking to CVS and we are talking to Walgreens, and trying to figure out, if they would get access to this kind of data demographic information, what could they do be better? Because, you know, from a gene pool perspective, there are diseases and stuff that are very prevalent in one community versus the other. We could probably equip them with this information to be able to better, you know, let's say, staff their pharmacies or keep better inventory of products that could be used for the population in that area. Similarly, the likes of Walmarts and Krogers, they would like to have more, let's say, ethnic products in their aisles, right? How do you enable that? That data is primarily, I think we are the biggest source of that data. So we do take pride in it, but you know, with caution, we are obviously exploring that as well. >> My last question for you, Harvir, is I'm going to ask you to do a thought exercise. So in that vein, that whole monetization piece, imagine that now, Harvir, you are running a P&L that is going to monetize that data. And my question to you is a there's a business vector and a technology vector. So from a business standpoint, the more distribution channels you have, the better. So running on AWS cloud, partnering with Microsoft, partnering with Google, going to market with them, going to give you more revenue. Okay, so there's a motivation for multi-cloud or supercloud. That's indisputable. But from a technical standpoint, is there an advantage to running on multiple clouds or is that a disadvantage for you? >> It's, I would say it's a disadvantage because if my data is distributed, I have to combine it at some place. So the very first step that we had taken was obviously we brought in Snowflake. The reason, we wanted our analytical data and we want our historical data in the same place. So we are already there and ready to share. And we are actually participating in the data share, but in a private setting at the moment. So we are technically enabled to share, unless there is a significant, I would say, upside to moving that data to another cloud. I don't see any reason because I can enable anyone to come and get it from Snowflake. It's already enabled for us. >> Yeah, or if somehow, magically, several years down the road, some standard developed so you don't have to move the data. Maybe there's a new, Mogli is talking about a new data architecture, and, you know, that's probably years away, but, Harvir, you're an awesome guest. I love having you on, and really appreciate you participating in the program. >> I appreciate it. Thank you, and good luck (indistinct) >> Ah, thank you very much. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the entire Cube community. Keep it right there for more great coverage from Supercloud 2. (uplifting music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, brilliant cloud community, and welcome back to AWS re:Invent. We are here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, how you doing? >> I'm doing well, thanks, yeah. >> Yeah, I feel like... >> I'm hanging in there. >> you've got a lot of pep in your step today for the fourth day. >> I think my voice is coming back, actually. >> (laughs) Look at you, resilient. >> I was almost lost yesterday, yeah. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> So, I actually, at a Hitachi event one time almost completely lost my voice. The production guys pulled me off. They said, "You're done." (Savannah laughing) They gave me the hook. >> You got booted? >> Dave: Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, yeah, you actually (laughs) got the hook, wow. >> So, I have good memories of Hitachi. >> I was going to say (Dave laughing) interesting that you mentioned Hitachi. Our two guests this morning are from Hitachi. Sid and KP, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> Savannah: How you guys doing? Looking great for day four. >> Great. Thank you. >> Great. >> Hanging in there. >> Thank you, Dave and Savannah. (Savannah laughing) >> Dave: Yeah, cool. >> Savannah: Yeah. (laughs) >> Yeah, it was actually a Pentaho thing, right? >> Oh, Pentaho? Yeah. >> Which kind of you guys into that software edge. It was right when you announced the name change to Hitachi Vantara, which is very cool. I had Brian Householder on. You remember Brian? >> Yeah, I know. >> He was explaining the vision, and yeah (indistinct). >> Yeah. Well, look at you a little Hitachi (indistinct). >> Yeah, I've been around a long time, yeah. >> Yeah, all right. (Dave laughing) >> Just a casual flex to start us off there, Dave. I love it. I love it. Sid, we've talked a lot on the show about delivering outcomes. It's a hot theme. Everyone wants to actually have tangible business outcomes from all of this. How are customers realizing value from the cloud? What does that mean? >> See, still 2007, 2008, it was either/or kind of architecture. Either I'm going to execute my use cases on cloud or I'm going to keep my use cases and outcomes through edge. But in the last four or five years and specifically we are in re:Invent, I would talk about AWS. Lot of the power of hyperscalers has been brought to edge. If you talk about the snowball family of AWS, if you talk about monitor on edge devices, if you talk about the entire server list being brought into Lambda coupled inside snowball, now the architecture premise, if I talk about logical shift is end. Now the customers are talking about executing the use cases between edge and cloud. So, there is a continuum rather than a binary bullion decision. So, if you are talking about optimizing a factory, earlier I'll do the analytics at cloud, and I'll do machine on edge. Now it is optimization of a factory outcome at scale across my entire manufacturing where edge, private cloud, AWS, hyperscalers, everything is a continuum. And the customer is not worried about where, which part of my data ops, network ops, server ops storage ops is being executed. >> Savannah: It's like (indistinct). >> The customer is enjoying the use cases. And the orchestration is abstracted through an industrial player like Hitachi working very collaboratively with AWS. So, that is how we are working on industrial use cases right now. >> You brought up manufacturing. I don't think there's been a hotter conversation around supply chain and manufacturing than there has been the last few years. I can imagine taking that guessing game out for customers is a huge deal for you guys. >> Big because if you look at the world today, right from a safety pin, to a cell phone jacket, to a cell phone, the entire supply chain is throttled. The supply chain is throttled because there are various choke points. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And each choke points is surrounded by different kind of supply and geopolitical issues. >> Savannah: 100%. >> Now, if we talk about the wheat crisis happening because of the Ukraine-Russia war, but the wheat crisis actually creates a multiple string of impacts which impact everything. Silicon, now we talk about silicon, but we then forget about nickel. Nickel is also controlled in one part of that geopolitical conflict. So, everything is getting conflagrated into a very big supply issue. So, if your factories are not performing beyond optimum, if they are not performing at real, I'm, we are talking about factory, hyperscale of the factory. The factory needs to perform at hyperscale to provide what the world needs today. So, we are in a very different kind of a scenario. Some of the economists call it earlier the recession was because of a demand constraint. The demand used to go down. Today's recession is because the supply is going down. The demand is there, but the supply is going down. And there is a different kind of recession in the world. The supply is what is getting throttled. >> And the demand is somewhat unpredictable too. People, you know, retailers, they've... >> Especially right now. >> kind of messed up their inventory. And so, the data is still siloed. And that's where, you know, you get to, okay, can I have the same experience across clouds, on-prem, out to the edge? Kind of bust those silos. >> Yep. >> You know, I dunno if it's, it's certainly not entirely a data problem. There's (laughs), like you say, geopolitical and social issues. >> Savannah: There's so much complexity. >> But there's a data problem too. >> Yes. >> Big. >> So, I wonder if you could talk about your sort of view of, point of view on that cross-cloud, hybrid, out to the edge, what I call super cloud? >> Absolutely. So, today, if you look at how enterprises are adopting cloud or how they're leveraging cloud, it's not just a hosting platform, right? It is the platform from where they can draw business capabilities. You heard in the re:Invent that Amazon is coming up with a supply chain service out of the box in the cloud. That's the kind of capabilities that business wants to draw from cloud today. So, the kind of multicloud or like hybrid cloud, public cloud, private cloud, those are the things which are kind of going to be behind the scenes. At the end of the day, the cloud needs to be able to support businesses by providing their services closer to their consumers. So, the challenges are going to be there in terms of like reliability, resilience, cost, security. Those are the ones that, you know, many of the enterprises are grappling with in terms of the challenges. And the way to solve that, the way how we approach our customers and work with them is to be able to bring resilience into the cloud, into the services which are running in cloud, and by driving automation, making autonomous in everything that you do, how you are monitoring your services, how we are making it available, how we are securing it, how we are making it very cost-effective as well. It cannot be manually executed; it has to be automated. So, automation is the key in terms of making the services leveraged from all of this cloud. >> That's your value add. >> Absolutely. >> And how do I consume that value add? Is it sort of embedded into infrastructure? Is it a service layer on top? >> Yeah, so everything that we do today in terms of like how these services have to be provided, how the services have to be consumed, there has to be a modern operating model, right? I think this is where Hitachi has come up with what we are calling as Hitachi Application Reliability Center and Services. That is focusing on modern operating, modern ways of like, you know, how you support these cloud workloads and driving this automation. So, whether we provide a hyper-converged infrastructure that is going to be at the edge location, or we are going to be able to take a customer through the journey of modernization or migrating onto cloud, the operating model that is going to be able to establish the foundation on cloud and then to be able to operate with the right levels of reliability, security, cost is the key. And that's the value added service that we provide. And then the way we do that is essentially by looking at three principles: one, to look at the service in totality. Gone are the days you look at infrastructure separately, applications separately, data and security separately, right? >> Savannah: No more silos. >> No more silos. You look at it as a workload, and you look at it as a service. And number two is to make sure that the DevOps that you bring and what you do at the table is totally integrated and it's end to end. It's not a product team developing a feature and then ops team trying to keep the lights on. It has to be a common backlog with the error budget that looks at you know, product releases, product functionalities, and even what ops needs to do to evolve the product as well. And then the third is to make sure that reliability and resiliency is inbuilt. Cloud offers native durability, native availability. But if your service doesn't take advantage of that, it's kind of going to still be not available. So, how do you kind of ingrain and embed all of these things as a value add that we provide? >> There's a lot of noise. We've got hybrid cloud. We've got multicloud. We've got a lot going on. It adds to the complexity. How do you help customers solve that complexity as they begin their transformation journey? I mean, I'm sure you're working with the biggest companies, making really massive change. How do you guide them through that process? >> So, it is to look at the outcome working backwards, like what AWS does, right? Like, you know, how do you look at the business outcome? What is the value that you're looking to drive? Again, it's not to be pinned through one particular cloud. I know there is lot of technology choices that you can make and lot of deployment models that you can choose from. But at the end of the day, having a common operating model which is kind of like modern, agile, and it is kind of like keeping the outcomes in the mind, that is what we do with our customers to be able to create that operating model, which completes the transformation, by the way. And cloud is just one part of the LEGO blocks which provides that overall scheme and then the view for driving that overall transformation. >> So, let's paint a picture. Let's say you've got this resilient foundation; you've kind of helped the customers build that out. How do they turn that into value for their customers? Do you have any examples that you can share? That'd be great. >> Yeah, I can start with what we're doing for one of the, you know, world's largest facility, infrastructure, power, cooling, security, monitoring company that has their products deployed in 2,000 locations across the globe. For them, and always on business means you are monitoring the temperature. You are monitoring the safety of people who are within the facility, right? A temperature shift of one to two degree can affect even the sustainability goals of NARC, our customer, but also their end consumers. So, how do you monitor these kind of like critical parameters? How do you have a platform? >> Savannah: Great example, yeah. >> How you have cloud resources that are going to be always on, that are going to be reliable, that are going to be cost-effective as well is what we are doing for one of our customers. Sid can talk about another example as well. >> Great. >> Yeah, go for it, Sid. >> So, there are examples: rail. We are working with a group in England; it's called West Coast Partnership. And they had a edge device which was increasing in size. Now, this edge device was becoming big because the parameters which go into the edge device were increasing because of regulation and because the rail is part of national security infrastructure. We have worked with West Coast Partnership and Hitachi Rail, which is a group company, to create a miniaturization of this edge device, because if the size of the edge device is increasing on the train, then the weight of the train increases, and the speed profile, velocity profile, everything goes down. So, we have miniaturized the edge device. Secondly, all the data profiles, signal control, traction control, traction motors, direction control, timetable compliance, everything has been kept uniform. And we have done analytics on cloud. So, what is the behavior of the driver? What is a big breaking parameter of the driver? If the timetable has being missed, is there an erratic behavior being demonstrated by the driver to just meet the timetable? And the timetable is a pretty important criteria in rail because if you miss one, then... So, what we have done is we have created an edge-to-cloud environment where the entire rail analytics is happening. Similarly, in another group company, Hitachi Energy, they had a problem that arguably one of the largest transformer manufacturer in the world. The transformer is a pretty common name now because you're seeing what is happening in Ukraine. Russia went after the transformers and substations before the start of the winter so that their district heating can be meddled with. Now, the transformer, it had a lead time of 17 weeks before COVID. So, if you put me an order of a three-phase transformer, I can deliver it to you in 17 weeks. After and during COVID, the entire lead time increased to 57 to 58 weeks. In cases of a complex transformer, it even went up to something like two years. >> Savannah: Ooh! >> Now, they wanted to increase the productivity of their existing plant because there is only that much sheet metal, that much copper for solenoid, that much microprocessor and silicon. So, they wanted to increase the output of their factory from 95 to 105, 10 more transformers every day, which is 500 and, which is 3,650 every- >> Savannah: Year. >> Year. Now, to do that, we went to a very complex machine; it's called a guard machine. And we increased the productivity of the guard machine by just analyzing all the throttles and all the wastages which are happening there. There are multiple case studies because, see, Hitachi is an industrial giant with 105 years of body of work. KP and I just represent the tip of the digital tip of the arrow. But what we are trying to do through HARC, through industry cloud, through partnership with AWS is basically containerizing and miniaturizing our entire body of work into a democratized environment, an industrial app store, if I may say, where people can come and take their industrial outcomes at ease without worrying about their computational and network orchestration between edge and cloud. That's what we are trying to do. >> I love that analogy of an industrial app cloud. Makes it feel easier in decreasing the complexity of all the different things that everyone's factoring into making their products, whatever they're making. So, we have a new challenge here on theCUBE at AWS re:Invent, where we are looking for your 30-second hot take, your Instagram reel, sound bite. What's the most important story or theme either for you as a team or coming out of the show? You can ponder it for a second. >> It might be different. See, for me, it is industrial security. Industrial OT security should be the theme of the Western world. Western world is on the crosshairs of multiple bad actors. And the industrial security is in the chemical plants, is in the industrial plants, is in the power grids, is in our postal networks and our rail networks. They need to be secured; otherwise, we are geopolitically very weak. Gone are the days when anyone is going to pick up a battle with America or Western world on a field. The battle is going to be pretty clandestine on an cyber world. And that is why industrial security is very important. >> Critical infrastructure and protecting it. >> Absolutely. >> Well said, Sid. KP, what's your hot take? >> My take is going to be a modern operating model, which is going to complete the transformation and to be able to tap into business services from cloud. So, a modern operating model through HARC, that is going to be my take. >> Fantastic. Well, can't wait to see what comes out of Hitachi next. Sid, KP... >> KP: Thank you. >> thank you so much for being here. >> Sid: Thank you. >> Absolutely. >> Dave: Thanks, guys. >> Savannah: This is I could talk to you all about supply chain all day long. And thank all of you for tuning in to our continuous live coverage here from AWS re:Invent in fantastic Sin City. I'm Savannah. Oh, excuse me. With Dave Vellante, I'm Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (digital xylophone music)

(soft upbeat music) >> The past two and a half years have seen a dramatic change in the security posture of virtually all organizations. By accelerating the digital business mandate, the isolation economy catalyzed a move toward cloud computing to support remote workers. This, we know. This had several ripple effects on CISO and CIO strategies that were highly visible at the board of directors level. Now, the first major change was to recognize that the perimeter had suddenly been vaporized. Protection, as a result, moved away from things like perimeter-based firewalls toward more distributed endpoints, cloud security, and modern identity management. The second major change was a heightened awareness of the realities of ransomware. Ransomware as a service, for example, emerged as a major threat where virtually anyone with access to critical data and criminal intentions could monetize corporate security exposures. The third major change was a much more acute understanding of how data protection needed to become a fundamental component of cyber security strategies. And more specifically, CIOs quickly realized that their business resilient strategies were too narrowly DR-focused, that their DR approach was not cost efficient and needed to be modernized, and that new approaches to operational resilience were needed to reflect the architectural and business realities of this new environment. Hello and welcome to Why Ransomware isn't your Only Problem, a service of theCUBE made possible by Druva, and in collaboration with IDC. I'm your host, Dave Vellante, and today we're presenting a three-part program. We'll start with the data. IDC recently conducted a global survey of 500 business technology practitioners across 20 industries to understand the degree to which organizations are aware of and prepared for the threats they face in today's new world. IDC Research Vice President, Phil Goodwin is here to share the highlights of the study and summarize the findings from a recent research report on the topic. After that, we're going to hear from Curtis Preston, who's the Chief Technical Evangelist at Druva. I've known Curtis for decades. He's one of the world's foremost experts on backup and recovery, specifically in data protection generally. Curtis will help us understand how the survey data presented by IDC aligns with the real world findings from the field, from his point of view. And he'll discuss why so many organizations have failed to successfully recover from an attack without major pains and big costs, and how to avoid such operational disruptions and disasters. And then finally, we'll hear from the technical experts at Druva, Stephen Manley and Anjan Srinivas. Stephen is a 10-time (indistinct) and chief technology officer at Druva. And Anjan is vice president and general manager of product management at the company. And these individuals will specifically address how Druva is closing the gaps presented in the IDC survey through their product innovation. Right now I'm going to toss it to Lisa Martin, another one of the hosts, for today's program. Lisa, over to you. (soft upbeat music) >> Phil Goodwin joins me next, the VP of research at IDC. We're going to be breaking down what's going on in the threat landscape. Phil, welcome to the program. It's great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Hey, Lisa, it's great to be here with you. >> So talk to me about the state of the global IT landscape as we see cyber attacks massively increasing, the threat landscape changing so much, what is IDC seeing? >> You really hit the top topic that we find from IT organizations as well as business organizations. And really it's that digital resilience that ransomware that has everybody's attention. And it has the attention not just of the IT people, but of the business people alike, because it really does have profound effects across the organization. The other thing that we're seeing, Lisa, is really a move towards cloud. And I think part of that is driven by the economics of cloud, which fundamentally changed the way that we can approach disaster recovery, but also was accelerated during the pandemic for all the reasons that people have talked about in terms of work from home and so on. And then really the third thing is the economic uncertainty. And this is relatively new for 2022. But within IDC we've been doing a lot of research around what are those impacts going to be. And what we find people doing is they want greater flexibility, they want more cost certainty, and they really want to be able to leverage those cloud economics to be have the scale up or scale down on demand nature of cloud. So those are in a nutshell kind of the three things that people are looking at. >> You mentioned ransomware. It's a topic we've been talking about a lot. It's a household word these days. It's now, Phil, no longer if we're going to get attacked, it's when, it's how often, it's the severity. Talk about ransomware as a priority all the way up the stack to the C-suite. And what are they trying to do to become resilient against it? >> Well, what some of the research that we did is we found that about 77% of organizations have digital resilience as a top priority within their organization. And so what you're seeing is organizations trying to leverage things to become more resilient, more digitally resilient, and to be able to really hone in on those kinds of issues that are keeping them awake at night, quite honestly. If you think about digital resilience, it really is foundational to the organization, whether it's through digital transformation or whether it's simply data availability, whatever it might happen to be. Digital resilience is really a large umbrella term that we use to describe that function that is aimed at avoiding data loss, assuring data availability, and helping the organization to extract value from their data. >> And digital resilience, data resilience, as every company these days has to be a data company to be competitive. Digital resilience, data resilience, are you using those terms interchangeably or is data resilience defined as something a little bit different? >> Well, sometimes yeah, that we do get caught using them when one is the other. But data resilience is really a part of digital resilience, if you think about the data itself in the context of of IT computing. So it really is a subset of that. But it is foundational to IT resilience. You can't have it resilience without data resilience. So that's where we're coming from on it >> Inextricably linked. And it's becoming a corporate initiative, but there's some factors that can complicate digital resilience, data resilience, for organizations. What are some of those complications that organizations need to be aware of? >> Well, one of the biggest is what you mentioned at the top of the segment, and that is the area of ransomware. The research that we found is about 46% of organizations have been hit within the last three years. It's kind of interesting how it's changed over the years. Originally, being hit by ransomware had a real stigma attached to it. Organizations didn't want to admit it, and they really avoided confronting that. Nowadays, so many people have been hit by it, that that stigma has gone. And so really it is becoming more of a community kind of effort as people try to defend against these ransomwares. The other thing about it is, it's really a lot like Whack-A-Mole. They attack us in one area, and we defend against it, so they attack us in another area, and we defend against it. And in fact, I had an individual come up to me at a show not long ago and said, "You know, one of these days we're going to get pretty well defended against ransomware and it's going to go away." And I responded, "I don't think so, because we're constantly introducing new systems, new software, and introducing new vulnerabilities. And the fact is ransomware is so profitable the bad guys aren't going to just fade into the night without giving it a lot of fight." So I really think that ransomware is one of those things that is here for the long term, and something that we have to address and have to get proactive about. >> You mentioned some stats there, and recently IDC and Druva did a white paper together that really revealed some quite shocking results. Talk to me about some of the things. Let's talk a little bit about the demographics of the survey and then talk about what was the biggest finding there, especially where it's concerning ransomware. >> Yeah, this was in a worldwide study, it was sponsored by Druva and conducted by IDC as an independent study. And what we did, we surveyed 500, is a little over 500 different individuals across the globe, in North America, select countries in Western Europe as well as several in Asia-Pacific. And we did it across industries where 20 different industries represented. They're all evenly represented. We had surveys that included IT practitioners, primarily CIOs, CTOs, VP of infrastructure, managers of data centers, things like that. And the biggest finding that we had in this, Lisa, was really finding that there is a huge disconnect, I believe, between how people think they are ready and what the actual results are when they get attacked. Some of the statistics that we learned from this, Lisa, include 83% of organizations believe, or told us that they have a playbook that they have for ransomware. I think 93% said that they have a high degree, or a high or very high degree of confidence in their recovery tools and are fully automated. And yet when you look at the actual results, I told you a moment ago, 46% have been attack successfully. I can also tell you that in separate research, fewer than a third of organizations were able to fully recover their data without paying the ransom. And some two thirds actually had to pay the ransom. And even when they did, they didn't necessarily achieve their full recovery. The bad guys aren't necessarily to be trusted. And so the software that they provide sometimes is fully recovered, sometimes it's not. So you look at that and you go, "Wow." On the one hand, people think they're really prepared, and on the other hand, the results are absolutely horrible. Two thirds of people having to pay the ransom. So you start to ask yourself, "Well, what's going on there?" And I believe that a lot of it comes down to... kind of reminds me of the old quote from Mike Tyson. "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." And I think that's kind of what happens with ransomware. You think you know what you're doing, you think you're ready, based on the information you have, and these people are smart people and they're professionals, but oftentimes you don't know what you don't know. And like I say, the bad guys are always dreaming up new ways to attack us. And so I think for that reason a lot of these have been successful. So that was kind of the key finding to me in kind of the "aha" moment, really, in this whole thing, Lisa. >> That's a massive disconnect, with the vast majority saying, "We have a cyber recovery playbook," yet, nearly half being the victims of ransomware in the last three years, and then half of them experiencing data loss. What is it then that organizations in this situation across any industry can do to truly enable cyber resilience, data resilience, as we said, this is a matter of this is going to happen, just a matter of when and how often? >> It is a matter, yeah, as you said, it's not if when or how often, it's really how badly. So I think what organizations are really doing now is starting to turn more to cloud-based services. Finding professionals who know what they're doing, who have that breadth of experience, and who have seen the kinds of necessary steps that it takes to do a recovery. And the fact of the matter is a disaster recovery and a cyber recovery are really not the same thing. And so organizations need to be able to plan the kinds of recovery associated with cyber recovery in terms of forensics, in terms of scanning, in terms of analysis, and so forth. So they're turning to professionals in the cloud much more in order to get that breadth of experience and to take advantage of cloud-based services that are out there. >> Talk to me about some of the key advantages of cloud-based services for data resilience versus traditional legacy on-prem equipment. What are some of the advantages? Why is IDC seeing this big shift to cloud where data resilience is concerned? >> Well, the first and foremost is the economics of it. You can have on-demand resources. And in the old days when we had disaster recoveries where there we had two different data centers and a failover and so forth, you had double the infrastructure if your financial services, it might even be triple the infrastructure. It was very complicated, very difficult. By going to the cloud, organizations can subscribe to disaster recovery as a service. And increasingly what we see is a new market of cyber recovery as a service. So being able to leverage those resources to be able to have the forensic analysis available to them, to be able to have the other resources available that are on-demand, and to have that plan in place to have those resources in place. I think what happens in a number of situations, Lisa, is that organizations think they're ready, but then all of a sudden they get hit, and all of a sudden they have to engage with outside consultants, or they have to bring in other experts. And that extends the time to recover that they have, and it also complicates it. So if they have those resources in place, then they can simply turn them on, engage them, and get that recover going as quickly as possible. >> So what do you think the big issue here is? Is it that these IT practitioners, over 500 that you surveyed across 20 industries, this a global survey, do they not know what they don't know? What's the overlying issue here? >> Yeah, I think that's right. It's you don't know what you don't know and until you get into a specific attack... there are so many different ways that organizations can be attacked. And in fact, from this research that we found, is that in many cases, data exfiltration exceeds data corruption by about 50%. And when you think about that, the issue is, once I have your data, what are you going to do? I mean, there's no amount of recovery that is going to help. So organizations are either faced with paying the ransom to keep the data from perhaps being used on the dark web or whatever, or simply saying no and taking their chances. So best practice things like encryption, immutability, things like that that organizations can put into place. Certainly air gaps, having a solid backup foundation to where data is, you have a high probability of recovery, things like that, those are the kinds of things that organizations have to put into place, really is a baseline to assure that they can recover as fast as possible and not lose data in the event of a ransomware attack. >> Given some of the disconnect that you articulated, the stats that show so many think, "We are prepared, we've got a playbook," yet so many are are being attacked, the vulnerabilities as the landscape, threat landscape, just gets more and more amorphous, what do you recommend organizations? Do you talk to the IT practitioners, but does this go all the way up to the board level in terms of, "Hey guys, across every industry we are vulnerable, this is going to happen, we've got to make sure that we are truly resilient and proactive"? >> Yes, and in fact, what we found from this research is in more than half of cases, the CEO is directly involved in the recovery. So this is very much a C-suite issue. And if you look at the the consequences of ransomware it's not just the ransom, it's the lost productivity, it's the loss of revenue, it's the loss of customer faith and goodwill. And organizations that have been attacked have suffered those consequences, and many of them are permanent. So people at the board level, whether it's the CEO, the CFO, the CIO, the CISO, whoever it is, they're extremely concerned about this. And I can tell you they are fully engaged in addressing these issues within their organization. >> So all the way at the top critically important, business critical for any industry. I imagine some industries may be a little bit more vulnerable than others, financial services, healthcare, education, we've just seen big attack in Los Angeles County. But in terms of establishing data resilience, you mentioned ransomware isn't going anywhere, it's a big business, it's very profitable, but what is IDC's prediction where ransomware is concerned? Do you think that organizations, if they truly adopt cloud and status-based technologies, can they get to a place where the C-suite doesn't have to be involved to the point where they really actually have a functioning playbook? >> I don't know if we'll ever get to the point where the C-suite is not involved. It's probably very important to have that level of executive sponsorship. But what we are seeing is, in fact, we predict predict that by 2025, 55% of organizations will have shifted to a cloud-centric strategy for their data resilience. And the reason we say that is workloads on premises aren't going away, so that's the core. We have an increasing number of workloads in the cloud and at the edge, and that's really where the growth is. So being able to take that cloud-centric model and take advantage of cloud resources, like immutable storage, being able to move data from region to region inexpensively and easily, and to be able to take that cloud-centric perspective and apply it on premises as well as in the cloud and at the edge, is really where we believe that organizations are shifting their focus. >> Got it. We're just cracking the surface here, Phil. I wish we had more time. But I had a chance to read the Druva-sponsored IDC white paper. Fascinating finds. I encourage all of you to download that. Take a read. You're going to learn some very interesting statistics and recommendations for how you can really truly deploy data resilience in your organization. Phil, it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you for joining me. >> No problem. Thank you, Lisa. (gentle music)

>> The past 2 1/2 years have seen a dramatic change in the security posture of virtually all organizations. By accelerating the digital business mandate, the isolation economy catalyzed a move toward cloud computing to support remote workers. This we know. This had several ripple effects on CSO and CIO strategies that were highly visible at the Board of Directors' level. Now, the first major change was to recognize that the perimeter had suddenly been vaporized. Protection, as a result, moved away from things like perimeter-based firewalls toward more distributed endpoints, cloud security, and modern identity management. The second major change was a heightened awareness of the realities of ransomware. Ransomware as a service, for example, emerged as a major threat where virtually anyone with access to critical data and criminal intentions could monetize corporate security exposures. The third major change was a much more acute understanding of how data protection needed to become a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies, and more specifically, CIOs quickly realized that their business resilience strategies were too narrowly DR-focused, that their DR approach was not cost efficient and needed to be modernized, and that new approaches to operational resilience were needed to reflect the architectural and business realities of this new environment. Hello, and welcome to "Why Ransomware isn't Your Only Problem," a service of theCUBE made possible by Druva, and in collaboration with IDC. I'm your host, Dave Vellante, and today, we're presenting a three-part program. We'll start with the data. IDC recently conducted a global survey of 500 business technology practitioners across 20 industries to understand the degree to which organizations are aware of and prepared for the threats they face in today's new world. IDC Research Vice President Phil Goodwin is here to share the highlights of the study and to summarize the findings from a recent research report on the topic. After that, we're going to hear from Curtis Preston, who's the Chief Technical Evangelist at Druva. I've known Curtis for decades. He's one of the world's foremost experts on backup and recovery, specifically, and data protection, generally. Curtis will help us understand how the survey data presented by IDC aligns with the real world findings from the field from his point of view. And he'll discuss why so many organizations have failed to successfully recover from an attack without major pains and big costs, and how to avoid such operational disruptions and disasters. And then finally, we'll hear from the technical experts at Druva, Stephen Manley and Anjan Srinivas. Stephen is a 10-time CUBE alum and Chief Technology Officer at Druva, and Anjan is Vice President and General Manager of Product Management at the company. And these individuals will specifically address how Druva is closing the gaps presented in the IDC survey through their product innovation. But right now I'm going to toss it to Lisa Martin, another one of the hosts for today's program. Lisa, over to you. (upbeat music) >> Bill Goodwin joins me next, the VP of Research at IDC. We're going to be breaking down what's going on in the threat landscape. Phil, welcome to the program. It's great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Hey, Lisa, it's great to be here with you. >> So talk to me about the state of the global IT landscape as we see cyberattacks massively increasing, the threat landscape changing so much. What is IDC seeing? >> You know, you really hit the top topic that we find from IT organizations as well as business organizations. And really, it's that digital resilience, that ransomware that has everybody's attention, and it has the attention, not just of the IT people, but of the business people alike, because it really does have profound effects across the organization. The other thing that we're seeing, Lisa, is really a move towards cloud. And I think part of that is driven by the economics of cloud, which fundamentally changed the way that we can approach disaster recovery, but also has accelerated during the pandemic for all the reasons that people have talked about in terms of work from home and so on. And then really the third thing is the economic uncertainty, and this is relatively new for 2022, but within IDC we've been doing a lot of research around what are those impacts going to be? And what we find people doing is they want greater flexibility, they want more cost certainty, and they really want to be able to leverage those cloud economics to have the scale up or scale down on demand nature of cloud. So those are, in a nutshell, kind of the three things that people are looking at. >> You mentioned ransomware. It's a topic we've been talking about a lot. It's a household word these days. It's now, Phil, no longer if we're going to get attacked, it's when, it's how often, it's the severity. Talk about ransomware as a priority all the way up the stack to the C-suite, and what are they trying to do to become resilient against it? >> Well, what some of the research that we did is we found that about 77% of organizations have digital resilience as a top priority within their organization. And so what you're seeing is organizations trying to leverage things to become more resilient, more digitally resilient, and to be able to really hone in on those kinds of issues that are keeping them awake at night, quite honestly. If you think about digital resilience, it really is foundational to the organization, whether it's through digital transformation or whether it's simply data availability, whatever it might happen to be. Digital resilience is really a large umbrella term that we use to describe that function that is aimed at avoiding data loss, assuring data availability, and helping the organization to extract value from their data. >> And digital resilience, data resilience, as every company these days has to be a data company to be competitive. Digital resilience, data resilience, are you using those terms interchangeably or is data resilience defined as something a little bit different? >> Well, sometimes yeah, we do get caught using them when one is the other. But data resilience is really a part of digital resilience, if you think about the data itself in the context of IT computing. So it really is a subset of that, but it is foundational to IT resilience. You can't have IT resilience without data resilience. So that's where we're coming from on it. >> Inextricably linked, and it's becoming a corporate initiative, but there's some factors that can complicate digital resilience, data resilience for organizations. What are some of those complications that organizations need to be aware of? >> Well, one of the biggest is what you mentioned at the top of the segment, and that is the area of ransomware. The research that we found is about 46% of organizations have been hit within the last three years. You know, it's kind of interesting how it's changed over the years. Originally, being hit by ransomware had a real stigma attached to it. Organizations didn't want to admit it, and they really avoided confronting that. Nowadays, so many people have been hit by it that that stigma has gone. And so really it is becoming more of a community kind of effort as people try to defend against these ransomers. The other thing about it is it's really a lot like Whac-A-Mole, you know. They attack us in one area and we defend against it so they attack us in another area, and we defend against it. And in fact, I had an individual come up to me at a show not long ago and said, "You know, one of these days we're going to get pretty well defended against ransomware and it's going to go away." And I responded I don't think so because we're constantly introducing new systems, new software, and introducing new vulnerabilities. And the fact is ransomware is so profitable, the bad guys aren't going to just fade into the night without giving it a a lot of fight. So I really think that ransomware is one of those things that is here for the long term and something that we have to address and have to get proactive about. >> You mentioned some stats there, and recently IDC and Druva did a white paper together that really revealed some quite shocking results. Talk to me about some of the things. Let's talk a little bit about the demographics of the survey and then talk about what was the biggest finding there, especially where it's concerning ransomware? >> Yeah, this was a worldwide study. It was sponsored by Druva and conducted by IDC as an independent study. And what we did, we surveyed 500, it was a little over 500 different individuals across the globe in North America, select countries in Western Europe, as well as several in Asia Pacific. And we did it across industries there were 20 different industries represented, they're all evenly represented. We had surveys that included IT practitioners, primarily CIOs, CTOs, VP of infrastructure, you know, managers of data centers, things like that. And the biggest finding that we had in this, Lisa, was really finding that there is a huge disconnect, I believe, between how people think they are ready and what the actual results are when they get attacked. Some of the statistics that we learned from this, Lisa, include 83% of organizations believe, or told us that they have a playbook that they have for ransomware. I think 93% said that they have a high degree, or a high or very high degree of confidence in their recovery tools and are fully automated. And yet, when you look at the actual results, you know, I told you a moment ago, 46% have been attacked successfully. I can also tell you that in separate research, fewer than 1/3 of organizations were able to fully recover their data without paying the ransom, and some 2/3 actually had to pay the ransom. And even when they did, they didn't necessarily achieve their full recovery. You know, the bad guys aren't necessarily to be trusted, and so the software that they provide sometimes is fully recovered, sometimes it's not. So you look at that and you go, wow. On the one hand, people think they're really, really prepared, and on the other hand, the results are absolutely horrible. You know, 2/3 of people having to pay the ransom. So you start to ask yourself, well, what's going on there? And I believe that a lot of it comes down to, kind of reminds me of the old quote from Mike Tyson. "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." And I think that's kind of what happens with ransomware. You think you know what you're doing. You think you're ready, based on the information you have. And these people are smart people, and they're professionals, but oftentimes, you don't know what you don't know. And like I said, the bad guys are always dreaming up new ways to attack us. And so, I think, for that reason, a lot of these have been successful. So that was kind of the key finding to me and kind of the aha moment really in this whole thing, Lisa. >> That's a massive disconnect with the vast majority saying, "We have a cyber recovery playbook," yet nearly 1/2 being the victims of ransomware in the last three years, and then 1/2 of them experiencing data loss. What is it then that organizations in this situation across any industry can do to truly enable cyber resilience, data resilience? As we said, this is a matter of this is going to happen, just a matter of when and how often. >> It is a matter, yeah, as you said, it's not if, when, or how often, it's really how badly. So I think what organizations are really doing now is starting to turn more to cloud-based services, you know, finding professionals who know what they're doing, who have that breadth of experience and who have seen the kinds of necessary steps that it takes to do a recovery. And the fact of the matter is a disaster recovery and a cyber recovery are really not the same thing. And so organizations need to be able to plan the kinds of recovery associated with cyber recovery in terms of forensics, in terms of scanning, in terms of analysis, and so forth. So they're turning to professionals in the cloud much more, in order to get that breadth of experience, and to take advantage of cloud-based services that are out there. >> Talk to me about some of the key advantages of cloud-based services for data resilience versus traditional legacy on-prem equipment. What are some of the advantages? Why is IDC seeing this big shift to cloud where data resilience is concerned? >> Well, the first and foremost is the economics of it. You know, you can have on-demand resources. In the old days, when we had disaster recoveries where we had two different data centers and a failover and so forth, you know, you had double the infrastructure. If you're financial services, it might even be triple the infrastructure. It was very complicated, very difficult. By going to the cloud, organizations can subscribe to disaster recovery as a service. And increasingly what we see is a new market of cyber recovery as a service. So being able to leverage those resources, to be able to have the forensic analysis available to them, to be able to have the other resources available that are on demand, and to have that plan in place to have those resources in place. I think what happens in a number of situations, Lisa, is that organizations think they're ready, but then all of a sudden they get hit, and all of a sudden they have to engage with outside consultants, or they have to bring in other experts, and that extends the time to recover that they have and it also complicates it. So if they have those resources in place, then they can simply turn them on, engage them, and get that recovery going as quickly as possible. >> So what do you think the big issue here is? Is it that these IPT practitioners, over 500 that you surveyed across 20 industries, this a global survey, do they they not know what they don't know? What's the overlying issue here? >> Yeah, I think that's right. You don't know what you don't know, and until you get into a specific attack, you know, there are so many different ways that organizations can be attacked. And, in fact, from this research that we found is that, in many cases, data exfiltration exceeds data corruption by about 50%. But when you think about that, the issue is, once I have your data, what are you going to do? I mean, there's no amount of recovery that is going to help. So organizations are either faced with paying the ransom to keep the data from perhaps being used on the dark web, or whatever, or simply saying no, and taking their chances. So best practice things like encryption, immutability, things like that that organizations can put into place. Certainly air gaps, having a solid backup foundation to where data is, you have a high recovery, high probability of recovery, things like that. Those are the kinds of things that organizations have to put into place, really as a baseline to assure that they can recover as fast as possible and not lose data in the event of a ransomware attack. >> Given some of the disconnect that you articulated, the stats that show so many think we are prepared, we've got a playbook, yet so many are being attacked, the vulnerabilities as the landscape, threat landscape, just gets more and more amorphous. What do you recommend organizations do? You talked to the IT practitioners, but does this go all the way up to the board level in terms of, hey guys, across every industry, we are vulnerable, this is going to happen. We've got to make sure that we are truly resilient and proactive? >> Yes, and in fact, what we found from this research is in more than 1/2 of cases, the CEO is directly involved in the recovery. So this is very much a C-suite issue. And if you look at the consequences of ransomware, it's not just the ransom, it's the lost productivity, it's the loss of revenue. It's the loss of customer faith and goodwill, and organizations that have been attacked have suffered those consequences, and many of them are permanent. So people at the board level, whether it's the CEO, the CFO, the CIO, the CSO, you know, whoever it is, they're extremely concerned about these. And I can tell you, they are fully engaged in addressing those issues within their organization. >> So all the way at the top, and critically important, business critical for any industry. I imagine some industries may be a little bit more vulnerable than others, financial services, healthcare, education. We've just seen a big attack in Los Angeles County. But in terms of establishing data resilience, you mentioned ransomware isn't going anywhere, it's a big business, it's very profitable. But what is IDC's prediction where ransomware is concerned? Do you think that organizations, if they truly adopt cloud and SaaS-based technologies, can they get to a place where the C-suite doesn't have to be involved to the point where they really actually have a functioning playbook? >> I don't know if we'll ever get to the point where the C-suite is not involved. It's probably very important to have that level of executive sponsorship. But what we are seeing is, in fact, we predict that by 2025, 55% of organizations will have shifted to a cloud-centric strategy for their data resilience. And the reason we say that is, you know, workloads on premises aren't going away. So that's the core. We have an increasing number of workloads in the cloud and at the edge, and that's really where the growth is. So being able to take that cloud-centric model and take advantage of cloud resources like immutable storage, being able to move data from region to region inexpensively and easily, and to be able to take that cloud-centric perspective and apply it on premises as well as in the cloud and at the edge is really where we believe that organizations are shifting their focus. >> Got it, we're just cracking the surface here, Phil. I wish we had more time, but I had a chance to read the Druva-sponsored IDC white paper. Fascinating finds. I encourage all of you to download that, take a read. You're going to learn some very interesting statistics and recommendations for how you can really truly deploy data resilience in your organization. Phil, it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you for joining me. >> No problem. Thank you, Lisa. >> In a moment, John Furrier will be here with his next guest. For right now, I'm Lisa Martin, and you are watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. >> We live in a world of infinite data. Sprawling, dispersed, valuable, but also vulnerable. So how do organizations achieve data resiliency when faced with ever expanding workloads, increasing security threats, and intensified regulations? Unfortunately, the answer often boils down to what flavor of complexity do you like best? The common patchwork approaches are expensive, convoluted, and difficult to manage. There's multiple software and hardware vendors to worry about, different deployments for workloads running on-premises or in the cloud. And an inconsistent security framework resulting in enterprises maintaining four to five copies of the same data, increasing costs and risk, building to an incoherent mess of complications. Now, imagine a world free from these complexities. Welcome to the the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, where full data protection and beautiful simplicity converge. No hardware, no upgrades, no management, just total data resilience. With just a few clicks, you can get started integrating all of your data resiliency workflows in minutes. Through a true cloud experience built on Amazon Web Services, the Druva platform automates and manages critical daily tasks, giving you time to focus on your business. In other words, get simplicity, scalability, and security instantly. With the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, your data isn't just backed up, it's ready to be used 24/7 to meet compliance needs and to extract critical insights. You can archive data for long-term retention, be protected against device failure and natural disasters, and recover from ransomware lightning fast. Druva is trusted with billions of backups annually by thousands of enterprises, including more than 60 of the Fortune 500, costing up to 50% less than the convoluted hardware, software, and appliance solutions. As data grows and becomes more critical to your business advantage, a data resiliency plan is vital, but it shouldn't be complicated. Druva makes it simple. (upbeat music) (mouse clicks) >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE and the Druva special presentation of "Why Ransomware isn't Your Only Problem." I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with W Curtis Preston, Curtis Preston, as he's known in the industry, Chief Technical Evangelist at Druva. Curtis, great to see you. We're here at "Why Ransomware isn't Your Only Problem." Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Happy to be here. >> So we always see each other at events now events are back. So it's great to have you here for this special presentation. The white paper from IDC really talks about this in detail. I'd like to get your thoughts, and I'd like you to reflect on the analysis that we've been covering here in this survey data, how it lines up with the real world that you're seeing out there. >> Yeah, I think it's, the survey results really, I'd like to say, I'd like to say that they surprised me, but unfortunately, they didn't. The data protection world has been this way for a while where there's this difference in belief, or difference between the belief and the reality. And what we see is that there are a number of organizations that have been hit, successfully hit by ransomware, paid the ransom and/or lost data, and yet the same people that were surveyed, they had high degrees of confidence in their backup system. And, you know, I could probably go on for an hour as to the various reasons why that would be the case, but I think that this long running problem that as long as I've been associated with backups, which, you know, has been a while, it's that problem of, you know, nobody wants to be the backup person. And people often just, they don't want to have anything to do with the backup system, and so it sort of exists in this vacuum. And so then management is like, "Oh, the backup system's great," because the backup person often, you know, might say that it's great because maybe it's their job to say so. But the reality has always been very, very different. >> It's funny, you know. "We're good, boss, we got this covered." >> Yeah, it's all good, it's all good. >> And the fingers crossed, right? So again, this is the reality, and as it becomes backup and recovery, which we've talked about many times on theCUBE, certainly we have with you before, but now with ransomware, also, the other thing is people get ransomware hit multiple times. So it's not only like they get hit once, so, you know, this is a constant chasing the tail on some ends, but there are some tools out there, You guys have a solution, and so let's get into that. You know, you have had hands-on backup experience. What are the points that surprise you the most about what's going on in this world and the realities of how people should be going forward? What's your take? >> Well, I would say that the one part in the survey that surprised me the most was people that had a huge, you know, there was a huge percentage of people that said that they had, you know, a ransomware response, you know, and readiness program. And you look at that, and how could you be, you know, that high a percentage of people be comfortable with their ransomware readiness program, which includes a number of things, right? There's the cyberattack aspect of responding to a ransomware attack, and then there's the recovery aspect. And so you believe that your company was ready for that, and then you go, and I think it was 67% of the people in the survey paid the ransom, which as a person who, you know, has spent my entire career trying to help people successfully recover their data, that number, I think, just hurt me the most is that because, you talked about re-infections. The surest way to guarantee that you get re-attacked and reinfected is to pay the ransom. This goes back all the way to ransom since the beginning of time, right? Everyone knows if you pay the blackmail, all you're telling people is that you pay blackmail. >> You're in business, you're a good customer >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. >> for ransomware. >> Yeah, so the fact that, you know, 60, what, 2/3 of the people that were attacked by ransomware paid the ransom. That one statistic just hurt my heart. >> Yeah, and I think this is the reality. I mean, we go back, and even the psychology of the practitioners was, you know, it's super important to get backup and recovery, and that's been around for a long time, but now that's an attack vector, okay? And there's dollars involved, like I said, I'm joking, but there's recurring revenue for the bad guys if they know you're paying up and if you're stupid enough not to change your tooling. So again, it works both ways. So I got to ask you, why do you think so many owners are unable to successfully respond after an attack? Is it because, they know it's coming, I mean, they're not that dumb. I mean, they have to know it's coming. Why aren't they responding successfully to this? >> I think it's a litany of things, starting with that aspect that I mentioned before, that nobody wants to have anything to do with the backup system, right? So nobody wants to be the one to raise their hand because if you're the one that raises their hand, "You know, that's a good idea, Curtis, why don't you look into that?" Nobody wants to be- >> Where's that guy now? He doesn't work here anymore. Yeah, I hear where you coming from. >> Exactly. >> It's psychology (indistinct) >> Yeah, so there's that. But then the second is that because of that, no one's looking at the fact that backups are the attack vector. They become the attack vector. And so because they're the attack vector, they have to be protected as much, if not more than the rest of the environment. The rest of the environment can live off of Active Directory and, you know, and things like Okta, so that you can have SSO and things like that. The backup environment has to be segregated in a very special way. Backups have to be stored completely separate from your environment. The login and authentication and authorization system needs to be completely separate from your typical environment. Why? Because if that production environment is compromised, now knowing that the attacks or that the backup systems are a significant portion of the attack vector, then if the production system is compromised, then the backup system is compromised. So you've got to segregate all of that. And I just don't think that people are thinking about that. You know, and they're using the same backup techniques that they've used for many, many years. >> So what you're saying is that the attack vectors and the attackers are getting smarter. They're saying, "Hey, we'll just take out the backup first so they can't backup. So we got the ransomware." It makes sense. >> Yeah, exactly. The largest ransomware group out there, the Conti ransomware group, they are specifically targeting specific backup vendors. They know how to recognize the backup servers. They know how to recognize where the backups are stored, and they are exfiltrating the backups first, and then deleting them, and then letting you know you have ransom. >> Okay, so you guys have a lot of customers. They all kind of have the same problem. What's the patterns that you're seeing? How are they evolving? What are some of the things that they're implementing? What is the best practice? >> Well, again, you've got to fully segregate that data, and everything about how that data is stored and everything about how that data's created and accessed, there are ways to do that with other, you know, with other commercial products. You can take a standard product and put a number of layers of defense on top of it, or you can switch to the way Druva does things, which is a SaaS offering that stores your data completely in the cloud in our account, right? So your account could be completely compromised. That has nothing to do with our account. It's a completely different authentication and authorization system. You've got multiple layers of defense between your computing environment and where we store your backups. So basically, what you get by default with the way Druva stores your backups is the best you can get after doing many, many layers of defense on the other side and having to do all that work. With us, you just log in and you get all of that. >> I guess, how do you break the laws of physics? I guess that's the question here. >> Well, because that's the other thing is that by storing the data in the cloud, and I've said this a few times, you get to break the laws of physics, and the only way to do that is time travel. (both laughing) So yes, so Druva has time travel. And this is a Curtisism, by the way, I don't think this is our official position, but the idea is that the only way to restore data as fast as possible is to restore it before you actually need it, and that's kind of what I mean by time travel, in that you, basically, you configure your DR, your disaster recovery environment in Druva one time, and then we are pre-restoring your data as often as you tell us to do, to bring your DR environment up to the, you know, the current environment as quickly as we can so that in a disaster recovery scenario, which is part of your ransomware response, right? Again, there are many different parts, but when you get to actually restoring the data, you should be able to just push a button and go. The data should already be restored. And that's the way that you break the laws of physics is you break the laws of time. >> (laughs) Well, all right, everyone wants to know the next question, and this is a real big question is, are you from the future? >> (laughs) Yeah. Very much the future. >> What's it like in the future, backup, recovery? How does it restore? Is it air gapping everything? >> Yeah, well, it's a world where people don't have to worry about their backups. I like to use the phrase get out of the backup business, just get into the restore business. You know, I'm a grandfather now, and I love having a granddaughter, and I often make the joke that if I'd have known how great grandkids were, I would've skipped straight to them, right? Not possible. Just like this. Recoveries are great. Backups are really hard. So in the future, if you use a SaaS data protection system and data resiliency system, you can just do recoveries and not have to worry about backups. >> Yeah, and what's great about your background is you've got a lot of historical perspective. You've seen that, the waves of innovation. Now it really is about the recovery and real time. So a lot of good stuff going on. And got to think automated, things got to be rocking and rolling. >> Absolutely. Yeah. I do remember, again, having worked so hard with many clients over the years, back then, we worked so hard just to get the backup done. There was very little time to work on the recovery. And I really, I kid you not, that our customers don't have to do all of those things that all of our competitors have to do to, you know, to break, to try to break the laws of physics, I've been fighting the laws of physics my entire career, to get the backup done in the first place, then to secure all the data, and to air gap it and make sure that a ransomware attack isn't going to attack it. Our customers get to get straight to a fully automated disaster recovery environment that they get to test as often as possible and they get to do a full test by simply pressing a single button. And you know, I wish everybody had that ability. >> Yeah, I mean, security's a big part of it. Data's in the middle of it all. This is now mainstream, front lines, great stuff. Curtis, great to have you on, bring that perspective, and thanks for the insight. Really appreciate it. >> Always happy to talk about my favorite subject. >> All right, we'll be back in a moment. We'll have Stephen Manley, the CTO, and Anjan Srinivas, the GM and VP of Product Management will join me. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >> Ransomware is top of mind for everyone. Attacks are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated. It's a problem you can't solve alone anymore. Ransomware is built to exploit weaknesses in your backup solution, destroying data, and your last line of defense. With many vendors, it can take a lot of effort and configuration to ensure your backup environment is secure. Criminals also know that it's easy to fall behind on best practices like vulnerability scans, patches, and updates. In fact, 42% of vulnerabilities are exploited after a patch has been released. After an attack, recovery can be a long and manual process that still may not restore clean or complete data. The good news is that you can keep your data safe and recover faster with the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud on your side. The Druva platform functions completely in the cloud with no hardware, software, operating system, or complex configurations, which means there are none of the weaknesses that ransomware commonly uses to attack backups. Our software as a service model delivers 24/7/365 fully managed security operations for your backup environment. We handle all the vulnerability scans, patches, and upgrades for you. Druva also makes zero trust security easy with built-in multifactor authentication, single sign-on, and role-based access controls. In the event of an attack, Druva helps you stop the spread of ransomware and quickly understand what went wrong with built-in access insights and anomaly detection. Then you can use industry first tools and services to automate the recovery of clean, unencrypted data from the entire timeframe of the attack. Cyberattacks are a major threat, but you can make protection and recovery easy with Druva. (electronic music) (upbeat music) (mouse clicks) >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's special presentation with Druva on "Why Ransomware isn't Your Only Problem." I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Our next guests are Stephen Manley, Chief Technology Officer of Druva, and Anjan Srinivas, who is the General Manager and Vice President of Product Management at Druva. Gentlemen, you got the keys to the kingdom, the technology, ransomware, data resilience. This is the topic. The IDC white paper that you guys put together with IDC really kind of nails it out. I want to get into it right away. Welcome to this segment. I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here, John. >> So what's your thoughts on the survey's conclusion? Obviously, the resilience is huge. Ransomware continues to thunder away at businesses and causes a lot of problems, disruption. I mean, it's endless ransomware problems. What's your thoughts on the conclusion? >> So I'll say the thing that pops out to me is, on the one hand, everybody who sees the survey and reads it is going to say, "Well, that's obvious." Of course, ransomware continues to be a problem. Cyber resilience is an issue that's plaguing everybody. But I think when you dig deeper and there's a lot of subtleties to look into, but one of the things that I hear on a daily basis from the customers is, it's because the problem keeps evolving. It's not as if the threat was a static thing to just be solved and you're done. Because the threat keeps evolving, it remains top of mind for everybody because it's so hard to keep up with what's happening in terms of the attacks. >> And I think the other important thing to note, John, is that people are grappling with this ransomware attack all of a sudden where they were still grappling with a lot of legacy in their own environment. So they were not prepared for the advanced techniques that these ransomware attackers were bringing to market. It's almost like these ransomware attackers had a huge leg up in terms of technology that they had in their favor while keeping the lights on was keeping IT away from all the tooling that they needed to do. A lot of people are even still wondering, when that happens next time, what do I even do? So clearly not very surprising. Clearly, I think it's here to stay, and I think as long as people don't retool for a modern era of data management, this is going to to stay this way. >> Yeah, I hear this all the time in our CUBE conversations with practitioners. It's kind of like the security pro, give me more tools, I'll buy anything that comes in the market, I'm desperate. There's definitely attention, but it doesn't seem like people are satisfied with the tooling that they have. Can you guys share kind of your insights into what's going on in the product side? Because, you know, people claim that they have tools at crime points of recovery opportunities, but they can't get there. So it seems to be that there's a confidence problem here in the market. How do you guys see that? 'cause I think this is where the rubber meets the road with ransomware 'cause it is a moving train, it's always changing, but it doesn't seem there's confidence. Can you guys talk about that? What's your reaction? >> Yeah, let me jump in first, and Stephen can add to it. What happens is, I think this is a panic buying and they have accumulated this tooling now just because somebody said they could solve your problem, but they haven't had a chance to take a real look from a ground up perspective to see where are the bottlenecks? Where are the vulnerabilities? And which tooling set needs to lie where? Where does the logic need to reside? And what, in Druva, we are watching people do and people do it successfully, is that as they have adopted Druva technology, which is ground up built for the cloud, and really built in a way which is, you know, driven at a data insight level where we have people even monitoring our service for anomalies and activities that are suspicious. We know where we need to play a role in really kind of mitigating this ransomware, and then there's a whole plethora of ecosystem players that kind of combine to really finish the story, so to say, right? So I think this has been a panic buying situation. This is like, "Get me any help you can give me." And I think as this settles down and people really understand that longer term as they really build out a true defense mechanism, they need to think really ground up. They will start to really see the value of technologies like Druva, and try to identify the right set of ecosystem to really bring together to solve it meaningfully. >> Yes, Stephen? >> I was going to say, I mean, one of the the really interesting things in the survey for me, and for a moment, a little more than a moment, it made me think was that the large number of respondents who said, "I've got a really efficient, well-run back environment," who, then, on basically the next question said, "And I have no confidence that I can recover from a ransomware attack." And you scratch your head and you think, "Well, if your backup environment is so good, why do you have such low confidence?" And I think that's the moment when we dug deeper and we realized, if you've got a traditional architecture, and let's face it, the disk-based architecture's been around for almost two decades now, in terms of disk-based backup, you can have that tuned to the hilt. That can be running as efficiently as you want it, but it was built before the ransomware attacks, before all these cyber issues, you know, really start hitting companies. And so I have this really well-run traditional backup environment that is not at all built for these modern threat vectors. And so that's really why customers are saying, "I'm doing the best I can," but as Anjan pointed out, the architecture, the tooling isn't there to support what problems I need to solve today. >> Yeah, great point. >> And so, yeah. >> Well, that's a great point. Before we get into the customer side I want to get to in second, you know, I interviewed Jaspreet, the founder and CEO many years ago, even before the pandemic, and you mentioned modern. You guys have always had the cloud with Druva. This is huge. Now that you're past the pandemic, what is that modern cloud edge that you guys have? 'Cause that's a great point. A lot of stuff was built kind of backup and recovery bolted on, not really kind of designed into the current state of the infrastructure and the cloud native application modern environment we're seeing right now. It's a huge issue. >> I think, to me there's three things that come up over and over and over again as we talk to people in terms of, you know, being built in cloud, being cloud native, why is it an advantage? The first one is security and ransomware. And we can go deeper, but the most obvious one that always comes up is every single backup you do with Druva is air gapped, offsite, managed under a separate administrative domain so that you're not retrofitting any sort of air gap network and buying another appliance or setting up your own cloud environment to manage this. Every backup is ransomware protected, guaranteed. The second advantage is the scalability. And you know, this certainly plays into account as your business grows, or, in some cases, as you shrink or repurpose workloads, you're only paying for what you use. But it also plays a big role, again, when you start thinking of ransomware recoveries because we can scale your recovery in cloud, on premises as much or as little as you want. And then I think the third one is we're seeing, basically, things evolving, new workloads, data sprawl, new threat vectors. And one of the nice parts of being a SaaS service in the cloud is we're able to roll out new functionality every two weeks and there's no upgrade cycle, there's no waiting. The customer doesn't have to say, "Wow, I needed six months in the lab before I upgrade it and it's an 18-month, 24-month cycle before the functionality releases. You're getting it every two weeks, and it's backed by Druva to make sure it works. >> Anjan, you know, you got the product side, you know, it's a challenging job 'cause you have so many customers asking for things, probably on the roadmap, you probably can go an hour for that one, but I want to get your thoughts on what you're hearing and seeing from customers. We just reviewed the IDC with Phil. How are you guys responding to your customer's needs? Because it seems that it's highly accelerated, probably on the feature requests, but also structurally as ransomware continues to evolve. What are you hearing? What's the key customer need? How are you guys responding? >> Yeah, actually, I have two things that I hear very clearly when I talk to customers. One, I think, after listening to their security problems and their vulnerability challenges, because we see customers and help customers who are getting challenged by ransomware on a weekly basis. And what I find that this problem is not just a technology problem, it's an operating model problem. So in order to really secure themselves, they need a security operating model and a lot of them haven't figured out that security operating model in totality. Now where we come in, as Druva, is that we are providing them the cloud operating model and a data protection operating model, combined with a data insights operating model which all fit into their overall security operating model that they are really owning and they need to manage and operate, because this is not just about a piece of technology. On top of that, I think our customers are getting challenged by all the same challenges of not just spending time on keeping the lights on, but innovating faster with less. And that has been this age old problem, do more with less. But in this whole, they're like trying to innovate in the middle of the war, so to say. The war is happening, they're getting attacked, but there's also net new shadow IT challenges that's forcing them to make sure that they can manage all the new applications that are getting developed in the cloud. There is thousands of SaaS applications that they're consuming, not knowing which data is critical to their success and which ones to protect and govern and secure. So all of these things are coming at them at 100 miles per hour, while they're just trying to live one day at a time. And unless they really develop this overall security operating model, helped by cloud native technologies like Druva that really providing them a true cloud native model of really giving like a touchless and an invisible protection infrastructure. Not just beyond backups, beyond just the data protection that we all know of into this mindset of kind of being able to look at where each of those functionalities need to lie. That's where I think they're grappling with. Now Druva is clearly helping them with keep up to pace with the public cloud innovations that they need to do and how to protect data. We just launched our EC2 offering to protect EC2 virtual machines back in AWS, and we are going to be continuing to evolve that to further the many services that public cloud software 'cause our customers are really kind of consuming them at breakneck speed. >> So new workloads, new security capabilities. Love that. Good call out there. Stephen, there's still the issue of the disruption side of it. You guys have a guarantee. There's a cost of ownership as you get more tools. Can you talk about that angle of it? You got new workloads, you got the new security needs, what's the disruption impact? 'Cause you want to avoid that. How much is it going to cost you? And you guys have this guarantee, can you explain that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So Druva launched our $10 million data resiliency guarantee. And for us, there were really two key parts to this. The first obviously is $10 million means that, you know, again, we're willing to put our money where our mouth is, and that's a big deal, right? That we're willing to back this with the guarantee. But then the second part, and this is the part that I think reflects that sort of model that Anjan was talking about. We sort of look at this and we say the goal of Druva is to do the job of protecting and securing your data for you so that you, as a customer, don't have to do it anymore. And so the guarantee actually protects you against multiple types of risks, all with SLAs. So everything from your data's going to be recoverable in the case of a ransomware attack. Okay, that's good. Of course, for it to be recoverable, we're also guaranteeing your backup success rate. We're also guaranteeing the availability of the service. We're guaranteeing that the data that we're storing for you can't be compromised or leaked externally, and we're guaranteeing the long-term durability of the data so that if you backup with us today and you need to recover 30 years from now, that data's going to be recovered. So we wanted to really attack the end-to-end risks that affect our customers. Cybersecurity is a big deal, but it is not the only problem out there, and the only way for this to work is to have a service that can provide you SLAs across all of the risks, because that means, as a SaaS vendor, we're doing the job for you so you're buying results as opposed to technology. >> That's great. Great point. Ransomware isn't the only problem. That's the title of this presentation, but it's a big one. (laughs) People are concerned about it, so great stuff. In the last five minutes, guys, if you don't mind, I'd love to have you share what's on the horizon for Druva? You mentioned the new workloads, Anjan. You mentioned this new security. You're going to shift left. DevOps is now the developer model. They're running IT. Get data and security teams now stepping in and trying to be as high velocity as possible for the developers and enterprises. What's on the horizon for Druva? What trends is the company watching, and how are you guys putting that together to stay ahead in the marketplace and the competition? >> Yeah, I think, listening to our customers, what we realize is they need help with the public cloud, number one. I think that's a big wave of consumption. People are consolidating their data centers, moving to the public cloud. They need help in expanding data protection, which becomes the basis of a lot of the security operating model that I talked about. They need that first, from Druva, before they can start to get into much more advanced level of insights and analytics around that data to protect themselves and secure themselves and do interesting things with that data. So we are expanding our coverage on multiple fronts there. The second key thing is to really bring together a very insightful presentation layer, which, I think, is very unique to Druva because only we can look at multiple tenants, multiple customers because we are a SaaS vendor, and look at insights and give them best practices and guidances and analytics that nobody else can give. There's no silo anymore because we are able to take a good big vision view and now help our customers with insights that otherwise that information map is completely missing. So we are able to guide them down a path where they can optimize which workloads need what kind of protection, and then how to secure them. So that is the second level of insights and analytics that we are building. And there's a whole plethora of security offerings that we are going to build, all the way from a feature level where we have things like (audio distorts) that's already available to our customers today to prevent any anomalous behavior and attacks that would delete their backups and then they still have a way to recover from it, but also things to curate and get back to that point in time where it is safe to recover and help them with a sandbox which they can recover confidently knowing it's not going to jeopardize them again and reinfect the whole environment again. So there's a whole bunch of things coming, but the key themes are public cloud, data insights, and security, and that's where my focus is, to go and get those features delivered, and Stephen can add a few more things around services that Stephen is looking to build and launch. >> Sure, so, yeah, so John, I think one of the other areas that we see just an enormous groundswell of interest. So public cloud is important, but there are more and more organizations that are running hundreds, if not thousands of SaaS applications, and a lot of those SaaS applications have data. So there's the obvious things, like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, but we're also seeing a lot of interest in protecting Salesforce because, if you think about it, if someone you know deletes some really important records in Salesforce, that's actually kind of the record of your business. And so, we're looking at more and more SaaS application protection, and really getting deep in that application awareness. It's not just about backup and recovery when you look at something like a Salesforce, or something like Microsoft 365. You do want to look into sandboxing, you want to look into long-term archival, because this is the new record of the business. What used to be in your on-premises databases, that all lives in cloud and SaaS applications now. So that's a really big area of investment for us. The second one, just to echo what Anjan said is, one of the great things of being a SaaS provider is I have metadata that spans across thousands of customers and tens of billions of backups a year. I'm tracking all sorts of interesting information that is going to enable us to do things like make backups more autonomous so that customers, again, I want to do the job for them. We'll do all the tuning, we'll do all the management for them to be able to better detect ransomware attacks, better respond to ransomware attacks, because we're seeing across the globe. And then, of course, being able to give them more insight into what's happening in their data environment so they can get a better security posture before any attack happens. Because, let's face it, if you can set your data up more cleanly, you're going to be a lot less worried and a lot less exposed when that attack happens. So we want to be able to, again, cover those SaaS applications in addition to the public cloud, and then we want to be able to use our metadata and use our analytics and use this massive pipeline we've got to deliver value to our customers. Not just charts and graphs, but actual services that enable them to focus their attention on other parts of the business. >> That's great stuff. >> And remember, John, I think all this while keeping things really easy to consume, consumer grade UI, APIs, and then really the power of SaaS as a service, simplicity to kind of continue on, amongst kind of keeping these complex technologies together. >> Anjan, that's a great callout. I was going to mention ease of use and self-service. Big part of the developer and IT experience. Expected. It's the table stakes. Love the analytic angle, I think that brings the scale to the table, and faster time to value to get to learn best practices. But at the end of the day, automation, cross-cloud protection and security to protect and recover. This is huge, and this is a big part of not only just protecting against ransomware and other things, but really being fast and being agile. So really appreciate the insights. Thanks for sharing on this segment, really under the hood and really kind of the value of the product. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay, there it is. You have the experts talk about under the hood, the product, the value, the future of what's going on with Druva, and the future of cloud native protecting and recovering. This is what it's all about. It's not just ransomware they have to worry about. In a moment, Dave Vellante will give you some closing thoughts on the subject here. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >> As organizations migrate their business processes to multi-cloud environments, they still face numerous threats and risks of data loss. With a growing number of cloud platforms and fragmented applications, it leads to an increase in data silos, sprawl, and management complexity. As workloads become more diverse, it's challenging to effectively manage data growth, infrastructure, and resource costs across multiple cloud deployments. Using numerous backup vendor solutions for multiple cloud platforms can lead to management complexity. More importantly, the lack of centralized visibility and control can leave you exposed to security vulnerabilities, including ransomware that can cripple your business. The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud is the only 100% SaaS data resiliency platform that provides centralized, secure, air gapped, and immutable backup and recovery. With Druva, your data is safe with multiple layers of protection and is ready for fast recovery from cyberattacks, data corruption, or accidental data loss. Through a simple, easy to manage platform, you can seamlessly protect fragmented, diverse data at scale, across public clouds, and your business critical SaaS applications. Druva is the only 100% SaaS vendor that can manage, govern, and protect data across multiple clouds and business critical SaaS applications. It supports not just backup and recovery, but also data resiliency across high value use cases, such as e-discovery, sensitive data governance, ransomware, and security. No other vendor can match Druva for customer experience, infinite scale, storage optimization, data immutability, and ransomware protection. The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, your data, always safe, always ready. Visit druva.com today to schedule a free demo. (upbeat music) >> One of the big takeaways from today's program is that in the scramble to keep business flowing over the past 2+ years, a lot of good technology practices have been put into place, but there's much more work to be done, specifically, because the frequency of attacks is on the rise and the severity of lost, stolen, or inaccessible data is so much higher today, business resilience must be designed into architectures and solutions from the start. It cannot be an afterthought. Well, actually it can be, but you won't be happy with the results. Now, part of the answer is finding the right partners, of course, but it also means taking a system's view of your business, understanding the vulnerabilities and deploying solutions that can balance cost efficiency with appropriately high levels of protection, flexibility, and speed slash accuracy of recovery. Here we hope you found today's program useful and informative. Remember, this session is available on demand in both its full format and the individual guest segments. All you got to do is go to thecube.net, and you'll see all the content, or you can go to druva.com. There are tons of resources available, including analyst reports, customer stories. There's this cool TCO calculator. You can find out what pricing looks like and lots more. Thanks for watching "Why Ransomware isn't Your Only Problem," made possible by Druva, in collaboration with IDC and presented by theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>The past two and a half years have seen a dramatic change in the security posture of virtually all organizations. By accelerating the digital business mandate, the isolation economy catalyzed a move toward cloud computing to support remote workers. This, we know this had several ripple effects on CISO and CIO strategies that were highly visible at the board of directors level. Now, the first major change was to recognize that the perimeter had suddenly been vaporized protection. As a result moved away from things like perimeter based firewalls toward more distributed endpoints, cloud security, and modern identity management. The second major change was a heightened awareness of the realities of ransomware. Ransomware as a service, for example, emerges a major threat where virtually anyone with access to critical data and criminal intentions could monetize corporate security exposures. The third major change was a much more acute understanding of how data protection needed to become a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. >>And more specifically, CIOs quickly realized that their business resilient strategies were too narrowly DR focused that their DR approach was not cost efficient and needed to be modernized. And that new approaches to operational resilience were needed to reflect the architectural and business realities of this new environment. Hello, and welcome to Why Ransomware isn't your Only Problem, a service of the Cube made possible by dva. And in collaboration with idc. I'm your host, Dave Ante, and today we're present a three part program. We'll start with the data. IDC recently conducted a global survey of 500 business technology practitioners across 20 industries to understand the degree to which organizations are aware of and prepared for the threats they face. In today's new world, IDC Research Vice President Phil Goodwin is here to share the highlights of the study and summarize the findings from a recent research report on the topic. >>After that, we're gonna hear from Curtis Preston, who's the Chief Technical Evangelist at Druva. I've known Curtis for decades. He's one of the world's foremost experts on backup and recovery, specifically in data protection. Generally. Curtis will help us understand how the survey data presented by IDC aligns with the real world findings from the field, from his point of view. And he'll discuss why so many organizations have failed to successfully recover from an attack without major pains and big costs, and how to avoid such operational disruptions and disasters. And then finally, we'll hear from the technical experts at dva, Steven Manly and Anja Serenas. Steven is a 10 time cubo and Chief technology officer at dva. And Anjan is vice president and general manager of product management at the company. And these individuals will specifically address how DVA is closing the gaps presented in the IDC survey through their product innovation. Or right now I'm gonna toss it to Lisa Martin, another one of the hosts for today's program. Lisa, over to you. >>Bill Goodwin joins me next, the VP of research at idc. We're gonna be breaking down what's going on in the threat landscape. Phil, welcome to the program. It's great to have you back on the cube. >>Hey, Lisa, it's great to be here with you. >>So talk to me about the state of the global IT landscape as we see cyber attacks massively increasing, the threat landscape changing so much, what is IDC seeing? >>You know, you, you really hit the, the top topic that we find from IT organizations as well as business organizations. And really it's that digital resilience that that ransomware that has everybody's attention, and it has the attention not just of the IT people, but of the business people alike, because it really does have profound effects across the organization. The other thing that we're seeing, Lisa, is really a move towards cloud. And I think part of that is driven by the economics of cloud, which fundamentally changed the way that we can approach disaster recovery, but also is accelerated during the pandemic for all the reasons that people have talked about in terms of work from home and so on. And then really the third thing is the economic uncertainty. And this is relatively new for 2022, but within idc we've been doing a lot of research around what are those impacts going to be. And what we find people doing is they want greater flexibility, they want more cost certainty, and they really want to be able to leverage those cloud economics to be, have the scale, upper scale, down on demand nature of cloud. So those are in a nutshell, kind of the three things that people are looking at. >>You mentioned ransomware, it's a topic we've been talking about a lot. It's a household word these days. It's now Phil, no longer if we're gonna get attacked. It's when it's how often it's the severity. Talk about ransomware as a priority all the way up the stack to the C-suite. And what are they trying to do to become resilient against it? >>Well, what, what some of the research that we did is we found that about 77% of organizations have digital resilience as a, as a top priority within their organization. And so what you're seeing is organizations trying to leverage things to become more, more resilient, more digitally resilient, and to be able to really hone in on those kinds of issues that are keeping keeping them awake at night. Quite honestly, if you think about digital resilience, it really is foundational to the organization, whether it's through digital transformation or whether it's simply data availability, whatever it might happen to be. Digital resilience is really a, a large umbrella term that we use to describe that function that is aimed at avoiding data loss, assuring data availability, and helping the organization to extract value from their data >>And digital resilience, data resilience as every company these days has to be a data company to be competitive, digital resilience, data resilience. Are you using those terms interchangeably or data resilience to find as something a little bit different? >>Well, sometimes yeah, that we do get caught using them when, when one is the other. But data resilience is really a part of digital resilience, if you think about the data itself and the context of of IT computing. So it really is a subset of that, but it is foundational to IT resilience. You, you really, you can't have it resilience about data resilience. So that, that's where we're coming from on it >>Inextricably linked and it's becoming a corporate initiative, but there's some factors that can complicate digital resilience, data resilience for organizations. What are some of those complications that organizations need to be aware of? >>Well, one of the biggest is what, what you mentioned at the, at the top of the segment. And, and that is the, the area of ransomware, the research that we found is about 46% of organizations have been hit within the last three years. You know, it's kind of interesting how it's changed over the years. Originally being hit by ransomware had a real stigma attached to it. Organizations didn't want to admit it, and they really avoided confronting that. Nowadays, so many people have been hit by it, that that stigma has gone. And so really it is becoming more of a community kind of effort as people try to, to defend against these ransoms. The other thing about it is it's really a lot like whackamole. You know, they attack us in one area and and, and we defend against it. They, so they attack us in another area and we defend against it. >>And in fact, I had a, an individual come up to me at a show not long ago and said, You know, one of these days we're gonna get pretty well defended against ransomware and it's gonna go away. And I responded, I don't think so because we're constantly introducing new systems, new software, and introducing new vulnerabilities. And the fact is ransomware is so profitable, the bad guys aren't gonna just fade into the night without giving it a a lot of fight. So I really think that ransomware is one of those things that here is here for the long term and something that we, we have to address and have to get proactive about. >>You mentioned some stats there and, and recently IDC and DVA did a white paper together that really revealed some quite shocking results. Talk to me about some of the things. Let, let's talk a little bit about the demographics of the survey and then talk about what was the biggest finding there, especially where it's concern concerning ransomware. >>Yeah, this, this was a worldwide study. It was sponsored by DVA and conducted by IDC as an independent study. And what we did, we surveyed 500 is a little over 500 different individuals across the globe in North America select countries in in western Europe, as well as several in, in Asia Pacific. And we did it across industries with our 20 different industries represented. They're all evenly represented. We had surveys that included IT practitioners, primarily CIOs, CTOs, VP of of infrastructure, you know, managers of data centers, things like that. And the, and the biggest finding that we had in this, Lisa, was really finding that there is a huge disconnect, I believe, between how people think they are ready and what the actual results are when they, when they get attacked. Some of the, some of the statistics that we learned from this, Lisa, include 83% of organizations believe or tell, told us that they have a, a playbook that, that they have for ransomware. >>I think 93% said that they have a high degree or a high or very high degree of confidence in their recovery tools and, and are fully automated. And yet when you look at the actual results, you know, I told you a moment ago, 46% have been attacked successfully. I can also tell you that in separate research, fewer than a third of organizations were able to fully recover their data without paying the ransom. And some two thirds actually had to pay the ransom. And even when they did, they didn't necessarily achieve their full recovery. You know, the bad guys aren't, aren't necessarily to be trusted. And, and so the software that they provide sometimes is, is fully recovered. Sometimes it's not. So you look at that and you go, Wow. On, on the one hand, people think they're really, really prepared, and on the other hand, the results are, are absolutely horrible. >>You know, two thirds of people having, having to pay their ransom. So you start to ask yourself, well, well, what is, what's going on there? And I believe that a lot of it comes down to, kind of reminds me of the old quote from Mike Tyson. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And I think that's kind of what happens with ransomware. You, you think you know what you're, you're doing, you think you're ready based on the information you have. And these people are smart people and, and they're professionals, but oftentimes you don't know what you don't know. And like I say, the bad guys are always dreaming up new ways to attack us. And so I think for that reason, a lot of these have been successful. So that was kind of the key finding to me in kind of the aha moment really in this whole thing. Lisa, >>That's a massive disconnect with the vast majority saying we have a cyber recovery playbook, yet nearly half being the victims of ransomware in the last three years, and then half of them experiencing data loss. What is it then that organizations in this situation across any industry can do to truly enable cyber resilience data resilience as it's, as we said, this is a matter of this is gonna happen just a matter of when and how often >>It it is a matter, Yeah, as you said, it's not if when or, or how often. It's really how badly. So I think what organizations are really do doing now is starting to turn more to cloud-based services. You know, finding professionals who know what they're doing, who have that breadth of experience and who have seen the kinds of, of necessary steps that it takes to do a recovery. And the fact of the matter is a disaster recovery and a cyber recovery are really not the same thing. And so organizations need to be able to, to plan the kinds of recovery associated with cyber recovery in terms of forensics, in terms of, of scanning, in terms of analysis and so forth. So they're, they're turning to professionals in the cloud much more in order to get that breadth of experience and, and to take advantage of cloud based services that are out there. >>Talk to me about some of the key advantages of cloud-based services for data resilience versus traditional legacy on-prem equipment. What are some of the advantages? Why are is IDC seeing this big shift to cloud where, where data resilience is concerned? >>Well, the first and foremost is the economics of it. You know, you can, you can have on demand resources. And in the old days when we had disaster recoveries where there we had two different data centers and a failover and so forth, you know, you had double the infrastructure. If your financial services, it might even be triple, the infrastructure is very complicated, very difficult by going to the cloud. Organizations can subscribe to disaster recovery as a service. It increasingly what we see is a new market of cyber recovery as a service. So being able to leverage those resources to be able to have the forensic analysis available to them, to be able to have the other resources available that are on demand, and to have that plan in place to have those resources in place. I think what happens in a number of situations, Lisa, is that that organizations think they're ready, but then all of a sudden they get hit and all of a sudden they have to engage with outside consultants or they have to bring in other experts and that, and that extends the time to recover that they have and it also complicates it. >>So if they have those resources in place, then they can simply turn them on, engage them, and get that recover going as quickly as possible. >>So what do you think the big issue here is, is it that these, these I p T practitioners over 500 that you surveyed across 20 industries is a global survey? Do they not know what they don't know? What's the the overlying issue here? >>Yeah, I think that's right. It's, you don't know what you don't know and until you get into a specific attack, you know, there, there are so many different ways that, that organizations can be attacked. And in fact, from this research that we found is that in many cases, data exfiltration exceeds data corruption by about 50%. And when you think about that, the, the issue is, once I have your data, what are you gonna do? I mean, there's no amount of recovery that is gonna help. So organizations are either faced with paying the ransom to keep the data from perhaps being used on the dark web or whatever, or simply saying no and, and taking their chances. So best practice things like encryption, immutability, you know, things like that that organizations can put into place. Certainly air gaps. Having a, a solid backup foundation to, to where data is you have a high recovery, high probability of recovery, things like that. Those are the kinds of things that organizations have to put into place really is a baseline to assure that they can recover as fast as possible and not lose data in the event of a ransomware attack. >>Given some of the, the, the disconnect that you articulated, the, the stats that show so many think we are prepared, we've got a playbook, yet so many are being, are being attacked. The vulnerabilities and the, and the, as the, the landscape threat landscape just gets more and more amorphous. Why, what do you recommend organizations? Do you talk to the IT practitioners, but does this go all the way up to the board level in terms of, hey guys, across every industry, we are vulnerable, this is gonna happen, we've gotta make sure that we are truly resilient and proactive? >>Yes, and in fact, what we found from this research is in more than half of cases, the CEO is directly involved in the recovery. So this is very much a C-suite issue. And if you look at the, the, the consequences of ransom where it's not just the ransom, it's the loss productivity, it's, it's the loss of, of revenue. It's, it's the loss of, of customer faith and, and, and goodwill and organizations that have been attacked have, have suffered those consequences. And, and many of them are permanent. So people at the board level where it's, whether it's the ceo, the cfo, the cio, the c cso, you know, whoever it is, they're extremely concerned about these. And I can tell you they are fully engaged in addressing these issues within their organization. >>So all the way at the top critically important, business critical for any industry. I imagine some industries may be a little bit more vulnerable than others, financial services, healthcare, education, we've just seen big attack in Los Angeles County. But in terms of establishing data resilience, you mentioned ransomware isn't going anywhere, It's a big business business, it's very profitable. But what is IDCs prediction where ransomware is concerned? Do you think that organizations, if they truly adopt cloud and status based technologies, can they get to a place where the C-suite doesn't have to be involved to the point where they're, they really actually have i i functioning playbook? >>I i, I don't know if we'll ever get to the point where the CCC C suite is not involved. It's probably very important to have that, that level of executive sponsorship. But, but what we are seeing is, in fact, we predicted by 20 25, 50 5% of organizations we'll have shifted to a cloud centric strategy for their data resilience. And the reason we say that is, you know, workloads on premises aren't going away. So that's the core. We have an increasing number of workloads in the cloud and, and at the edge, and that's really where the growth is. So being able to take that cloud centric model and take advantage of, of cloud resources like immutable storage, being able to move data from region to region inexpensively and easily and, and to be able to take that cloud centric perspective and apply it on premises as well as in the cloud and at the edge is really where we believe that organizations are shifting their focus. >>Got it. We're just cracking the surface here. Phil, I wish we had more time, but I had a chance to read the Juba sponsored IDC White paper. Fascinating finds. I encourage all of you to download that, Take a read, you're gonna learn some very interesting statistics and recommendations for how you can really truly deploy data resilience in your organization. Phil, it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you for joining >>Me. No problem. Thank you, Lisa. >>In a moment, John Furrier will be here with his next guest. For right now, I'm Lisa Martin and you are watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. >>We live in a world of infinite data, sprawling, dispersed valuable, but also vulnerable. So how do organizations achieve data resiliency when faced with ever expanding workloads, increasing security threats and intensified regulations? Unfortunately, the answer often boils down to what flavor of complexity do you like best? The common patchwork approaches are expensive, convoluted, and difficult to manage. There's multiple software and hardware vendors to worry about different deployments for workloads running on premises or in the cloud. And an inconsistent security framework resulting in enterprises maintaining four of five copies of the same data, increasing costs and risk building to an incoherent mess of complications. Now imagine a world free from these complexities. Welcome to the dr. A data resiliency cloud where full data protection and beautiful simplicity converge. No hardware, no upgrades, no management, just total data resili. With just a few clicks, you can get started integrating all of your data resiliency workflows in minutes. >>Through a true cloud experience built on Amazon web services, the DR A platform automates and manages critical daily tasks giving you time to focus on your business. In other words, get simplicity, scalability, and security instantly with the dr A data resiliency cloud, your data isn't just backed up, it's ready to be used 24 7 to meet compliance needs and to extract critical insights. You can archive data for long term retention, be protected against device failure and natural disasters, and recover from ransomware lightning fast. DVA is trusted with billions of backups annually by thousands of enterprises, including more than 60 of the Fortune 500 costing up to 50% less in the convoluted hardware, software, and appliance solutions. As data grows and becomes more critical to your business advantage, a data resiliency plan is vital, but it shouldn't be complicated. Dr. A makes it simple. >>Welcome back everyone to the cube and the drew of a special presentation of why ransomware isn't your only problem. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We're here with w Curtis Preston. Curtis Preston, he known in the industry Chief Technical Evangelist at Druva. Curtis, great to see you. We're here at why ransomware isn't your only problem. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Happy to be here. >>So we always see each other events now events are back. So it's great to have you here for this special presentation. The white paper from IDC really talks about this in detail. I to get your thoughts and I'd like you to reflect on the analysis that we've been covering here and the survey data, how it lines up with the real world that you're seeing out there. >>Yeah, I think it's the, the survey results really, I'd like to say, I'd like to say that they surprised me, but unfortunately they didn't. The, the, the, the data protection world has been this way for a while where there's this, this difference in belief or difference between the belief and the reality. And what we see is that there are a number of organizations that have been hit successfully, hit by ransomware, paid the ransom and, and, and or lost data. And yet the same people that were surveyed, they had to high degrees of confidence in their backup system. And I, you know, I, I could, I could probably go on for an hour as to the various reasons why that would be the case, but I, I think that this long running problem that as long as I've been associated with backups, which you know, has been a while, it's that problem of, you know, nobody wants to be the backup person. And, and people often just, they, they, they don't wanna have anything to do with the backup system. And so it sort of exists in this vacuum. And so then management is like, oh, the backup system's great, because the backup person often, you know, might say that it's great because maybe it's their job to say so. But the reality has always been very, very different. >>It's funny, you know, we're good boss, we got this covered. Good, >>It's all good, it's all good, >>You know, and the fingers crossed, right? So again, this is the reality and, and, and as it becomes backup and recovery, which we've talked about many times on the cube, certainly we have with you before, but now with ransomware also, the other thing is people get ransomware hit multiple times. So it's not, not only like they get hit once, so, you know, this is a constant chasing the tail on some ends, but there are some tools out there, You guys have a solution. And so let's get into that. You know, you have had hands on backup experience. What are the points that surprised you the most about what's going on in this world and the realities of how people should be going forward? What's your take? >>Well, I would say that the, the, the one part in the survey that surprised me the most was people that had a huge, you know, that there, there was a huge percentage of people that said that they had a, a, a, you know, a a a ransomware response, you know, in readiness program. And you look at that and you, how could you be, you know, that high percentage of people be comfortable with their ransomware readiness program and a, you know, which includes a number of things, right? There's the cyber attack aspect of responding to a ransomware attack, and then there's the recovery aspect. And so your, you believe that your company was ready for that, and then you go, and I, I think it was 67% of the people in the survey paid the ransom, which as, as a person who, you know, has spent my entire career trying to help people successfully recover their data, that number I think just hurt me the most is that because you, you talked about re infections, the surest way to guarantee that you get rein attacked and reinfected is to pay the ransom. This goes back all the way ransom since the beginning of time, right? Everyone knows if you pay the blackmail, all you're telling people is that you pay blackmail and >>You're in business, you're a good customer arr for ransomware. >>Yeah. So the, the fact that, you know, 60 what two thirds of the people that were attacked by ransomware paid the ransom. That one statistic just, just hurt my heart. >>Yeah. And I think this is the reality. I mean, we go back and even the psychology of the practitioners was, you know, it's super important to get back in recovery and that's been around for a long time, but now that's an attack vector, okay? And there's dollars involved, like I said, the arr joking, but there's recurring revenue for the, for the bad guys if they know you're paying up and if you're stupid enough not to change, you're tooling, right? So, so again, it works both ways. So I gotta ask you, why do you think so many are unable to successfully respond after an attack? Is it because they know it's coming? I mean, I mean, they're not that dumb. I mean, they have to know it's coming. Why aren't they responding and successfully to this? >>I I think it's a, it's a litany of thing starting with the, that aspect that I mentioned before, that nobody wants to have anything to do with the backup system, right? So nobody wants to be the one to raise their hand because if, if you're the one that raises their hand, you know what, that's a good idea, Curtis, why don't you look into that? Right. Nobody, nobody wants to be, Where's >>That guy now? He doesn't work here anymore. Yeah, but I I I hear where you come from exactly. Psychology. >>Yeah. So there, there's that. But then the second is that because of that, no one's looking at the fact that backups are the attack vector. They, they, they become the attack vector. And so because they're the attack vector, they have to be protected as much, if not more than the rest of the environment. The rest of the environment can live off of active directory and, you know, and things like Okta, so that you can have SSO and things like that. The backup environment has to be segregated in a very special way. Backups have to be stored completely separate for from your environment. The login and authentication and authorization system needs to be completely separate from your typical environment. Why? Because if you, if that production environment is compromised now knowing that the attacks or that the backup systems are a significant portion of the attack vector, then you've, if, if the production system is compromised, then the backup system is compromised. So you've got to segregate all of that. And I, and I just don't think that people are thinking about that. Yeah. You know, and they're using the same backup techniques that they've used for many, many years. >>So what you're saying is that the attack vectors and the attackers are getting smarter. They're saying, Hey, we'll just take out the backup first so they can backup. So we got the ransomware it >>Makes Yeah, exactly. The the largest ransomware group out there, the KTI ransomware group, they are specifically targeting specific backup vendors. They know how to recognize the backup servers. They know how to recognize where the backups are stored, and they are exfiltrating the backups first and then deleting them and then letting you know you have ransom. >>Okay, so you guys have a lot of customers, they all kind of have the same this problem. What's the patterns that you're seeing? How are they evolving? What are some of the things that they're implementing? What is the best practice? >>Well, again, you, you've got to fully segregate that data. There are, and, and everything about how that data is stored and everything about how that data's created and accessed. There are ways to do that with other, you know, with other commercial products, you can take a, a, a standard product and put a number of layers of defense on top of it, or you can switch to the, the way Druva does things, which is a SAS offering that stores your data completely in the cloud in our account, right? So your account could be completely compromised. That has nothing to do with our account. And the, the, it's a completely different authentication and authorization system. You've got multiple layers of defense between your computing environment and where we store your backups. So basically what you get by default with the, the way juva stores your backups is the best you can get after doing many, many layers of defense on the other side and having to do all that work with us. You just log in and you get all of that. >>I guess how do, how do you break the laws of physics? I guess that's the question here. >>Well, when, because that's the other thing is that by storing the data in the cloud, we, we do, and I've said this a few times, that you get to break the laws of physics and the, the only way to do that is to, is time travel and what, that's what it, so yeah, so Druva has time travel. What, and this is a criticism by the way. I don't think this is our official position, but Yeah. But the, the idea is that the only way to restore data as fast as possible is to restore it before you actually need it. And that's what kind of what I mean by time travel in that you basically, you configure your dr your disaster recovery environment in, in DVA one time. And then we are pre restoring your data as often as you tell us to do, to bring your DR environment up to the, you know, the, the current environment as quickly as we can so that in a disaster recovery scenario, which is part of your ransomware response, right? Again, there are many different parts, but when you get to actually restoring the data, you should be able to just push a button and go the, the data should already be restored. And that's the, i that's the way that you break the laws of physics is you break the laws of time. >>Well, I, everyone wants to know the next question, and this is the real big question, is, are you from the future? >>Yeah. Very much the future. >>What's it like in the future? Backup recovery as a restore, Is it air gaping? Everything? >>Yeah. It, it, it, Well it's a world where people don't have to worry about their backups. I I like to use the phrase, get outta the backup business. Just get into the ReSTOR business. I I, you know, I'm, I'm a grandfather now and I, and I love having a granddaughter and I often make the joke that if I don't, if I'd have known how great grandkids were, I would've skipped straight to them, right? Not possible. Just like this. Recoveries are great. Backups are really hard. So in the future, if you use a SAS data protection system and data resiliency system, you can just do recoveries and not have to worry about >>Backups. Yeah. And what's great about your background is you've got a lot of historical perspective. You've seen that been in the ways of innovation now it's really is about the recovery and real time. So a lot of good stuff going on. And God think automated thingss gotta be rocking and rolling. >>Absolutely. Yeah. I do remember, again, having worked so hard with many clients over the years, back then, we worked so hard just to get the backup done. There was very little time to work on the recovery. And I really, I kid you not that our customers don't have to do all of those things that all of our competitors have to do to, you know, to, to break, to try to break the laws of physics. I've been fighting the laws of physics my entire career to get the backup done in the first place. Then to secure all the data, right to air gap it and make sure that a ransomware attack isn't going to attack it. Our customers get to get straight to a fully automated disaster recovery environment that they get to test as often as possible and they get to do a full test by simply pressing a single button. And you know, I, I wish that, I wish everybody had that ability. >>Yeah, I mean, security's a big part of it. Data's in the middle of it all. This is now mainstream front lines. Great stuff Chris, great to have you on, bring that perspective and thanks for the insight. Really >>Appreciate it. Always happy to talk about my favorite subject. >>All right, we'll be back in a moment. We'll have Steven Manley, the cto and on John Shva, the GM and VP of Product Manage will join me. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >>Ransomware is top of mind for everyone. Attacks are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated. It's a problem you can't solve alone anymore. Ransomware is built to exploit weaknesses in your backup solution, destroying data and your last line of defense. With many vendors, it can take a lot of effort and configuration to ensure your backup environment is secure. Criminals also know that it's easy to fall behind on best practices like vulnerability, scans, patches and updates. In fact, 42% of vulnerabilities are exploited after a patch has been released after an attack. Recovery can be a long and manual process that still may not restore clean or complete data. The good news is that you can keep your data safe and recover faster with the DR A data resiliency cloud on your side. The DR A platform functions completely in the cloud with no hardware, software, operating system, or complex configurations, which means there are none of the weaknesses that ransomware commonly uses to attack backups. >>Our software as a service model delivers 24 7 365 fully managed security operations for your backup environment. We handle all the vulnerability scans, patches and upgrades for you. DVA also makes zero trust security easy with builtin multifactor authentication, single sign-on and role-based access controls in the event of an attack. Druva helps you stop the spread of ransomware and quickly understand what went wrong. With builtin access insights and anomaly detection, then you can use industry first tools and services to automate the recovery of clean unencrypted data from the entire timeframe of the attack. Cyber attacks are a major threat, but you can make protection and recovery easy with dva. >>Welcome back everyone to the Cubes special presentation with DVA on why ransomware isn't your only problem. I'm John er, host of the Cube. Our next guest are Steven Manley, Chief Technology Officer of dva and I, John Trini VAs, who is the general manager and vice president of product management and Druva. Gentleman, you got the keys to the kingdom, the technology, ransomware, data resilience. This is the topic, the IDC white paper that you guys put together with IDC really kind of nails it out. I want to get into it right away. Welcome to this segment. I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to be here John. >>So what's your thoughts on the survey's conclusion? I've obviously the resilience is huge. Ransomware is continues to thunder away at businesses and causes a lot of problems. Disruption, I mean just it's endless ransomware problems. What's your thoughts on the con conclusion? >>So I'll say the, the thing that pops out to me is, is on the one hand, everybody who sees the survey, who reads, it's gonna say, well that's obvious. Of course ransomware continues to be a problem. Cyber resilience is an issue that's plaguing everybody. But, but I think when you dig deeper and there and there's a lot of subtleties to look into, but, but one of the things that, that I hear on a daily basis from the customers is it's because the problem keeps evolving. It, it's not as if the threat was a static thing to just be solved and you're done because the threat keeps evolving. It remains top of mind for everybody because it's so hard to keep up with with what's happening in terms of the attacks. >>And I think the other important thing to note, John, is that people are grappling with this ransomware attack all of a sudden where they were still grappling with a lot of legacy in their own environment. So they were not prepared for the advanced techniques that these ransomware attackers were bringing to market. It's almost like these ransomware attackers had a huge leg up in terms of technology that they had in their favor while keeping the lights on was keeping it away from all the tooling that needed to do. A lot of people are even still wondering when that happens next time, what do I even do? So clearly not very surprising. Clearly I think it's here to stay and I think as long as people don't retool for a modern era of data management, this is going to stay this >>Way. Yeah, I mean I hear this whole time and our cube conversations with practitioners, you know there, it's kind of like the security pro give me more tools, I'll buy anything that comes in the market. I'm desperate. There's definitely attention but it doesn't seem like people are satisfied with the tooling that they have. Can you guys share kind of your insights into what's going on in the product side? Because you know, people claim that they have tools at fine points of, of recovery opportunities but they can't get there. So it seems to be that there's a confidence problem here in the market. What, how do you guys see that? Cuz I think this is where the rubber meets the road with ransomware cuz it's, it is a moving train, it's always changing but it doesn't seem as confidence. Can you guys talk about that? What's your reaction? >>Yeah, let me jump in first and Steven can add to it. What happens is I think this is a panic buying and they have accumulated this tooling now just because somebody said could solve your problem, but they haven't had a chance to take a re-look from a ground up perspective to see where are the bottlenecks, where are the vulnerabilities and which tooling set needs to lie? Where, where does the logic need to recite and what in Drew we are watching people do and people do it successfully, is that as they have adopted through our technology, which is ground up built for the cloud and really built in a way which is, you know, driven at a data insight level where we have people even monitoring our service for anomalies and activities that are suspicious. We know where we need to play a role in really kind of mitigating this ransomware. >>And then there's a whole plethora of ecosystem players that kind of combine to really really finish the story so to say, right? So I think this has been a panic buying situation. This is like, get me any help you can give me. And I think as this settles down and people really understand that longer term as they really build out a true defense mechanism, they need to think really ground up. They will start to really see the value of technologies like Druva and tried to identify the right set of ecosystem to really bring together to solve it meaningfully. >>Steven, >>I was gonna say, I mean one, one of the, one of the really interesting things in the survey for me and, and, and for a moment, little more than a moment, it made me think was that the large number of respondents who said I've got a really efficient well run backup environment, who then on basically the next question said, and I have no confidence that I can recover from a ransomware attack. And you scratch your head and you think, well if your backup environment is so good, why do you have such low confidence? And, and, and I think that's the moment when we, we dug deeper and we realized, you know, if you've got a traditional architecture and let's face the dis base architecture's been around for almost two decades now in terms of dis based backup, you can have that tune to the help that can be running as efficiently, efficiently as you want it, but it was built before the ransomware attacks before, before all these cyber issues, you know, really start hitting companies. And so I have this really well run traditional backup environment that is not at all built for these modern threat vectors. And so that's really why customers are saying I'm doing the best I can, but as Angen pointed out, the architecture, the tooling isn't there to support what, what problems I need to solve today. Yeah, >>Great point. And so yeah, well that's a great point. Before we get into the customer side, I wanna get to in second, you know, I interviewed Jare, the the founder CEO many years ago, even before the pandemic. You mentioned modern, you guys have always had the cloud, which r this is huge. Now that you're past the pandemic, what is that modern cloud edge you guys have? Cuz that's a great point. A lot of stuff was built kind of Beckham recovery bolted on, not really kind of designed into the, the current state of the infrastructure and the cloud native application modern environment we're seeing. Right? Now's a huge issue >>I think. I think it's, it's to me there's, there's three things that come up over and over and over again as, as we talk to people in terms of, you know, being built in cloud, being cloud native, why is an advantage? The first one is, is security and ransomware. And, and, and we can go deeper, but the most obvious one that always comes up is every single backup you do with DVA is air gap offsite managed under a separate administrative domain so that you're not retrofitting any sort of air gap network and buying another appliance or setting up your own cloud environment to manage this. Every backup is ransomware protected, guaranteed. I think the second advantage is the scalability. And you know this, this certainly plays into account as your, your business grows or in some cases as you shrink or repurpose workloads, you're only paying for what you use. >>But it also plays a a big role again when you start thinking of ransomware recoveries because we can scale your recovery in cloud on premises as much or as little as you want. And then I think the third one is we're seeing a basically things evolving new workloads, data sprawl, new threat vectors. And one of the nice parts of being a SA service in the cloud is you're able to roll out new functionality every two weeks and there's no upgrade cycle, there's no waiting, you know, the customer doesn't have to say, Wow, I need it six months in the lab before I upgrade it and it's an 18 month, 24 month cycle before the functionality releases. You're getting it every two weeks and it's backed by Druva to make sure it works. >>That says on John, you know, you got the, the product side, you know, it's challenging job cuz you have so many customers asking for things probably on the roadmap you probably go hour for that one. But I wanna get your thoughts on what you're hearing and seeing from customers. You know, we just reviewed the IDC with Phil. How are you guys responding to your customer's needs? Because it seems that it's highly accelerated on the, probably on the feature request, but also structurally as as ransomware continues to evolve. What are you hearing, what's the key customer need? How are you guys responding? >>Yeah, actually I have two things that I hear very clearly when I talk to customers. One, I think after listening to their security problems and their vulnerability challenges because we see customers and help customers who are getting challenge by ransomware on a weekly basis. And what I find that this problem is not just a technology problem, it's an operating model problem. So in order to really secure themselves, they need a security operating model and a lot of them haven't figured out that security operating model in totality. Now where we come in as rua is that we are providing them the cloud operating model and a data protection operating model combined with a data insights operating model which all fit into their overall security operating model that they are really owning and they need to manage and operate because this is just not about a piece of technology. >>On top of that, I think our customers are getting challenged by all the same challenges of not just spending time on keeping the lights on but innovating faster with faster, with less. And that has been this age old problem, do more with less. But in this, in this whole, they're like trying to innovate in the middle of the war so to say, right, the war is happening, they're getting attacked, but there's also net new shadow IT challenges that's forcing them to make sure that they can manage all the new applications that are getting developed in the cloud. There is thousands of SaaS applications that they're consuming not knowing which data is critical to their success and which ones to protect and govern and secure. So all of these things are coming at them at a hundred miles per hour while they're just, you know, trying to live one day at a time. >>And unless they really develop this overall security operating model helped by cloud native technologies like Druva that really providing them a true cloud native model of really giving like a touchless and an invisible protection infrastructure. Not just beyond backups, beyond just the data protection that we all know of into this kind of this mindset of kind of being able to look at where each of those functionalities need to lie. That's where I think they're grappling with now. Drew is clearly helping them with keep up to pace with the public cloud innovations that they need to do and how to protect data. We just launched our EC two offering to protect EC two virtual machines back in aws and we are gonna be continuing to evolve that to further many services that public cloud software cuz our customers are really kind of consuming them at breakneck speed. >>So the new workloads, the new security capabilities. Love that. Good, good call out there. Steven, this still the issue of the disruption side of it, you guys have a guarantee there's a cost of ownership as you get more tools. Can you talk about that angle of it? Because this is, you got new workloads, you got the new security needs, what's the disruption impact? Cause you know, you won't avoid that. How much is it gonna cost you? And you guys have this guarantee, can you explain that? >>Yeah, absolutely. So, so Dr launched our 10 million data resiliency guarantee. And, and for us, you know, there were, there were really two key parts to this. The first obviously is 10 million means that, you know, again we're, we're we're willing to put our money where our mouth is and, and that's a big deal, right? That that, that we're willing to back this with the guarantee. But then the second part, and, and, and this is the part that I think reflects that, that sort of model that Angen was talking about, we, we sort of look at this and we say the goal of DVA is to do the job of protecting and securing your data for you so that you as a customer don't have to do it anymore. And so the guarantee actually protects you against multiple types of risks all with SLAs. So everything from, you know, your data's gonna be recoverable in the case of a ransomware attack. >>Okay, that's good. Of course for it to be recoverable, we're also guaranteeing, you know, your backup, your backup success rate. We're also guaranteeing the availability of the service. You know, we're, we're guaranteeing that the data that we're storing for you can't be compromised or leaked externally and you know, we're guaranteeing the long term durability of the data so that if you back up with us today and you need to recover 30 years from now, that data's gonna be recovered. So we wanted to really attack the end to end, you know, risks that, that, that affect our customers. Cybersecurity is a big deal, but it is not the only problem out there and the only way for this to work is to have a service that can provide you SLAs across all of the risks because that means, again, as a SAS vendor, we're doing the job for you so you're buying results as opposed to technology. >>That's great. Great point. Ransomware isn't the only problem that's the title of this presentation, but is a big one. People concerned about it. So great stuff. In the last five minutes guys, if you don't mind, I'd love to have you share what's on the horizon for dva. You mentioned the new workloads on John, you mentioned this new security hearing shift left DevOps is now the developer model, they're running it get data and security teams now stepping in and trying to be as vo high velocity as possible for the developers and enterprises. What's on the horizon, Ava? What trends is the company watching and how are you guys putting that together to stay ahead in the marketplace and the competition? >>Yeah, I think listening to our customers, what we realize is they need help with the public cloud. Number one. I think that's a big wave of consumption. People are consolidating their data centers, moving to the public cloud. They need help in expanding data protection, which becomes the basis of a lot of the security operating model that I talked about. They need that first from before they can start to get into much more advanced level of insights and analytics on that data to protect themselves and secure themselves and do interesting things with that data. So we are expanding our coverage on multiple fronts there. The second key thing is to really bring together a very insightful presentation layer, which I think is very unique to thwa because only we can look at multiple tenants, multiple customers because we are a SAS vendor and look at insights and give them best practices and guidances and analytics that nobody else can give. >>There's no silo anymore because we are able to take a good big vision view and now help our customers with insights that otherwise that information map is completely missing. So we are able to guide them down a path where they can optimize which workloads need, what kind of protection, and then how to secure them. So that is the second level of insights and analytics that we are building. And there's a whole plethora of security offerings that we are gonna build all the way from a feature level where we have things like recycle bin that's already available to our customers today to prevent any anomalous behavior and attacks that would delete their backups and then they still have a way to recover from it, but also things to curate and get back to that point in time where it is safe to recover and help them with a sandbox which they can recover confidently knowing it's not going to jeopardize them again and reinfect the whole environment again. So there's a whole bunch of things coming, but the key themes are public cloud, data insights and security and that's where my focus is to go and get those features delivered and Steven can add a few more things around services that Steven is looking to build in launch. >>Sure. So, so yeah, so, so John, I think one of the other areas that we see just an enormous groundswell of interest. So, so public cloud is important, but there are more and more organizations that are running hundreds if not thousands of SaaS applications and a lot of those SaaS applications have data. So there's the obvious things like Microsoft 365 Google workspace, but we're also seeing a lot of interest in protecting Salesforce because if you think about it, you know, if you, if if someone you know deletes some really important records in Salesforce, that's, that's actually actually kind of the record of your business. And so, you know, we're looking at more and more SaaS application protection and, and really getting deep in that application awareness. It's not just about backup and recovery. When you look at something like, like a sales force or something like Microsoft 365, you do wanna look into sandboxing, you wanna, you wanna look into long term archival because again, this is the new record of the business, what used to be in your on premises databases that all lives in cloud and SaaS applications now. >>So that's a really big area of investment for us. The second one, just to echo what, what engine said is, you know, one of the great things of being a SaaS provider is I have metadata that spans across thousands of customers and tens of billions of backups a year. And I'm tracking all sorts of interesting information that is going to enable us to do things like make backups more autonomous so that customers, again, I want to do the job for them, will do all the tuning, we'll do all the management for them to be able to better detect ransomware attacks, better respond to ransomware attacks because we're seeing across the globe. And then of course being able to give them more insight into what's happening in their data environment so they can get a better security posture before any attack happens. Because let's face it, if you can set your, your data up more cleanly, you're gonna be a lot less worried and a lot less exposed from that attack happens. So we want to be able to again, cover those SaaS applications in addition to the public cloud. And then we want to be able to use our metadata and use our analytics and use this massive pipeline. We've got to deliver value to our customers, not just charts and graphs, but actual services that enable them to focus their attention on other parts of the business. >>That's great stuff. Run John. >>And remember John, I think all this while keeping things really easy to consume consumer grade UI APIs and the, the really, the power of SaaS as a service simplicity to kind of continue on amongst kind of keeping these complex technologies together. >>Aj, that's a great call out. I was gonna mention ease of use is and self-service, big part of the developer and IT experience expected, it's the table stakes, love the analytic angle. I think that brings the scale to the table and faster time to value to get to learn best practices. But the end of the day automation, cross cloud protection and security to protect and recover. This is huge and this is big part of not only just protecting against ransomware and other things, but really being fast and being agile. So really appreciate the insights. Thanks for sharing on this segment, really under the hood and really kind of the value of of the product. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Thank you very much. >>Okay, there it is. You got the experts talking about under the hood, the product, the value, the future of what's going on with Druva and the future of cloud native protecting and recovering. This is what it's all about. It's not just ransomware they have to worry about. In a moment, Dave Ante will give you some closing thoughts on the subject here you're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >>As organizations migrate their business processes to multi-cloud environments, they still face numerous threats and risks of data loss. With a growing number of cloud platforms and fragmented applications, it leads to an increase in data silos, sprawl, and management complexity. As workloads become more diverse, it's challenging to effectively manage data growth infrastructure, and resource costs across multiple cloud deployments. Using numerous backup vendor solutions for multiple cloud platforms can lead to management complexity. More importantly, the lack of centralized visibility and control can leave you exposed to security vulnerabilities, including ransomware that can cripple your business. The dr. A Data Resiliency Cloud is the only 100% SAS data resiliency platform that provides centralized, secure air gapped and immutable backup and recovery. With dva, your data is safe with multiple layers of protection and is ready for fast recovery from cyber attack, data corruption, or accidental data loss. Through a simple, easy to manage platform, you can seamlessly protect fragmented, diverse data at scale, across public clouds and your business critical SaaS applications. Druva is the only 100% SAS fender that can manage, govern, and protect data across multiple clouds and business critical SAS applications. It supports not just backup and recovery, but also data resiliency across high value use cases such as e-discovery, sensitive data governance, ransomware, and security. No other vendor can match Druva for customer experience, infinite scale storage optimization, data immutability and ransomware protection. The DVA data resiliency cloud your data always safe, always ready. Visit druva.com today to schedule a free demo. >>One of the big takeaways from today's program is that in the scramble to keep business flowing over the past two plus years, a lot of good technology practices have been put into place, but there's much more work to be done specifically because the frequency of attacks is on the rise and the severity of lost, stolen, or inaccessible data is so much higher. Today, business resilience must be designed into architectures and solutions from the start. It cannot be an afterthought. Well, actually it can be, but you won't be happy with the results. Now, part of the answer is finding the right partners, of course, but it also means taking a systems' view of your business, understanding the vulnerabilities and deploying solutions that can balance cost efficiency with appropriately high levels of protection, flexibility, and speed slash accuracy of recovery. You know, we hope you found today's program useful and informative. Remember, this session is available on demand in both its full format and the individual guest segments. All you gotta do is go to the cube.net and you'll see all the content, or you can go to druva.com. There are tons of resources available, including analyst reports, customer stories. There's this cool TCO calculator. You can find out what pricing looks like and lots more. Thanks for watching why Ransomware isn't your only problem Made possible by dva, a collaboration with IDC and presented by the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>The past two and a half years have seen a dramatic change in the security posture of virtually all organizations. By accelerating the digital business mandate, the isolation economy catalyzed a move toward cloud computing to support remote workers. This, we know this had several ripple effects on CISO and CIO strategies that were highly visible at the board of directors level. Now, the first major change was to recognize that the perimeter had suddenly been vaporized protection. As a result moved away from things like perimeter based firewalls toward more distributed endpoints, cloud security, and modern identity management. The second major change was a heightened awareness of the realities of ransomware. Ransomware as a service, for example, emerges a major threat where virtually anyone with access to critical data and criminal intentions could monetize corporate security exposures. The third major change was a much more acute understanding of how data protection needed to become a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. >>And more specifically, CIOs quickly realized that their business resilient strategies were too narrowly DR focused that their DR approach was not cost efficient and needed to be modernized. And that new approaches to operational resilience were needed to reflect the architectural and business realities of this new environment. Hello and welcome to Why Ransomware isn't your Only Problem, a service of the Cube made possible by dva. And in collaboration with idc. I'm your host, Dave Ante, and today we're present a three part program. We'll start with the data. IDC recently conducted a global survey of 500 business technology practitioners across 20 industries to understand the degree to which organizations are aware of and prepared for the threats they face. In today's new world, IDC Research Vice President Phil Goodwin is here to share the highlights of the study and summarize the findings from a recent research report on the topic. >>After that, we're gonna hear from Curtis Preston, who's the Chief Technical Evangelist at Druva. I've known Curtis for decades. He's one of the world's foremost experts on backup and recovery, specifically in data protection. Generally. Curtis will help us understand how the survey data presented by IDC aligns with the real world findings from the field, from his point of view. And he'll discuss why so many organizations have failed to successfully recover from an attack without major pains and big costs, and how to avoid such operational disruptions and disasters. And then finally, we'll hear from the technical experts at dva, Steven Manly and Anja Serenas. Steven is a 10 time cubo and Chief technology officer at dva, and Anjan is vice president and general manager of product management at the company. And these individuals will specifically address how DVA is closing the gaps presented in the IDC survey through their product innovation. Or right now I'm gonna toss it to Lisa Martin, another one of the hosts for today's program. Lisa, over to you. >>Bill Goodwin joins me next, the VP of research at idc. We're gonna be breaking down what's going on in the threat landscape. Phil, welcome to the program. It's great to have you back on the cube. >>Hey, Lisa, it's great to be here with you. >>So talk to me about the state of the global IT landscape as we see cyber attacks massively increasing, the threat landscape changing so much, what is IDC seeing? >>You know, you, you really hit the, the top topic that we find from IT organizations as well as business organizations. And really it's that digital resilience that that ransomware that has everybody's attention and it has the attention not just of the IT people, but of the business people alike, because it really does have profound effects across the organization. The other thing that we're seeing, Lisa, is really a move towards cloud. And I think part of that is driven by the economics of cloud, which fundamentally changed the way that we can approach disaster recovery, but also is accelerated during the pandemic for all the reasons that people have talked about in terms of work from home and so on. And then really the third thing is the economic uncertainty. And this is relatively new for 2022, but within idc we've been doing a lot of research around what are those impacts going to be. And what we find people doing is they want greater flexibility, they want more cost certainty, and they really want to be able to leverage those cloud economics to be, have the scale, upper scale, down on demand nature of cloud. So those are in a nutshell, kind of the three things that people are looking at. >>You mentioned ransomware, it's a topic we've been talking about a lot. It's a household word these days. It's now Phil, no longer if we're gonna get attacked. It's when it's how often it's the severity. Talk about ransomware as a priority all the way up the stack to the C-suite. And what are they trying to do to become resilient against it? >>Well, what, what some of the research that we did is we found that about 77% of organizations have digital resilience as a, as a top priority within their organization. And so what you're seeing is organizations trying to leverage things to become more, more resilient, more digitally resilient, and to be able to really hone in on those kinds of issues that are keeping keeping them awake at night. Quite honestly, if you think about digital resilience, it really is foundational to the organization, whether it's through digital transformation or whether it's simply data availability, whatever it might happen to be. Digital resilience is really a, a large umbrella term that we use to describe that function that is aimed at avoiding data loss, assuring data availability, and helping the organization to extract value from their data >>And digital resilience, data resilience as every company these days has to be a data company to be competitive, digital resilience, data resilience. Are you using those terms interchangeably or data resilience to find as something a little bit different? >>Well, sometimes yeah, that we do get caught using them when, when one is the other. But data resilience is really a part of digital resilience, if you think about the data itself and the context of of IT computing. So it really is a subset of that, but it is foundational to IT resilience. You, you really, you can't have it resilience about data resilience. So that, that's where we're coming from on it >>Inextricably linked and it's becoming a corporate initiative, but there's some factors that can complicate digital resilience, data resilience for organizations. What are some of those complications that organizations need to be aware of? >>Well, one of the biggest is what, what you mentioned at the, at the top of the segment and, and that is the, the area of ransomware, the research that we found is about 46% of organizations have been hit within the last three years. You know, it's kind of interesting how it's changed over the years. Originally being hit by ransomware had a real stigma attached to it. Organizations didn't want to admit it, and they really avoided confronting that. Nowadays, so many people have been hit by it, that that stigma has gone. And so really it is becoming more of a community kind of effort as people try to, to defend against these ransoms. The other thing about it is it's really a lot like whackamole. You know, they attack us in one area and and, and we defend against it. They, so they attack us in another area and we defend against it. >>And in fact, I had a, an individual come up to me at a show not long ago and said, You know, one of these days we're gonna get pretty well defended against ransomware and it's gonna go away. And I responded, I don't think so because we're constantly introducing new systems, new software, and introducing new vulnerabilities. And the fact is ransomware is so profitable, the bad guys aren't gonna just fade into the night without giving it a a lot of fight. So I really think that ransomware is one of those things that here is here for the long term and something that we, we have to address and have to get proactive about. >>You mentioned some stats there and, and recently IDC and DVA did a white paper together that really revealed some quite shocking results. Talk to me about some of the things. Let, let's talk a little bit about the demographics of the survey and then talk about what was the biggest finding there, especially where it's concern concerning ransomware. >>Yeah, this, this was a worldwide study. It was sponsored by DVA and conducted by IDC as an independent study. And what we did, we surveyed 500 is a little over 500 different individuals across the globe in North America select countries in in western Europe, as well as several in, in Asia Pacific. And we did it across industries with our 20 different industries represented. They're all evenly represented. We had surveys that included IT practitioners, primarily CIOs, CTOs, VP of of infrastructure, you know, managers of data centers, things like that. And the, and the biggest finding that we had in this, Lisa, was really finding that there is a huge disconnect, I believe, between how people think they are ready and what the actual results are when they, when they get attacked. Some of the, some of the statistics that we learned from this, Lisa, include 83% of organizations believe or tell, told us that they have a, a playbook that, that they have for ransomware. >>I think 93% said that they have a high degree or a high or very high degree of confidence in their recovery tools and, and are fully automated. And yet when you look at the actual results, you know, I told you a moment ago, 46% have been attacked successfully. I can also tell you that in separate research, fewer than a third of organizations were able to fully recover their data without paying the ransom. And some two thirds actually had to pay the ransom. And even when they did, they didn't necessarily achieve their full recovery. You know, the bad guys aren't, aren't necessarily to be trusted. And, and so the software that they provide sometimes is, is fully recovered, sometimes it's not. So you look at that and you go, Wow. On, on the one hand people think they're really, really prepared and on the other hand the results are, are absolutely horrible. >>You know, two thirds of people having, having to pay their ransom. So you start to ask yourself, well, well, what is, what's going on there? And I believe that a lot of it comes down to, kind of reminds me of the old quote from Mike Tyson. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And I think that's kind of what happens with ransomware. You, you think you know what you're, you're doing, you think you're ready based on the information you have. And these people are smart people and, and they're professionals, but oftentimes you don't know what you don't know. And like I say, the bad guys are always dreaming up new ways to attack us. And so I think for that reason, a lot of these have been successful. So that was kind of the key finding to me in kind of the aha moment really in this whole thing. Lisa, >>That's a massive disconnect with the vast majority saying we have a cyber recovery playbook, yet nearly half being the victims of ransomware in the last three years and then half of them experiencing data loss. What is it then that organizations in this situation across any industry can do to truly enable cyber resilience data resilience as it's, as we said, this is a matter of this is gonna happen just a matter of when and how often >>It it is a matter, Yeah, as you said, it's not if when or, or how often. It's really how badly. So I think what organizations are really do doing now is starting to turn more to cloud-based services. You know, finding professionals who know what they're doing, who have that breadth of experience and who have seen the kinds of, of necessary steps that it takes to do a recovery. And the fact of the matter is a disaster recovery and a cyber recovery are really not the same thing. And so organizations need to be able to, to plan the kinds of recovery associated with cyber recovery in terms of forensics, in terms of, of scanning, in terms of analysis and so forth. So they're, they're turning to professionals in the cloud much more in order to get that breadth of experience and, and to take advantage of cloud based services that are out there. >>Talk to me about some of the key advantages of cloud-based services for data resilience versus traditional legacy on-prem equipment. What are some of the advantages? Why are is IDC seeing this big shift to cloud where, where data resilience is concerned? >>Well, the first and foremost is the economics of it. You know, you can, you can have on demand resources. And in the old days when we had disaster recoveries where there we had two different data centers and a failover and so forth, you know, you had double the infrastructure. If your financial services, it might even be triple, the infrastructure is very complicated, very difficult by going to the cloud. Organizations can subscribe to disaster recovery as a service. It increasingly what we see is a new market of cyber recovery as a service. So being able to leverage those resources to be able to have the forensic analysis available to them, to be able to have the other resources available that are on demand, and to have that plan in place to have those resources in place. I think what happens in a number of situations, Lisa, is that that organizations think they're ready, but then all of a sudden they get hit and all of a sudden they have to engage with outside consultants or they have to bring in other experts and that, and that extends the time to recover that they have and it also complicates it. >>So if they have those resources in place, then they can simply turn them on, engage them, and get that recover going as quickly as possible. >>So what do you think the big issue here is, is it that these, these I p T practitioners over 500 that you surveyed across 20 industries is a global survey? Do they not know what they don't know? What's the the overlying issue here? >>Yeah, I think that's right. It's, you don't know what you don't know and until you get into a specific attack, you know, there, there are so many different ways that, that organizations can be attacked. And in fact, from this research that we found is that in many cases, data exfiltration exceeds data corruption by about 50%. And when you think about that, the, the issue is, once I have your data, what are you gonna do? I mean, there's no amount of recovery that is gonna help. So organizations are either faced with paying the ransom to keep the data from perhaps being used on the dark web or whatever, or simply saying no and, and taking their chances. So best practice things like encryption, immutability, you know, things like that that organizations can put into place. Certainly air gaps. Having a, a solid backup foundation to, to where data is you have a high recovery, high probability of recovery, things like that. Those are the kinds of things that organizations have to put into place really is a baseline to assure that they can recover as fast as possible and not lose data in the event of a ransomware attack. >>Given some of the, the, the disconnect that you articulated, the, the stats that show so many think we are prepared, we've got a playbook, yet so many are being, are being attacked. The vulnerabilities and the, and the, as the, the landscape threat landscape just gets more and more amorphous. Why, what do you recommend organizations? Do you talk to the IT practitioners, but does this go all the way up to the board level in terms of, hey guys, across every industry we are vulnerable, this is gonna happen, we've gotta make sure that we are truly resilient and proactive? >>Yes, and in fact, what we found from this research is in more than half of cases, the CEO is directly involved in the recovery. So this is very much a C-suite issue. And if you look at the, the, the consequences of ransom where it's not just the ransom, it's the loss productivity, it's, it's the loss of, of revenue, it's, it's the loss of, of customer faith and, and, and goodwill and organizations that have been attacked have, have suffered those consequences. And, and many of them are permanent. So people at the board level where it's, whether it's the ceo, the cfo, the cio, the c cso, you know, whoever it is, they're extremely concerned about these. And I can tell you they are fully engaged in addressing these issues within their organization. >>So all the way at the top critically important, business critical for any industry. I imagine some industries may be a little bit more vulnerable than others, financial services, healthcare, education, we've just seen big attack in Los Angeles County. But in terms of establishing data resilience, you mentioned ransomware isn't going anywhere, it's a big business business, it's very profitable. But what is IDCs prediction where ransomware is concerned? Do you think that organizations, if they truly adopt cloud and status based technologies, can they get to a place where the C-suite doesn't have to be involved to the point where they're, they really actually have i i functioning playbook? >>I i, I don't know if we'll ever get to the point where the CCC C suite is not involved. It's probably very important to have that, that level of executive sponsorship. But, but what we are seeing is, in fact we predicted by 20 25, 50 5% of organizations we'll have shifted to a cloud centric strategy for their data resilience. And the reason we say that is, you know, workloads on premises aren't going away. So that's the core. We have an increasing number of workloads in the cloud and, and at the edge, and that's really where the growth is. So being able to take that cloud centric model and take advantage of, of cloud resources like immutable storage, being able to move data from region to region inexpensively and easily and, and to be able to take that cloud centric perspective and apply it on premises as well as in the cloud and at the edge is really where we believe that organizations are shifting their focus. >>Got it. We're just cracking the surface here. Phil, I wish we had more time, but I had a chance to read the Juba sponsored IDC White paper. Fascinating finds. I encourage all of you to download that. Take a read, you're gonna learn some very interesting statistics and recommendations for how you can really truly deploy data resilience in your organization. Phil, it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you for joining >>Me. No problem. Thank you, Lisa. >>In a moment, John Furrier will be here with his next guest. For right now, I'm Lisa Martin and you are watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage.

>> We're back at the ARIA Las Vegas. We're covering CrowdStrike's Fal.Con 22. First one since 2019. Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson on theCUBE. Adam Meyers is here, he is the Senior Vice President of Intelligence at CrowdStrike. Adam, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> Interesting times, isn't it? You're very welcome. Senior Vice President of Intelligence, tell us what your role is. >> So I run all of our intelligence offerings. All of our analysts, we have a couple hundred analysts that work at CrowdStrike tracking threat actors. There's 185 threat actors that we track today. We're constantly adding more of them and it requires us to really have that visibility and understand how they operate so that we can inform our other products: our XDR, our Cloud Workload Protections and really integrate all of this around the threat actor. >> So it's that threat hunting capability that CrowdStrike has. That's what you're sort of... >> Well, so think of it this way. When we launched the company 11 years ago yesterday, what we wanted to do was to tell customers, to tell people that, well, you don't have a malware problem, you have an adversary problem. There are humans that are out there conducting these attacks, and if you know who they are what they're up to, how they operate then you're better positioned to defend against them. And so that's really at the core, what CrowdStrike started with and all of our products are powered by intelligence. All of our services are our OverWatch and our Falcon complete, all powered by intelligence because we want to know who the threat actors are and what they're doing so we can stop them. >> So for instance like you can stop known malware. A lot of companies can stop known malware, but you also can stop unknown malware. And I infer that the intelligence is part of that equation, is that right? >> Absolutely. That that's the outcome. That's the output of the intelligence but I could also tell you who these threat actors are, where they're operating out of, show you pictures of some of them, that's the threat intel. We are tracking down to the individual persona in many cases, these various threats whether they be Chinese nation state, Russian threat actors, Iran, North Korea, we track as I said, quite a few of these threats. And over time, we develop a really robust deep knowledge about who they are and how they operate. >> Okay. And we're going to get into some of that, the big four and cyber. But before we do, I want to ask you about the eCrime index stats, the ECX you guys call it a little side joke for all your nerds out there. Maybe you could explain that Adam >> Assembly humor. >> Yeah right, right. So, but, what is that index? You guys, how often do you publish it? What are you learning from that? >> Yeah, so it was modeled off of the Dow Jones industrial average. So if you look at the Dow Jones it's a composite index that was started in the late 1800s. And they took a couple of different companies that were the industrial component of the economy back then, right. Textiles and railroads and coal and steel and things like that. And they use that to approximate the overall health of the economy. So if you take these different stocks together, swizzle 'em together, and figure out some sort of number you could say, look, it's up. The economy's doing good. It's down, not doing so good. So after World War II, everybody was exuberant and positive about the end of the war. The DGI goes up, the oil crisis in the seventies goes down, COVID hits goes up, sorry, goes down. And then everybody realizes that they can use Amazon still and they can still get the things they need goes back up with the eCrime index. We took that approach to say what is the health of the underground economy? When you read about any of these ransomware attacks or data extortion attacks there are criminal groups that are working together in order to get things spammed out or to buy credentials and things like that. And so what the eCrime index does is it takes 24 different observables, right? The price of a ransom, the number of ransom attacks, the fluctuation in cryptocurrency, how much stolen material is being sold for on the underground. And we're constantly computing this number to understand is the eCrime ecosystem healthy? Is it thriving or is it under pressure? And that lets us understand what's going on in the world and kind of contextualize it. Give an example, Microsoft on patch Tuesday releases 56 vulnerabilities. 11 of them are critical. Well guess what? After hack Tuesday. So after patch Tuesday is hack Wednesday. And so all of those 11 vulnerabilities are exploitable. And now you have threat actors that have a whole new array of weapons that they can deploy and bring to bear against their victims after that patch Tuesday. So that's hack Wednesday. Conversely we'll get something like the colonial pipeline. Colonial pipeline attack May of 21, I think it was, comes out and all of the various underground forums where these ransomware operators are doing their business. They freak out because they don't want law enforcement. President Biden is talking about them and he's putting pressure on them. They don't want this ransomware component of what they're doing to bring law enforcement, bring heat on them. So they deplatform them. They kick 'em off. And when they do that, the ransomware stops being as much of a factor at that point in time. And the eCrime index goes down. So we can look at holidays, and right around Thanksgiving, which is coming up pretty soon, it's going to go up because there's so much online commerce with cyber Monday and such, right? You're going to see this increase in online activity; eCrime actors want to take advantage of that. When Christmas comes, they take vacation too; they're going to spend time with their families, so it goes back down and it stays down till around the end of the Russian Orthodox Christmas, which you can probably extrapolate why that is. And then it goes back up. So as it's fluctuating, it gives us the ability to really just start tracking what that economy looks like. >> Realtime indicator of that crypto. >> I mean, you talked about, talked about hack Wednesday, and before that you mentioned, you know, the big four, and I think you said 185 threat actors that you're tracking, is 180, is number 185 on that list? Somebody living in their basement in their mom's basement or are the resources necessary to get on that list? Such that it's like, no, no, no, no. this is very, very organized, large groups of people. Hollywood would have you believe that it's guy with a laptop, hack Wednesday, (Dave Nicholson mimics keyboard clacking noises) and everything done. >> Right. >> Are there individuals who are doing things like that or are these typically very well organized? >> That's a great question. And I think it's an important one to ask and it's both it tends to be more, the bigger groups. There are some one-off ones where it's one or two people. Sometimes they get big. Sometimes they get small. One of the big challenges. Have you heard of ransomware as a service? >> Of course. Oh my God. Any knucklehead can be a ransomwarist. >> Exactly. So we don't track those knuckleheads as much unless they get onto our radar somehow, they're conducting a lot of operations against our customers or something like that. But what we do track is that ransomware as a service platform because the affiliates, the people that are using it they come, they go and, you know, it could be they're only there for a period of time. Sometimes they move between different ransomware services, right? They'll use the one that's most useful for them that that week or that month, they're getting the best rate because it's rev sharing. They get a percentage that platform gets percentage of the ransom. So, you know, they negotiate a better deal. They might move to a different ransomware platform. So that's really hard to track. And it's also, you know, I think more important for us to understand the platform and the technology that is being used than the individual that's doing it. >> Yeah. Makes sense. Alright, let's talk about the big four. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Tell us about, you know, how you monitor these folks. Are there different signatures for each? Can you actually tell, you know based on the hack who's behind it? >> So yeah, it starts off, you know motivation is a huge factor. China conducts espionage, they do it for diplomatic purposes. They do it for military and political purposes. And they do it for economic espionage. All of these things map to known policies that they put out, the Five Year Plan, the Made in China 2025, the Belt and Road Initiative, it's all part of their efforts to become a regional and ultimately a global hegemon. >> They're not stealing nickels and dimes. >> No they're stealing intellectual property. They're stealing trade secrets. They're stealing negotiation points. When there's, you know a high speed rail or something like that. And they use a set of tools and they have a set of behaviors and they have a set of infrastructure and a set of targets that as we look at all of these things together we can derive who they are by motivation and the longer we observe them, the more data we get, the more we can get that attribution. I could tell you that there's X number of Chinese threat groups that we track under Panda, right? And they're associated with the Ministry of State Security. There's a whole other set. That's too associated with the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force. So, I mean, these are big operations. They're intelligence agencies that are operating out of China. Iran has a different set of targets. They have a different set of motives. They go after North American and Israeli businesses right now that's kind of their main operation. And they're doing something called hack and lock and leak. With a lock and leak, what they're doing is they're deploying ransomware. They don't care about getting a ransom payment. They're just doing it to disrupt the target. And then they're leaking information that they steal during that operation that brings embarrassment. It brings compliance, regulatory, legal impact for that particular entity. So it's disruptive >> The chaos creators that's.. >> Well, you know I think they're trying to create a they're trying to really impact the legitimacy of some of these targets and the trust that their customers and their partners and people have in them. And that is psychological warfare in a certain way. And it, you know is really part of their broader initiative. Look at some of the other things that they've done they've hacked into like the missile defense system in Israel, and they've turned on the sirens, right? Those are all things that they're doing for a specific purpose, and that's not China, right? Like as you start to look at this stuff, you can start to really understand what they're up to. Russia very much been busy targeting NATO and NATO countries and Ukraine. Obviously the conflict that started in February has been a huge focus for these threat actors. And then as we look at North Korea, totally different. They're doing, there was a major crypto attack today. They're going after these crypto platforms, they're going after DeFi platforms. They're going after all of this stuff that most people don't even understand and they're stealing the crypto currency and they're using it for revenue generation. These nuclear weapons don't pay for themselves, their research and development don't pay for themselves. And so they're using that cyber operation to either steal money or steal intelligence. >> They need the cash. Yeah. >> Yeah. And they also do economic targeting because Kim Jong Un had said back in 2016 that they need to improve the lives of North Koreans. They have this national economic development strategy. And that means that they need, you know, I think only 30% of North Korea has access to reliable power. So having access to clean energy sources and renewable energy sources, that's important to keep the people happy and stop them from rising up against the regime. So that's the type of economic espionage that they're conducting. >> Well, those are the big four. If there were big five or six, I would presume US and some Western European countries would be on there. Do you track, I mean, where United States obviously has you know, people that are capable of this we're out doing our thing, and- >> So I think- >> That defense or offense, where do we sit in this matrix? >> Well, I think the big five would probably include eCrime. We also track India, Pakistan. We track actors out of Columbia, out of Turkey, out of Syria. So there's a whole, you know this problem is getting worse over time. It's proliferating. And I think COVID was also, you know a driver there because so many of these countries couldn't move human assets around because everything was getting locked down. As machine learning and artificial intelligence and all of this makes its way into the cameras at border and transfer points, it's hard to get a human asset through there. And so cyber is a very attractive, cheap and deniable form of espionage and gives them operational capabilities, not, you know and to your question about US and other kind of five I friendly type countries we have not seen them targeting our customers. So we focus on the threats that target our customers. >> Right. >> And so, you know, if we were to find them at a customer environment sure. But you know, when you look at some of the public reporting that's out there, the malware that's associated with them is focused on, you know, real bad people, and it's, it's physically like crypted to their hard drive. So unless you have sensor on, you know, an Iranian or some other laptop that might be target or something like that. >> Well, like Stuxnet did. >> Yeah. >> Right so. >> You won't see it. Right. See, so yeah. >> Well Symantec saw it but way back when right? Back in the day. >> Well, I mean, if you want to go down that route I think it actually came from a company in the region that was doing the IR and they were working with Symantec. >> Oh, okay. So, okay. So it was a local >> Yeah. I think Crisis, I think was the company that first identified it. And then they worked with Symantec. >> It Was, they found it, I guess, a logic controller. I forget what it was. >> It was a long time ago, so I might not have that completely right. >> But it was a seminal moment in the industry. >> Oh. And it was a seminal moment for Iran because you know, that I think caused them to get into cyber operations. Right. When they realized that something like that could happen that bolstered, you know there was a lot of underground hacking forums in Iran. And, you know, after Stuxnet, we started seeing that those hackers were dropping their hacker names and they were starting businesses. They were starting to try to go after government contracts. And they were starting to build training offensive programs, things like that because, you know they realized that this is an opportunity there. >> Yeah. We were talking earlier about this with Shawn and, you know, in the nuclear war, you know the Cold War days, you had the mutually assured destruction. It's not as black and white in the cyber world. Right. Cause as, as Robert Gates told me, you know a few years ago, we have a lot more to lose. So we have to be somewhat, as the United States, careful as to how much of an offensive posture we take. >> Well here's a secret. So I have a background on political science. So mutually assured destruction, I think is a deterrent strategy where you have two kind of two, two entities that like they will destroy each other if they so they're disinclined to go down that route. >> Right. >> With cyber I really don't like that mutually assured destruction >> That doesn't fit right. >> I think it's deterrents by denial. Right? So raising the cost, if they were to conduct a cyber operation, raising that cost that they don't want to do it, they don't want to incur the impact of that. Right. And think about this in terms of a lot of people are asking about would China invade Taiwan. And so as you look at the cost that that would have on the Chinese military, the POA, the POA Navy et cetera, you know, that's that deterrents by denial, trying to, trying to make the costs so high that they don't want to do it. And I think that's a better fit for cyber to try to figure out how can we raise the cost to the adversary if they operate against our customers against our enterprises and that they'll go someplace else and do something else. >> Well, that's a retaliatory strike, isn't it? I mean, is that what you're saying? >> No, definitely not. >> It's more of reducing their return on investment essentially. >> Yeah. >> And incenting them- disincening them to do X and sending them off somewhere else. >> Right. And threat actors, whether they be criminals or nation states, you know, Bruce Lee had this great quote that was "be like water", right? Like take the path of least resistance, like water will. Threat actors do that too. So, I mean, unless you're super high value target that they absolutely have to get into by any means necessary, then if you become too hard of a target, they're going to move on to somebody that's a little easier. >> Makes sense. Awesome. Really appreciate your, I could, we'd love to have you back. >> Anytime. >> Go deeper. Adam Myers. We're here at Fal.Con 22, Dave Vellante, Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back right after this short break. (bouncy music plays)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, Lisa Martin for theCUBE here. Phil Goodwin joins me next, the VP of research at IDC. We're going to be breaking down what's going on in the threat landscape. Phil, welcome to the program. It's great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Hey, Lisa, it's great to be here with you. >> So talk to me about the state of the global IT landscape, as we see cyber attacks massively increasing, the threat landscape changing so much, what is IDC seeing? >> You really hit the top topic that we find from IT organizations, as well as business organizations, and really it's that digital resilience, that ransomware that has everybody's attention. And it has the attention, not just of the IT people, but of the business people alike, because it really does have profound effects across the organization. The other thing that we're seeing, Lisa, is really a move towards cloud. And I think part of that is driven by the economics of cloud, which fundamentally changed the way that we can approach disaster recovery, but also is accelerated during the pandemic for all the reasons that people have talked about in terms of work from home and so on. And then really the third thing is the economic uncertainty. And this is relatively new for 2022. But within IDC, we've been doing a lot of research around what are those impacts going to be? And what we find people doing is they want greater flexibility, they want more cost certainty, and they really want to be able to leverage those cloud economics to be have the scale up or scale down on demand nature of cloud. So those are in a nutshell kind of the three things that people are looking at. >> You mentioned ransomware, it's a topic we've been talking about a lot. It's a household word these days. It's now, Phil, no longer if we're going to get attacked, it's when, it's how often, it's the severity. Talk about ransomware as a priority all the way up the stack to the C-suite, and what are they trying to do to become resilient against it? >> Well, what some of the research that we did is what we found that about 77% of organizations have digital resilience as a top priority within their organization. And so what you're seeing is organizations trying to leverage things to become more resilient, more digitally resilient. And to be able to really hone in on those kinds of issues that are keeping them awake at night, quite honestly. If you think about digital resilience, it really is foundational to the organization. Whether it's through digital transformation, or whether it's simply data availability, whatever it might happen to be, digital resilience is really a large umbrella term that we use to describe that function that is aimed at avoiding data loss, assuring data availability, and helping the organization to extract value from their data. >> And digital resilience, data resilience, as every company These days has to be a data company to be competitive. Digital resilience, data resilience, are you using those terms interchangeably? Or is data resilience to find as something a little bit different? >> Well, sometimes, yeah, that we do get caught using them when one as the other, but data resilience is really a part of digital resilience if you think about the data itself and the context of IT computing. So it really is a subset of that. But it is foundational to IT resilience. You can't have it resilience without data resilience. So that's where we're coming from on it. >> Inextricably linked. And it's becoming a corporate initiative. But there's some factors that can complicate digital resilience, data resilience for organizations. What are some of those complications that organizations need to be aware of? >> Well, one of the biggest is what you mentioned at the top of the segment, and that is the area of ransomware. The research that we found is about 46% of organizations have been hit within the last three years. It's kind of interesting how it's changed over the years. Originally, being hit by ransomware had a real stigma attached to it. Organizations didn't want to admit it. And they really avoided confronting that. Nowadays, so many people have been hit by it, that stigma has gone. And so really it is becoming more of a community kind of effort, as people try to defend against these ransomwares. The other thing about it is it's really a lot like Whac-A-Mole. They attack us in one area and we defend against it, so they attack us in another area and we defend against it. And in fact, I had an individual come up to me at a show not long ago and said, "One of these days, we're going to get pretty well defended against ransomware, and it's going to go away." And I responded, "I don't think so because we're constantly introducing new systems, new software, and introducing new vulnerabilities." And the fact is ransomware is so profitable, the bad guys aren't going to just fade into the night without giving it a lot of fight. So I really think that ransomware is one of those things that is here for the long-term, and something that we we have to address and have to get proactive about. >> You mentioned some stats there. And recently, IDC and Druva did a white paper together that really revealed some quite shocking results. Talk to me about some of the things, let's talk a little bit about the demographics of the survey, and then talk about what was the biggest finding there, especially where it's concerning ransomware. >> Yeah, this was a worldwide study. It was sponsored by Druva and conducted by IDC as an independent study. And what we did, we surveyed 500, it's a little over 500 different individuals across the globe, in North America, select countries in Western Europe, as well as several in Asia Pacific. And we did it across industries where 20 different industries represented. They're all evenly represented. We had surveys that included IT practitioners, primarily CIOs, CTOs, BPO of infrastructure, managers of data centers, things like that. And the biggest finding that we had in this, Lisa, was really finding that there is a huge disconnect, I believe, between how people think they are ready and what the actual results are when they get attacked. Some of the statistics that we learned from this, Lisa, include 83% of organizations believe or told us that they have a playbook that they have for ransomware. I think 93% said that they have a high degree, or a high, or very high degree of confidence in their recovery tools, and are fully automated. And yet when you look at the actual results, I told you a moment ago, 46% have been attacked successfully. I can also tell you that in separate research, fewer than a 1/3 of organizations were able to fully recover their data without paying the ransom. And some 2/3 actually had to pay the ransom. And even when they did, they didn't necessarily achieve their full recovery. The bad guys aren't aren't necessarily to be trusted. And so the software that they provide, sometimes is fully recovered, sometimes it's not. So you look at that and you go, "Wow." On the one hand, people think they're really prepared. And on the other hand, the results are absolutely horrible. 2/3 of people having to pay the ransom. So you start to ask yourself, "Well, what's going on there?" And I believe that a lot of it comes down to, kind of reminds me of the old quote from Mike Tyson, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." And I think that's kind of what happens with ransomware. You think you know what you're doing, you think you're ready based on the information you have. And these people are smart people, and they're professionals. But oftentimes, you don't know what you don't know. And like I say, the bad guys are always dreaming up new ways to attack us. And so I think for that reason, a lot of these have been successful. So that was kind of the key finding to me, and kind of the aha moment, really, in this whole thing, Lisa. >> That's a massive disconnect with the vast majority saying, "We have a cyber recovery playbook," yet nearly half being the victims of ransomware in the last three years. And then half of them experiencing data loss. What is it then that organizations in this situation across any industry can do to truly enable cyber resilience, data resilience? As we said, this is a matter of this is going to happen. Just a matter of when and how often. >> It is a matter. Yeah, as you said, it's not if when or how often, it's really how badly. So I think what organizations are really doing now is starting to turn more to cloud based services. Finding professionals who know what they're doing, who have that breadth of experience, and who have seen the kinds of of necessary steps that it takes to do a recovery. And the fact of the matter is a disaster recovery and a cyber recovery are really not the same thing. And so organizations need to be able to plan the kinds of recovery associated with cyber recovery in terms of forensics, in terms of scanning, in terms of analysis, and so forth. So they're turning to professionals in the cloud much more in order to get that breadth of experience, and to take advantage of cloud-based services that are out there. >> Talk to me about some of the key advantages of cloud-based services for data resilience versus traditional legacy on-prem equipment. What are some of the advantages? Why is IDC seeing this big shift to cloud, where data resilience is concerned? >> Well, the first and foremost is the economics of it. You can have on demand resources. And in the old days when we had disaster recoveries, where there we had two different data centers and the failover and so forth, you have double the infrastructure. If your financial services, it might even be triple the infrastructure. It's very complicated, very difficult. By going to the cloud, organizations can subscribe to disaster recovery as a service. And increasingly, what we see is a new market of cyber recovery as a service. So being able to leverage those resources, to be able to have the forensic analysis available to them, to be able to have the other resources available that are on demand, and to have that plan in place, to have those resources in place. I think what happens in a number of situations, Lisa, is that that organizations think they're ready, but then all of a sudden they get hit. And all of a sudden, they have to engage with outside consultants, or they have to bring in other experts. And that extends the time to recover that they have. And it also complicates it. So if they have those resources in place, then they can simply turn them on, engage them, and get that recovery going as quickly as possible. >> So what do you think the big issue here? Is it that these IT practitioners over 500 that you surveyed across 20 industries, as a global survey, do they not know what they don't know? What's the overlying issue here? >> Yeah, I think that's right. It's you don't know what you don't know. And until you get into a specific attack, there are so many different ways that organizations can be attacked. And in fact, from this research that we found is that in many cases, data exfiltration exceeds data corruption by about 50%. And when you think about that, the issue is, once I have your data, what are you going to do? I mean, there's no amount of recovery that is going to help. So organizations are either faced with paying the ransom to keep the data from perhaps being used on the dark web, or whatever, or simply saying no, and taking their chances. So best practice, things like encryption, immutability, things like that that organizations can put into place. Certainly, air gaps, having a solid backup foundation to where data is, you have a high probability recovery, things like that. Those are the kinds of things that organizations have to put into place, really, is a baseline to assure that they can recover as fast as possible, and not lose data in the event of our ransomware attack. >> Given some of the disconnect that you articulated, the stats that show so many think we are prepared, we've got a playbook, yet so many are being attacked, the vulnerabilities, and as the threat landscape just gets more and more amorphous, what do you recommend organizations? Do you talk to the IT practitioners? But does this go all the way up to the board level in terms of, " Hey guys across every industry, we are vulnerable. This is going to happen. We've got to make sure that we are truly resilient and proactive." >> Yes, and in fact, what we found from this research is in more than half of cases, the CEO is directly involved in the recovery. So this is very much a C-suite issue. And if you look at the consequences of ransomware, it's not just the ransom, it's the loss productivity, it's the loss of revenue, it's the loss of customer faith and goodwill. And organizations that have been attacked have suffered those consequences, and many of them are permanent. So people at the board level, whether it's the CEO, the CFO, the CIO, the CSO, whoever it is, they're extremely concerned about these. And I can tell you, they are fully engaged in addressing these issues within their organization. >> So all the way at the top, business critical for any industry. I imagine some industries may be a little bit more vulnerable than others, financial services, healthcare, education. We've just seen big attack in Los Angeles County. But in terms of establishing data resilience, you mentioned, ransomware isn't going anywhere, it's a big business, it's very profitable, but what is IDC's prediction where ransomware is concerned? Do you think that organizations, if they truly adopt cloud and SaaS-based technologies, can they get to a place where the C-suite doesn't have to be involved? To the point where they really actually have a functioning playbook? >> I don't know if we'll ever get to the point where the C-suite is not involved. It's probably very important to have that level of executive sponsorship. But what we are seeing is, in fact, we predict that by 2025, 55% of organizations will have shifted to a cloud-centric strategy for their data resilience. And the reason we say that is workloads on-premises aren't going away. So that's the core. We have an increasing number of workloads in the cloud and at the edge, and that's really where the growth is. So being able to take that cloud-centric model and take advantage of cloud resources, like immutable storage, being able to move data from region to region inexpensively and easily, and and to be able to take that cloud-centric perspective and apply it on-premises, as well as in the cloud and at the edge is really where we believe that organizations are shifting their focus. >> Got it. We're just cracking the surface here. Phil, I wish we had more time, but I had a chance to read the Druva sponsored IDC white paper, fascinating finds. I encourage all of you to download that. Take a read. You're going to learn some very interesting statistics and recommendations for how you can really truly deploy data resilience in your organization. Phil, it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you for joining me. >> No problem. Thank you, Lisa. >> I'm, Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone and welcome back to The Cube. We are covering VMware Explore live in San Francisco. This is our third day of wall to wall coverage. And John Furrier is here with me, Lisa Martin. We are excited to welcome two guests from Kasten by Veeam, please welcome Tom Laden, VP of marketing and Matt LeBlanc, not Joey from friends, Matt LeBlanc, the systems engineer from North America at Kasten by Veeam. Welcome guys, great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Tom-- >> Great, go ahead. >> Oh, I was going to say, Tom, talk to us about some of the key challenges customers are coming to you with. >> Key challenges that they have at this point is getting up to speed with Kubernetes. So everybody has it on their list. We want to do Kubernetes, but where are they going to start? Back when VMware came on the market, I was switching from Windows to Mac and I needed to run a Windows application on my Mac and someone told me, "Run a VM." Went to the internet, I downloaded it. And in a half hour I was done. That's not how it works with Kubernetes. So that's a bit of a challenge. >> I mean, Kubernetes, Lisa, remember the early days of The Cube Open Stack was kind of transitioning, Cloud was booming and then Kubernetes was the paper that became the thing that pulled everybody together. It's now de facto in my mind. So that's clear, but there's a lot of different versions of it and you hear VMware, they call it the dial tone. Usually, remember, Pat Gelter, it's a dial tone. Turns out that came from Kit Colbert or no, I think AJ kind of coined the term here, but it's since been there, it's been adopted by everyone. There's different versions. It's open source. AWS is involved. How do you guys look at the relationship with Kubernetes here and VMware Explore with Kubernetes and the customers because they have choices. They can go do it on their own. They can add a little bit with Lambda, Serverless. They can do more here. It's not easy. It's not as easy as people think it is. And then this is a skill gaps problem too. We're seeing a lot of these problems out there. What's your take? >> I'll let Matt talk to that. But what I want to say first is this is also the power of the cloud native ecosystem. The days are gone where companies were selecting one enterprise application and they were building their stack with that. Today they're building applications using dozens, if not hundreds of different components from different vendors or open source platforms. And that is really what creates opportunities for those cloud native developers. So maybe you want to... >> Yeah, we're seeing a lot of hybrid solutions out there. So it's not just choosing one vendor, AKS, EKS, or Tanzu. We're seeing all the above. I had a call this morning with a large healthcare provider and they have a hundred clusters and that's spread across AKS, EKS and GKE. So it is covering everything. Plus the need to have a on-prem solution manage it all. >> I got a stat, I got to share that I want to get your reactions and you can laugh or comment, whatever you want to say. Talk to big CSO, CXO, executive, big company, I won't say the name. We got a thousand developers, a hundred of them have heard of Kubernetes, okay. 10 have touched it and used it and one's good at it. And so his point is that there's a lot of Kubernetes need that people are getting aware. So it shows that there's more and more adoption around. You see a lot of managed services out there. So it's clear it's happening and I'm over exaggerating the ratio probably. But the point is the numbers kind of make sense as a thousand developers. You start to see people getting adoption to it. They're aware of the value, but being good at it is what we're hearing is one of those things. Can you guys share your reaction to that? Is that, I mean, it's hyperbole at some level, but it does point to the fact of adoption trends. You got to get good at it, you got to know how to use it. >> It's very accurate, actually. It's what we're seeing in the market. We've been doing some research of our own, and we have some interesting numbers that we're going to be sharing soon. Analysts don't have a whole lot of numbers these days. So where we're trying to run our own surveys to get a grasp of the market. One simple survey or research element that I've done myself is I used Google trends. And in Google trends, if you go back to 2004 and you compare VMware against Kubernetes, you get a very interesting graph. What you're going to see is that VMware, the adoption curve is practically complete and Kubernetes is clearly taking off. And the volume of searches for Kubernetes today is almost as big as VMware. So that's a big sign that this is starting to happen. But in this process, we have to get those companies to have all of their engineers to be up to speed on Kubernetes. And that's one of the community efforts that we're helping with. We built a website called learning.kasten.io We're going to rebrand it soon at CubeCon, so stay tuned, but we're offering hands on labs there for people to actually come learn Kubernetes with us. Because for us, the faster the adoption goes, the better for our business. >> I was just going to ask you about the learning. So there's a big focus here on educating customers to help dial down the complexity and really get them, these numbers up as John was mentioning. >> And we're really breaking it down to the very beginning. So at this point we have almost 10 labs as we call them up and they start really from install a Kubernetes Cluster and people really hands on are going to install a Kubernetes Cluster. They learn to build an application. They learn obviously to back up the application in the safest way. And then there is how to tune storage, how to implement security, and we're really building it up so that people can step by step in a hands on way learn Kubernetes. >> It's interesting, this VMware Explore, their first new name change, but VMWorld prior, big community, a lot of customers, loyal customers, but they're classic and they're foundational in enterprises and let's face it. Some of 'em aren't going to rip out VMware anytime soon because the workloads are running on it. So in Broadcom we'll have some good action to maybe increase prices or whatnot. So we'll see how that goes. But the personas here are definitely going cloud native. They did with Tanzu, was a great thing. Some stuff was coming off, the fruit's coming off the tree now, you're starting to see it. CNCF has been on this for a long, long time, CubeCon's coming up in Detroit. And so that's just always been great, 'cause you had the day zero event and you got all kinds of community activity, tons of developer action. So here they're talking, let's connect to the developer. There the developers are at CubeCon. So the personas are kind of connecting or overlapping. I'd love to get your thoughts, Matt on? >> So from the personnel that we're talking to, there really is a split between the traditional IT ops and a lot of the people that are here today at VMWare Explore, but we're also talking with the SREs and the dev ops folks. What really needs to happen is we need to get a little bit more experience, some more training and we need to get these two groups to really start to coordinate and work together 'cause you're basically moving from that traditional on-prem environment to a lot of these traditional workloads and the only way to get that experience is to get your hands dirty. >> Right. >> So how would you describe the persona specifically here versus say CubeCon? IT ops? >> Very, very different, well-- >> They still go ahead. Explain. >> Well, I mean, from this perspective, this is all about VMware and everything that they have to offer. So we're dealing with a lot of administrators from that regard. On the Kubernetes side, we have site reliability engineers and their goal is exactly as their title describes. They want to architect arch applications that are very resilient and reliable and it is a different way of working. >> I was on a Twitter spaces about SREs and dev ops and there was people saying their title's called dev ops. Like, no, no, you do dev ops, you don't really, you're not the dev ops person-- >> Right, right. >> But they become the dev ops person because you're the developer running operations. So it's been weird how dev ops been co-opted as a position. >> And that is really interesting. One person told me earlier when I started Kasten, we have this new persona. It's the dev ops person. That is the person that we're going after. But then talking to a few other people who were like, "They're not falling from space." It's people who used to do other jobs who now have a more dev ops approach to what they're doing. It's not a new-- >> And then the SRE conversation was in site, reliable engineer comes from Google, from one person managing multiple clusters to how that's evolved into being the dev ops. So it's been interesting and this is really the growth of scale, the 10X developer going to more of the cloud native, which is okay, you got to run ops and make the developer go faster. If you look at the stuff we've been covering on The Cube, the trends have been cloud native developers, which I call dev ops like developers. They want to go faster. They want self-service and they don't want to slow down. They don't want to deal with BS, which is go checking security code, wait for the ops team to do something. So data and security seem to be the new ops. Not so much IT ops 'cause that's now cloud. So how do you guys see that in, because Kubernetes is rationalizing this, certainly on the compute side, not so much on storage yet but it seems to be making things better in that grinding area between dev and these complicated ops areas like security data, where it's constantly changing. What do you think about that? >> Well there are still a lot of specialty folks in that area in regards to security operations. The whole idea is be able to script and automate as much as possible and not have to create a ticket to request a VM to be billed or an operating system or an application deployed. They're really empowered to automatically deploy those applications and keep them up. >> And that was the old dev ops role or person. That was what dev ops was called. So again, that is standard. I think at CubeCon, that is something that's expected. >> Yes. >> You would agree with that. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So now translating VM World, VMware Explore to CubeCon, what do you guys see as happening between now and then? Obviously got re:Invent right at the end in that first week of December coming. So that's going to be two major shows coming in now back to back that're going to be super interesting for this ecosystem. >> Quite frankly, if you compare the persona, maybe you have to step away from comparing the personas, but really compare the conversations that we're having. The conversations that you're having at a CubeCon are really deep dives. We will have people coming into our booth and taking 45 minutes, one hour of the time of the people who are supposed to do 10 minute demos because they're asking more and more questions 'cause they want to know every little detail, how things work. The conversations here are more like, why should I learn Kubernetes? Why should I start using Kubernetes? So it's really early day. Now, I'm not saying that in a bad way. This is really exciting 'cause when you hear CNCF say that 97% of enterprises are using Kubernetes, that's obviously that small part of their world. Those are their members. We now want to see that grow to the entire ecosystem, the larger ecosystem. >> Well, it's actually a great thing, actually. It's not a bad thing, but I will counter that by saying I am hearing the conversation here, you guys'll like this on the Veeam side, the other side of the Veeam, there's deep dives on ransomware and air gap and configuration errors on backup and recovery and it's all about Veeam on the other side. Those are the guys here talking deep dive on, making sure that they don't get screwed up on ransomware, not Kubernete, but they're going to Kub, but they're now leaning into Kubernetes. They're crossing into the new era because that's the apps'll end up writing the code for that. >> So the funny part is all of those concepts, ransomware and recovery, they're all, there are similar concepts in the world of Kubernetes and both on the Veeam side as well as the Kasten side, we are supporting a lot of those air gap solutions and providing a ransomware recovery solution and from a air gap perspective, there are a many use cases where you do need to live. It's not just the government entity, but we have customers that are cruise lines in Europe, for example, and they're disconnected. So they need to live in that disconnected world or military as well. >> Well, let's talk about the adoption of customers. I mean this is the customer side. What's accelerating their, what's the conversation with the customer at base, not just here but in the industry with Kubernetes, how would you guys categorize that? And how does that get accelerated? What's the customer situation? >> A big drive to Kubernetes is really about the automation, self-service and reliability. We're seeing the drive to and reduction of resources, being able to do more with less, right? This is ongoing the way it's always been. But I was talking to a large university in Western Canada and they're a huge Veeam customer worth 7000 VMs and three months ago, they said, "Over the next few years, we plan on moving all those workloads to Kubernetes." And the reason for it is really to reduce their workload, both from administration side, cost perspective as well as on-prem resources as well. So there's a lot of good business reasons to do that in addition to the technical reliability concerns. >> So what is those specific reasons? This is where now you start to see the rubber hit the road on acceleration. >> So I would say scale and flexibility that ecosystem, that opportunity to choose any application from that or any tool from that cloud native ecosystem is a big driver. I wanted to add to the adoption. Another area where I see a lot of interest is everything AI, machine learning. One example is also a customer coming from Veeam. We're seeing a lot of that and that's a great thing. It's an AI company that is doing software for automated driving. They decided that VMs alone were not going to be good enough for all of their workloads. And then for select workloads, the more scalable one where scalability was more of a topic, would move to Kubernetes. I think at this point they have like 20% of their workloads on Kubernetes and they're not planning to do away with VMs. VMs are always going to be there just like mainframes still exist. >> Yeah, oh yeah. They're accelerating actually. >> We're projecting over the next few years that we're going to go to a 50/50 and eventually lean towards more Kubernetes than VMs, but it was going to be a mix. >> Do you have a favorite customer example, Tom, that you think really articulates the value of what Kubernetes can deliver to customers where you guys are really coming in and help to demystify it? >> I would think SuperStereo is a really great example and you know the details about it. >> I love the SuperStereo story. They were a AWS customer and they're running OpenShift version three and they need to move to OpenShift version four. There is no upgrade in place. You have to migrate all your apps. Now SuperStereo is a large French IT firm. They have over 700 developers in their environment and it was by their estimation that this was going to take a few months to get that migration done. We're able to go in there and help them with the automation of that migration and Kasten was able to help them architect that migration and we did it in the course of a weekend with two people. >> A weekend? >> A weekend. >> That's a hackathon. I mean, that's not real come on. >> Compared to thousands of man hours and a few months not to mention since they were able to retire that old OpenShift cluster, the OpenShift three, they were able to stop paying Jeff Bezos for a couple of those months, which is tens of thousands of dollars per month. >> Don't tell anyone, keep that down low. You're going to get shot when you leave this place. No, seriously. This is why I think the multi-cloud hybrid is interesting because these kinds of examples are going to be more than less coming down the road. You're going to see, you're going to hear more of these stories than not hear them because what containerization now Kubernetes doing, what Dockers doing now and the role of containers not being such a land grab is allowing Kubernetes to be more versatile in its approach. So I got to ask you, you can almost apply that concept to agility, to other scenarios like spanning data across clouds. >> Yes, and that is what we're seeing. So the call I had this morning with a large insurance provider, you may have that insurance provider, healthcare provider, they're across three of the major hyperscalers clouds and they do that for reliability. Last year, AWS went down, I think three times in Q4 and to have a plan of being able to recover somewhere else, you can actually plan your, it's DR, it's a planned migration. You can do that in a few hours. >> It's interesting, just the sidebar here for a second. We had a couple chats earlier today. We had the influences on and all the super cloud conversations and trying to get more data to share with the audience across multiple areas. One of them was Amazon and that super, the hyper clouds like Amazon, as your Google and the rest are out there, Oracle, IBM and everyone else. There's almost a consensus that maybe there's time for some peace amongst the cloud vendors. Like, "Hey, you've already won." (Tom laughs) Everyone's won, now let's just like, we know where everyone is. Let's go peace time and everyone, then 'cause the relationship's not going to change between public cloud and the new world. So there's a consensus, like what does peace look like? I mean, first of all, the pie's getting bigger. You're seeing ecosystems forming around all the big new areas and that's good thing. That's the tides rise and the pie's getting bigger, there's bigger market out there now so people can share and share. >> I've never worked for any of these big players. So I would have to agree with you, but peace would not drive innovation. And in my heart is with tech innovation. I love it when vendors come up with new solutions that will make things better for customers and if that means that we're moving from on-prem to cloud and back to on-prem, I'm fine with that. >> What excites me is really having the flexibility of being able to choose any provider you want because you do have open standards, being cloud native in the world of Kubernetes. I've recently discovered that the Canadian federal government had mandated to their financial institutions that, "Yes, you may have started all of your on cloud presence in Azure, you need to have an option to be elsewhere." So it's not like-- >> Well, the sovereign cloud is one of those big initiatives, but also going back to Java, we heard another guest earlier, we were thinking about Java, right once ran anywhere, right? So you can't do that today in a cloud, but now with containers-- >> You can. >> Again, this is, again, this is the point that's happening. Explain. >> So when you have, Kubernetes is a strict standard and all of the applications are written to that. So whether you are deploying MongoDB or Postgres or Cassandra or any of the other cloud native apps, you can deploy them pretty much the same, whether they're in AKS, EKS or on Tanzu and it makes it much easier. The world became just a lot less for proprietary. >> So that's the story that everybody wants to hear. How does that happen in a way that is, doesn't stall the innovation and the developer growth 'cause the developers are driving a lot of change. I mean, for all the talk in the industry, the developers are doing pretty good right now. They've got a lot of open source, plentiful, open source growing like crazy. You got shifting left in the CICD pipeline. You got tools coming out with Kubernetes. Infrastructure has code is almost a 100% reality right now. So there's a lot of good things going on for developers. That's not an issue. The issue is just underneath. >> It's a skillset and that is really one of the biggest challenges I see in our deployments is a lack of experience. And it's not everyone. There are some folks that have been playing around for the last couple of years with it and they do have that experience, but there are many people that are still young at this. >> Okay, let's do, as we wrap up, let's do a lead into CubeCon, it's coming up and obviously re:Invent's right behind it. Lisa, we're going to have a lot of pre CubeCon interviews. We'll interview all the committee chairs, program chairs. We'll get the scoop on that, we do that every year. But while we got you guys here, let's do a little pre-pre-preview of CubeCon. What can we expect? What do you guys think is going to happen this year? What does CubeCon look? You guys our big sponsor of CubeCon. You guys do a great job there. Thanks for doing that. The community really recognizes that. But as Kubernetes comes in now for this year, you're looking at probably the what third year now that I would say Kubernetes has been on the front burner, where do you see it on the hockey stick growth? Have we kicked the curve yet? What's going to be the level of intensity for Kubernetes this year? How's that going to impact CubeCon in a way that people may or may not think it will? >> So I think first of all, CubeCon is going to be back at the level where it was before the pandemic, because the show, as many other shows, has been suffering from, I mean, virtual events are not like the in-person events. CubeCon LA was super exciting for all the vendors last year, but the attendees were not really there yet. Valencia was a huge bump already and I think Detroit, it's a very exciting city I heard. So it's going to be a blast and it's going to be a huge attendance, that's what I'm expecting. Second I can, so this is going to be my third personally, in-person CubeCon, comparing how vendors evolved between the previous two. There's going to be a lot of interesting stories from vendors, a lot of new innovation coming onto the market. And I think the conversations that we're going to be having will yet, again, be much more about live applications and people using Kubernetes in production rather than those at the first in-person CubeCon for me in LA where it was a lot about learning still, we're going to continue to help people learn 'cause it's really important for us but the exciting part about CubeCon is you're talking to people who are using Kubernetes in production and that's really cool. >> And users contributing projects too. >> Also. >> I mean Lyft is a poster child there and you've got a lot more. Of course you got the stealth recruiting going on there, Apple, all the big guys are there. They have a booth and no one's attending you like, "Oh come on." Matt, what's your take on CubeCon? Going in, what do you see? And obviously a lot of dynamic new projects. >> I'm going to see much, much deeper tech conversations. As experience increases, the more you learn, the more you realize you have to learn more. >> And the sharing's going to increase too. >> And the sharing, yeah. So I see a lot of deep conversations. It's no longer the, "Why do I need Kubernetes?" It's more, "How do I architect this for my solution or for my environment?" And yeah, I think there's a lot more depth involved and the size of CubeCon is going to be much larger than we've seen in the past. >> And to finish off what I think from the vendor's point of view, what we're going to see is a lot of applications that will be a lot more enterprise-ready because that is the part that was missing so far. It was a lot about the what's new and enabling Kubernetes. But now that adoption is going up, a lot of features for different components still need to be added to have them enterprise-ready. >> And what can the audience expect from you guys at CubeCon? Any teasers you can give us from a marketing perspective? >> Yes. We have a rebranding sitting ready for learning website. It's going to be bigger and better. So we're not no longer going to call it, learning.kasten.io but I'll be happy to come back with you guys and present a new name at CubeCon. >> All right. >> All right. That sounds like a deal. Guys, thank you so much for joining John and me breaking down all things Kubernetes, talking about customer adoption, the challenges, but also what you're doing to demystify it. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. >> Our pleasure. >> Thanks Matt. >> For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube's live coverage of VMware Explore 2022. Thanks for joining us. 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