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Oct. 24, 2022

When to use public or private cloud AND how to protect it

When to use public or private cloud AND how to protect it

If you have sometimes wondered if your apps should be in a public cloud, private cloud, or in your own datacenter, have we got the episode for you. And we'll also talk about how to protect those apps regardless of where they reside. We looked hard for an unbiased cloud expert, and I think we hit gold. We found Sagi Brody, the CTO of Opti9, an MSP that supports both public and private clouds, as well as on-premises backup infrastructure! We talk extensively about which types of things are appropriate (from a cost and risk perspective) to go into the public cloud, private cloud, SaaS apps, and even your own datacenter. It was an informative and entertaining conversation that we're sure you will enjoy.

Mentioned in this episode:

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Transcript
W. Curtis Preston:

Hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restored All podcast.

W. Curtis Preston:

I'm your host, w Curtis Preston, aka Mr.

W. Curtis Preston:

Backup.

W. Curtis Preston:

And I have with me my, uh, DIY flooring encourager Prasanna Malaiyandi.

W. Curtis Preston:

How's it going, Prasanna?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I'm good, Curtis.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I'm good.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, how goes the floors.

W. Curtis Preston:

It, it, it goes well as you see.

W. Curtis Preston:

And you know, I've been sending you the photos that, you know, there was a, there

W. Curtis Preston:

was a pause there for a while while my knee injured injury, uh, I don't know,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Well, I, Well, I think it was a knee entry,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

but I think it was also like you were, you went to Hawaii, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You had other

W. Curtis Preston:

was not too,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So it wasn't,

W. Curtis Preston:

hard to do flooring while you're on vacation.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Bluetooth flooring,

W. Curtis Preston:

It has resumed in earnest and I actually, what's,

W. Curtis Preston:

once I'm done with the current room, which is the super hard room

W. Curtis Preston:

where I have to work backwards.

W. Curtis Preston:

I dunno if any of you ever done, you know, paneling or the luxury vinyl

W. Curtis Preston:

planking or the laminate flooring.

W. Curtis Preston:

There's a working for, there's a working backwards.

W. Curtis Preston:

I am now currently working backwards as I have to in one of the rooms.

W. Curtis Preston:

It's the hardest, it's the worst I'm doing.

W. Curtis Preston:

Once I'm done with that, I will be half done with the project.

W. Curtis Preston:

So I'm super, super excited to get to that.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, and you're the only one who I can send photos and you're like, Good job.

W. Curtis Preston:

And

W. Curtis Preston:

you're the only one that like encourages me in my little DIY

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Well, I gotta try, you know.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Well, here's the thing.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I live vicariously through your projects, so it feels like I'm working on it.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

When you're working on.

W. Curtis Preston:

I wonder how many of our podcast listeners also live

W. Curtis Preston:

vicariously through my projects or are going, Gosh, shut up about the

W. Curtis Preston:

flooring and get to the tech already.

W. Curtis Preston:

I just wonder,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

so if you, if you, Yeah, if you have a viewpoint

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

on this, please let Curtis know.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

On Twitter,

W. Curtis Preston:

Yes, at WC Preston on Twitter, uh, you know, we love to hear

W. Curtis Preston:

opinions, you know, and just remember opinions are like, you know, noses.

W. Curtis Preston:

Everybody has one and I usually pick my own.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, alright, so we're gonna bring on our guest today.

W. Curtis Preston:

He is the CTO of Opti9 Tech, having been there since the late 90.

W. Curtis Preston:

It could be found on Twitter, @SagiBrody, and LinkedIn as the same name.

W. Curtis Preston:

It's having a unique name.

W. Curtis Preston:

You get to go, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

If you search on my name on LinkedIn, you get like

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think, I think I'm the only Malaiyandi, by the

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

You, you're definitely yeah, as well.

W. Curtis Preston:

So welcome to the podcast, Sagi Brody.

Sagi Brody:

Thank you.

Sagi Brody:

It's, it's great to be here.

Sagi Brody:

I could already tell this is gonna be a fun conversation.

W. Curtis Preston:

Well, it, it'll be something, it'll

W. Curtis Preston:

be, it'll be lively for sure.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, the two of us talk way too much and we, we invite you to the conversation.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

do you do any home DIY projects by chance?

Sagi Brody:

I just finished, um, having a home built, uh, from scratch, but not

Sagi Brody:

myself, a contractor, but, um, What I can tell you is I, I wouldn't do it again.

Sagi Brody:

Um, it,

W. Curtis Preston:

I hear that from almost everybody that actually has

W. Curtis Preston:

a home built for them, um, is that it's a pretty stressful project.

W. Curtis Preston:

But, uh, there, there's basically two groups of people though in this world.

W. Curtis Preston:

There, there there's people like me who like to do a lot of DIY stuff, and I, I

W. Curtis Preston:

like to do it partially because I like to process and I like to do it because I, I.

W. Curtis Preston:

I get more, I can get more stuff done than what I could pay for if I

W. Curtis Preston:

had to pay somebody else to do it.

W. Curtis Preston:

And, but a but a friend of mine, uh, he learned from his dad the following

W. Curtis Preston:

phrase, Do what you do well so you can pay other people to do what they do well.

W. Curtis Preston:

And he does zero DIY and I can respect that as well.

W. Curtis Preston:

It's all good, you know.

W. Curtis Preston:

But, uh, anyway, so let, let's start with.

W. Curtis Preston:

A summary of what, you know, when I see your company, I see you

W. Curtis Preston:

talk a lot about hybrid computing.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, what sort of, you know, give us an overview of the company to start with.

Sagi Brody:

Sure.

Sagi Brody:

Um, well, Opti9 is a, a managed cloud provider.

Sagi Brody:

Two very vague terms, manage and cloud, um, talk all day about that.

Sagi Brody:

But yeah, so what we're doing is, you know, we we're managing production

Sagi Brody:

workloads for our customers, either in public clouds like aws.

Sagi Brody:

Or in private environments like virtual private clouds or host of private clouds,

Sagi Brody:

which we host in our data centers, which we have, uh, around the world.

Sagi Brody:

And, um, so there's sort of like the line of business of, of taking

Sagi Brody:

ownership and accountability for customers production environments.

Sagi Brody:

And then we have a, the side of the house where we're providing managed offsite

Sagi Brody:

backups and managed disaster recovery.

Sagi Brody:

. Um, and I would say sort of what's, what's interesting or, or what we

Sagi Brody:

find to be important is not, not so much the what, which is kind of what

Sagi Brody:

I just described, but more of like the how, how do we, how do we integrate

Sagi Brody:

those things within your existing framework of your network or security?

Sagi Brody:

How do we.

Sagi Brody:

Give you the best of both worlds so that you can consume these services

Sagi Brody:

in a, in a way that looks and feels and acts like it's part of your

Sagi Brody:

environment, but it's as a service.

Sagi Brody:

So it, it's definitely a bespoke sort of model.

Sagi Brody:

Um, and we, we get deep and, you know, a lot of people, a lot of organizations

Sagi Brody:

have, uh, technical debt and skeletons in their closets and weird platforms

Sagi Brody:

and you know, like sort of like the higher up the enterprise stack you

Sagi Brody:

go, the more edge cases you encounter.

Sagi Brody:

The less vendors that are out there that have an appetite to service

Sagi Brody:

those, and for whatever reason, that's where we sit and we like it

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah, it's interesting cuz when you're talking

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

initially about Oh yeah, we do hybrid cloud, I was like, why would someone

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

choose like Opti9 tech, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Versus, um, go with like an AWS or someone or like any of the other public.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Cloud companies, but like you were just talking about, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's all those skeletons in the closets, the unique situations that you have

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the ability to sort of customize and support for versus like some of

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the public clouds, which is like, Hey, just onboard whatever you have.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

If it fits into what we have, great.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

If not, sorry.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah, it, it.

W. Curtis Preston:

I would, I would guess what it sounds like is, you know, comparing you to an

W. Curtis Preston:

aws, you, it is that m it's the m right.

W. Curtis Preston:

You know, not, not everybody wants to actually manage a cloud environment.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right.

W. Curtis Preston:

They'll, they'll, they'll hand it over to you, but, uh, but they don't,

W. Curtis Preston:

they don't necessarily wanna manage.

W. Curtis Preston:

It sounds like you manage both the, the cloud side as well as the

W. Curtis Preston:

on-prem side, and that's, that would

Sagi Brody:

Yeah, well, so we're not actually, we're not

Sagi Brody:

actually manag anything, managing anything at our customers

Sagi Brody:

premises in their, in your office.

Sagi Brody:

Um, but within our, our facilities, um, which are all over the world,

Sagi Brody:

you know, we'll stand up a, you know, wanna call it a legacy environment,

Sagi Brody:

like a private VMware cluster and you know, which, which is analogous to

Sagi Brody:

what they have prem, which we can.

Sagi Brody:

Lift and shift.

Sagi Brody:

Um, but I, I think the overall, our, our tagline is Right cloud,

Sagi Brody:

right workload, right time.

Sagi Brody:

The idea is that, um, we wanna have the workload's best interest at heart.

Sagi Brody:

And you know, years ago you would hear people, you know, saying, I'm going

Sagi Brody:

all in, we're going all in with aws, we're going all in with Azure, We've

Sagi Brody:

picked our cloud, you know, strategy.

Sagi Brody:

And it, it's all gcp.

Sagi Brody:

And now I think the whole market has woken up to hybrid.

Sagi Brody:

And it's very safe to say hybrid because what you're saying is, I'm

Sagi Brody:

not ready to make a commitment.

Sagi Brody:

I might need this tomorrow.

Sagi Brody:

I might need that tomorrow.

Sagi Brody:

And that's what hybrid is.

Sagi Brody:

It's, it's mixing them and.

Sagi Brody:

What we're trying to do is to, to be, you know, sort of like

Sagi Brody:

fiduciary to the workloads and really build a, a reference architecture

Sagi Brody:

from a networking perspective.

Sagi Brody:

Um, for mo, for, for the hybrid.

Sagi Brody:

So if we are doing an audit on our customers environment and, you know, we,

Sagi Brody:

they have some legacy perpetual workloads that are gonna cost a lot less in a

Sagi Brody:

private cloud and be more performant.

Sagi Brody:

We'll put it there.

Sagi Brody:

If they're looking to build a, you know, retool an old I series retail

Sagi Brody:

application and have it be cloud native, we'll put it on aws, it'll actually help

Sagi Brody:

with the modernization of the app too.

Sagi Brody:

So it's hybrid from a platform perspective, but also from

Sagi Brody:

a migration strategies too.

Sagi Brody:

But I would say most importantly, you know, people are already hybrid.

Sagi Brody:

They have stuff in organizations, but kind of, you know, who owns the glue

Sagi Brody:

between those platforms and who's.

Sagi Brody:

You know, figuring out the integration strategies, and so oftentimes

Sagi Brody:

we'll do that, you know, for, for mid-market companies, we'll, we'll,

Sagi Brody:

we'll manage in both environments and we'll do the network integration

Sagi Brody:

back to wherever they need it to go.

W. Curtis Preston:

So if I'm, so, you know, I'm a customer thinking

W. Curtis Preston:

about using you, so it sounds like I have to move if I, if I'm, if I'm

W. Curtis Preston:

fully on-prim at this point, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

I have to move my workloads, or you help me move my workloads to

W. Curtis Preston:

either a cloud provider that you support or to your, uh, private

W. Curtis Preston:

cloud that's in your colo facilities.

W. Curtis Preston:

Is that, is that a correct summary statement?

W. Curtis Preston:

If I want you to.

Sagi Brody:

On the production side, but every, almost everything that

Sagi Brody:

we do from a, you know, an, an offsite backup and disaster recovery

Sagi Brody:

perspective is, is, you know, sort of responsive to existing environments.

Sagi Brody:

So, uh, we have tons of customers that are just using us to manage

Sagi Brody:

their local backups, um, and their backups to the cloud.

Sagi Brody:

And when it comes to disaster recovery, and kind of answer your

Sagi Brody:

question, why would somebody use us?

Sagi Brody:

You know, again, there's no right or wrong.

Sagi Brody:

I mean, go using AWS without a managed provider.

Sagi Brody:

That's fine.

Sagi Brody:

Um, using a data protection software and building your own target

Sagi Brody:

environment and building your own DR strategy, that's fine too.

Sagi Brody:

What we really ask people is like, and it's kind of like actually

Sagi Brody:

kind of like the quote that you said from, from your dad before.

Sagi Brody:

Look what is, you know, what do you have an appetite to be

Sagi Brody:

accountable for and responsible for?

Sagi Brody:

Do you wanna be in the business of managing your DR.

Sagi Brody:

Runbooks in perpetuity and nudging to be tested?

Sagi Brody:

And who, who should own fail over?

Sagi Brody:

Who should own fail failback?

Sagi Brody:

Who should own the consumption strategy, which is more important

Sagi Brody:

than just moving bits and bites.

Sagi Brody:

So that's where we, that's where, you know, it's all white glove.

Sagi Brody:

We're getting deep.

Sagi Brody:

We wanna see those network diagrams.

Sagi Brody:

We, we wanna, you know, make suggestions that are, are usable and don't require

Sagi Brody:

them to re IP their entire network.

Sagi Brody:

You know, so it's all about that, you know, it's a, we fit for those

Sagi Brody:

organizations that are looking to shift ownership and just hold

Sagi Brody:

someone accountable to an sla.

W. Curtis Preston:

Interesting.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, and by the way, uh, before we continue, I'll throughout our usual

W. Curtis Preston:

disclaimer, uh, I work for Druva, Prasanna works for Zoom, and this is

W. Curtis Preston:

not a podcast of either company and the opinions that you hear are ours.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, if you'd like to join the conversation, I am available

W. Curtis Preston:

at WC Preston on Twitter.

W. Curtis Preston:

Or, uh, you can reach me at w Curtis Preston gmail.

W. Curtis Preston:

And, um, then, uh, also be sure to rate us, um, I think by the time, I

W. Curtis Preston:

think by the time this goes live, our current comment special will probably

W. Curtis Preston:

be over, but, you know, we'll see.

W. Curtis Preston:

We'll see if we extend it.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, the idea was to get, uh, I think it was like eight new comments by

W. Curtis Preston:

the end of October, and I would continue to grow my beard and

W. Curtis Preston:

look, look more like Santa Claus by

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Come on, people You want to see Curtis

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

in a beard in a Santa Claus

W. Curtis Preston:

beard

W. Curtis Preston:

I'm, I'm, I'm, um, I've, I've been letting it grow.

W. Curtis Preston:

I, I, uh, Sagi, I've, I've been trimming it pretty tightly, uh, kinda

W. Curtis Preston:

like yours, and then I've been letting it grow because Prasanna over here

W. Curtis Preston:

has a, is it a, is it a three or yet?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Not a three year beard yet, so it's

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

a two and a half year beard.

Sagi Brody:

You're

W. Curtis Preston:

So he didn't cut, He basically cut tast, cut his

W. Curtis Preston:

hair or his beard since, um, Covid and, um, I don't know, it's some

W. Curtis Preston:

sort of weird protest or something.

W. Curtis Preston:

But anyway, if you wanna see me grow my beard longer for Christmas and throw

W. Curtis Preston:

out a few more comments, we'd love to see comments, uh, on, uh, iTunes there.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, I I am curious.

W. Curtis Preston:

So, so now, so the reason, right, so I get that basically you, you manage

W. Curtis Preston:

on-prem backup environments, but if I'm gonna move my production workloads

W. Curtis Preston:

to you, how I is, I guess one thing, and, and let's just assume for the

W. Curtis Preston:

moment that I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna retool, I'm not gonna refactor,

W. Curtis Preston:

I'm just gonna run, I'm gonna take my, my, my on-prem stuff and I'm gonna.

W. Curtis Preston:

Your cloud or their cloud I, Is there a cost advantage of one versus the other?

W. Curtis Preston:

Is yours less expensive than putting it, uh, you know, in

W. Curtis Preston:

AWS or VMware cloud on aws

Sagi Brody:

Well, almost everything is less expensive than VMware Cloud on aws.

Sagi Brody:

Um, I know we're not, Yeah, it's not about vendors, but I think I can say, say that

Sagi Brody:

as an independent, um, participant, um,

W. Curtis Preston:

It doesn't excel in, in, um, cost effectiveness

W. Curtis Preston:

is what you're saying.

Sagi Brody:

I, I think though that, um, VMware Cloud on aws, the fact that

Sagi Brody:

it's been successful is really a good story for folks like Opti9 and others.

Sagi Brody:

There's a lot of companies that are running, you know, private cloud as a

Sagi Brody:

service, and the reason that I think it's successful is, you know, and I'm

Sagi Brody:

sure you guys understand, is people were gonna shut down data centers.

Sagi Brody:

There's a lot of pressure on them to just sort of turn it off and they had

Sagi Brody:

to move their stuff and, you know, EC2 on AWS is, know you can run VMs, but

Sagi Brody:

it's not, the same as running VMware.

Sagi Brody:

Um, you know, it's designed to run, you know, sort of swarms of instances.

Sagi Brody:

There's no inherent per node redundancy, and it, it was

Sagi Brody:

designed for a different use case.

Sagi Brody:

Um, and they, and then you have the whole sort of just operational overhead.

Sagi Brody:

These people are very, very familiar with the VMware interface and, and, you know,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that's what I've heard a lot about.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's like once you have like a VMware admin trying to go beyond

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

VMware, they're like, No, no, no, no.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Kicking and screaming.

Sagi Brody:

Yeah.

Sagi Brody:

And so now you have, you know, basically move us to AWS because, you

Sagi Brody:

know, you can't go wrong picking aws.

Sagi Brody:

But, um, you know, so the right thing to do is, if you wanna bring it to EC2

Sagi Brody:

and to AWS in general, is let's, let's, let's retool it to be cloud native.

Sagi Brody:

Let's take advantage of PaaS, um, and SQL as a service and function as a service.

Sagi Brody:

You know, how long is it gonna take to rewrite all these applications and do

Sagi Brody:

we even want to rewrite all of them?

Sagi Brody:

So, so VMC was this really good middle ground where it's like, Hey,

Sagi Brody:

everything stays the same from a, from a technology perspective and interface

Sagi Brody:

and operations and management, and you get to shut down your data center.

Sagi Brody:

Um, and that's great.

Sagi Brody:

I think what's different about companies like, like Opti9 and all the other

Sagi Brody:

iterations that are out there is.

Sagi Brody:

Vmc with vmc, they have to kind of, they have to kind of, it's like the Borg.

Sagi Brody:

They have to assimilate everything into the AWS model.

Sagi Brody:

And you know, that's a scale company.

Sagi Brody:

So, um, you can't run a lot.

Sagi Brody:

Like, for instance, you can't run a lot of the data protection

Sagi Brody:

tools, um, that run on VMware.

Sagi Brody:

They won't run on vmc, um, because you don't get sort of

Sagi Brody:

native root access to esxi.

Sagi Brody:

Um, and also if you try to put it inside your network, like one, one of the things

Sagi Brody:

that I like doing, You know, integrating our cloud services into a customer's

Sagi Brody:

existing MPLS or sdwan network from the closest location from the same metro.

Sagi Brody:

So it looks and feels and acts like it's in just another node.

Sagi Brody:

You, It's hard to do that with vmc and it's a lot of steps to go through.

Sagi Brody:

So I use VMC as an example, you know.

Sagi Brody:

That there is a model for these regional service providers, and if you can do all

Sagi Brody:

the things that they do, they can do, but you have this level of flexibility

Sagi Brody:

and customization and oh, you gotta put a half rack worth of networking

Sagi Brody:

gear in front of it, no problem.

Sagi Brody:

Oh, you have an MSSP that needs to monitor every packet.

Sagi Brody:

No problem.

Sagi Brody:

It's kind of like that, you know?

Sagi Brody:

Um,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

A bespoke model a little.

Sagi Brody:

Yeah.

Sagi Brody:

Yeah.

Sagi Brody:

Um, but, but to answer your question on cost, the least expensive

Sagi Brody:

solution is the one that is, it is best sort of tuned for the use case.

Sagi Brody:

So I do think running a, a SaaS platform, a modern day SaaS platform on a private

Sagi Brody:

cloud is probably, it's, it's, it's not gonna be very cost effective at scale

Sagi Brody:

when you start talking about traffic and also to run perpetual VMs like

Sagi Brody:

legacy ERP systems and so on, on EC2.

Sagi Brody:

It's, it's overkill.

Sagi Brody:

And I'd say one of the things that people forget when they move to the cloud is

Sagi Brody:

they've all been sold on virtualization on-prem, years and years ago.

Sagi Brody:

And one of the reasons was, um, based on over subscription.

Sagi Brody:

Hey, you can provision 16 gigs of memory on all your VMs and only

Sagi Brody:

use four or five or whatever.

Sagi Brody:

When you move to public cloud to EC2, to Azure, you're going backwards.

Sagi Brody:

You're paying for provisioned again, um, whether you use it or not.

Sagi Brody:

Hey, that's okay.

Sagi Brody:

If you're using Ansible or Puppet or cloud formations to automatically

Sagi Brody:

deploy and resize VMs, who cares?

Sagi Brody:

But if you're moving a perpetual vm, like you want that over subscription benefit,

Sagi Brody:

so the private cloud retains that part of it for you, which is really interesting.

W. Curtis Preston:

Mm,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I believe though, with VMC though, it would still hold

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that same ability to over provision.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Just base,

W. Curtis Preston:

within the VMC world.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Within the VMC world.

Sagi Brody:

Absolutely.

Sagi Brody:

And that's, that's a really big factor that I, I think regardless of where you

Sagi Brody:

go, what you do, people, it just kind of like, just forget about that aspect.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Which is a big thing.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think a lot of people don't realize, like the entire reason they went

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

virtualized was to deal with the, Yeah, I don't know the exact size and how

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

can I overprovision and not waste a bunch of resources and Interesting.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I'd never thought about the fact of, yeah, moving to EC2,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

you're losing those benefits

W. Curtis Preston:

And now instead of, instead of sharing something that you

W. Curtis Preston:

own, you're now renting something that you don't own and you're paying, you're

W. Curtis Preston:

paying for the whole thing, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

I would argue that the better utilization of resources was the

W. Curtis Preston:

OG reason for virtualization.

W. Curtis Preston:

But to me, and again, maybe it's because I see things the

W. Curtis Preston:

way I do, to me backup and DR.

W. Curtis Preston:

Is like, if you do it right, uh, and, and things like ha and all of that stuff

W. Curtis Preston:

that you can do with virtualization.

W. Curtis Preston:

Like you can't do vmotion you know, with, with a, with a physical box.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right.

W. Curtis Preston:

It just, it just, well, you can, it just doesn't do anything right.

W. Curtis Preston:

But, um, things like that, that just simp the idea.

W. Curtis Preston:

It's just, there were just so many things that we could do from a backup

W. Curtis Preston:

and DR perspective now that just simply weren't possible in the old days.

W. Curtis Preston:

Now there was that period and you know, it sounds like Sagi, you've been

W. Curtis Preston:

in this long enough that you remember that period when, when VMware came out.

W. Curtis Preston:

and backup just broke, like, like overnight because everybody just kept

W. Curtis Preston:

running their same old, same old.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, you know, And that's what created essentially the market for Veeam in

W. Curtis Preston:

the first place was all the traditional backup products were just broke.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, and, and,

W. Curtis Preston:

eventually we got there, right?

Sagi Brody:

yeah.

Sagi Brody:

I mean, our, our backup software, you know, was rsync.

Sagi Brody:

That's, uh, what we ran, you know, a very long time ago.

Sagi Brody:

And then VMware, there was nothing.

Sagi Brody:

We, there, there was a script called, uh, Ghetto vcp, which

Sagi Brody:

is what everybody ran, you know?

Sagi Brody:

And, uh, It was called ghetto BCP for a reason, you know?

Sagi Brody:

Um, but, but I agree with you.

Sagi Brody:

I think once you get things, once you get sort of, sort of these, um, objects,

Sagi Brody:

servers, connections, whatever, into, uh, like a virtual construct Yeah.

Sagi Brody:

You can manipulate 'em in so many interesting ways.

Sagi Brody:

Um, I mean, listen, we still do DR.

Sagi Brody:

Today for physical servers and iSeries and P series and NFS and all the skeletons.

Sagi Brody:

Do we like doing it?

Sagi Brody:

No, it's not as easy as doing VMs.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right.

Sagi Brody:

the RPOs and RTOs are not the same, but you know, when

Sagi Brody:

things are image based, there are so many cool things you can do with it.

Sagi Brody:

I'll give you my favorite example is when people think about DR.

Sagi Brody:

From, and I'm not like an old school networking guy, so from a, from a

Sagi Brody:

connectivity perspective, um, whereas the virtualization might be replicated, you

Sagi Brody:

know, using images in these cool ways, connectivity is still often thought of

Sagi Brody:

in the old school way, where if I have, you know, three private connections

Sagi Brody:

at my production, one's going to Fiserv and one's going Mackenzie, and

Sagi Brody:

one's going to Bloomberg or whatever, and my MPLS, I, I still need to

Sagi Brody:

duplicate all of those at the DR site.

Sagi Brody:

And then I have to pay for double the circuits and I have

Sagi Brody:

to have double the overhead.

Sagi Brody:

And by the way, no one is monitoring those circuits until

Sagi Brody:

I actually have to use them.

Sagi Brody:

And then we find out they've been down for six months and blah, blah.

Sagi Brody:

So one of the really cool things that we've been, we've been using, um, and it's

Sagi Brody:

not something that we even sell, but if you look at these network as a service

Sagi Brody:

platforms, um, the likes of Packet Fabric or Megaport, or even Equinix, uh, Ecx, you

Sagi Brody:

know, if, if you take that cross, connect that transport circuit and you, and you

Sagi Brody:

plug it into their fabric instead, you can fail over and fail back the physical

Sagi Brody:

connectivity from production to DR.

Sagi Brody:

Just like you do your VMs.

Sagi Brody:

Right?

Sagi Brody:

And and to me that's, that's the coolest thing, right?

Sagi Brody:

Cause now I'm saving money and now I'm using that always during production too.

Sagi Brody:

So if it breaks, I know immediately.

Sagi Brody:

And I think it's tangible, you know?

Sagi Brody:

Um, and it reduces the complexity greatly.

Sagi Brody:

So this whole software defined, you know, buzzword.

Sagi Brody:

For me as being someone who has to design DR infrastructure, um, I can

Sagi Brody:

use that and leverage it to simplify and, and, you know, reduce the rto.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Speaker:

That's very interesting.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Speaker:

I never thought, like, normally when I think about.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Speaker:

Doing DR testing, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Speaker:

It's like, Hey, can I fail over?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Speaker:

Can I bring it up?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Speaker:

But the networking aspect you just talked about, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Speaker:

It's like you really have to validate that entire stack top to bottom.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Speaker:

Not only of does your VM come up, but does your app come up?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Speaker:

Is your networking all good to go?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Speaker:

Right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Speaker:

Does all the connectivity services all come up as well that you need

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Speaker:

in order for it to be operational?

Sagi Brody:

Yeah, I mean, DR.

Sagi Brody:

Uh, networking is like the dirty little secret of DR.

Sagi Brody:

You know, copying data is, is easy.

Sagi Brody:

I mean, you know, companies like Druva and Veeam and, and many others have

Sagi Brody:

done a really good job of, of data replication and data assurance and,

Sagi Brody:

and, and, you know, I mean, they're, they're just amazing at what they do.

Sagi Brody:

Um, But devil's in the details.

Sagi Brody:

And so the first question I usually ask is, how are you gonna consume?

Sagi Brody:

You know, what does consumption look like?

Sagi Brody:

And the answer kind of changes if we're talking about a full failover versus a

Sagi Brody:

partial failover, and so on and so forth.

W. Curtis Preston:

And then you, you add, you know, we, we, we just

W. Curtis Preston:

recorded yesterday, we recorded a, an episode where we, we were, we've been

W. Curtis Preston:

doing a back to basic series and uh, we recorded an episode yesterday that

W. Curtis Preston:

was just like, why we back up and, you know, all the things that can go wrong.

W. Curtis Preston:

That backup is backup and DR.

W. Curtis Preston:

Are meant to fix.

W. Curtis Preston:

And we, we talked.

W. Curtis Preston:

A true disaster, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

We were talking about things like hurricanes and giant floods that take out

W. Curtis Preston:

regions and one of the real challenges is, okay, how do you do connectivity to your

W. Curtis Preston:

apps when, um, everybody is now working out of Starbucks and you are running out

W. Curtis Preston:

of a cloud provider in another region?

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, you know, there, there's all those things that you have to count on that,

W. Curtis Preston:

that, that aren't necessarily available.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, I, I wanted to go back to there, there was a thought that Prasanna

W. Curtis Preston:

that you brought up earlier, I think that was you that talked about,

W. Curtis Preston:

you know, the, the OG reason why we went with, with virtualization.

W. Curtis Preston:

When I think about the cloud, like, like, like a true IaaS

W. Curtis Preston:

provider, um, to me that big reason.

W. Curtis Preston:

Like, it may not be it, it definitely is not the reason most

W. Curtis Preston:

people go to the cloud today.

W. Curtis Preston:

I, I think they, they go to the cloud for false reasons, but the

W. Curtis Preston:

true beauty of, of an IAS vendor is that dynamic allocation of resources.

W. Curtis Preston:

I need a VM boom.

W. Curtis Preston:

I need a, I need a PaaS platform.

W. Curtis Preston:

Boom.

W. Curtis Preston:

I don't need it anymore.

W. Curtis Preston:

Boom, , right?

W. Curtis Preston:

That, that, uh, that, that automatic.

W. Curtis Preston:

You know, allocation and de allocation of resources and paying

W. Curtis Preston:

for them only when you use them.

W. Curtis Preston:

That that's the thing.

W. Curtis Preston:

Going back to when we talked about virtualization, the stuff that is

W. Curtis Preston:

possible now that wasn't possible then that's the thing that is possible

W. Curtis Preston:

only in a public or, you know, cloud environment or I guess private cloud

W. Curtis Preston:

environment like yours as well.

W. Curtis Preston:

Where you can just grab a bunch of stuff, use it, and then get rid of it and pay for

W. Curtis Preston:

it for the three hours that you had it.

W. Curtis Preston:

That, to me, is the beauty of the public cloud, and if you're not

W. Curtis Preston:

leveraging that, you're not really, you're not really getting the,

W. Curtis Preston:

the beauty of the public cloud.

W. Curtis Preston:

I don't know what, what do you think about that, that thought?

Sagi Brody:

You're absolutely right because, and, and I, I, I talk up, I

Sagi Brody:

talk about that sometimes with people and I tell them, when you're paying for

Sagi Brody:

EC2 instances, you know you're paying for the APIs, you're paying for the

Sagi Brody:

pleasure of being able to do all that.

Sagi Brody:

And if you're, and if you're not actually using it, if your goal is

Sagi Brody:

to deploy 20 windows VMs with 16 gigs of memory and maintain that in

Sagi Brody:

perpetuity, um, you're overpaying you.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

Sagi Brody:

So it is true, and I think people that are using, you need to be

Sagi Brody:

using X number of PaaS features, you know, to really sell me on the fact

Sagi Brody:

that you need to be in public cloud.

Sagi Brody:

And you know, I would say in general today, With all of this,

Sagi Brody:

the, the real threat is complexity.

Sagi Brody:

That's the killer and everybody in it, they're part of their goal should

Sagi Brody:

be on sort of watching complexity, sprawl and reigning in complexity.

Sagi Brody:

Um, because, you know, as you're aware, you know, the more complex, the harder

Sagi Brody:

it's to manage, the harder it is to ensure it falls into your resilience, you

Sagi Brody:

know, goals, um, or your compliance goals

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Or, Or your security goals.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah, one of, one of my mantras is complexity equals risk,

Sagi Brody:

Yeah.

Sagi Brody:

Yeah.

Sagi Brody:

And, and even like people that are like, you know, you have, you know,

Sagi Brody:

departments going and, and just running, um, just using SaaS platforms.

Sagi Brody:

I mean, it's great from a functionality, uh, perspective, but, you know,

Sagi Brody:

how does that, how, how does that relate to those different things?

Sagi Brody:

How does it relate to resilience?

Sagi Brody:

And going back to, um, what you were saying before about

Sagi Brody:

sort of DR testing, Right.

Sagi Brody:

One of the interesting scenarios that's popped up with this and DR.

Sagi Brody:

, you know, if you are, if part of your production environment is, you know,

Sagi Brody:

Office 365 and um, Salesforce and Workday, and like you have, you know, critical

Sagi Brody:

data that's sitting there, um, and your, your own applications are speaking to

Sagi Brody:

them and integrated via APIs, can you actually do a DR test on your application?

Sagi Brody:

Like when you bring up your app and DR.

Sagi Brody:

I, if you haven't blocked off your firewall right?

Sagi Brody:

And you start going in the app and making changes and playing with it and meanwhile.

Sagi Brody:

It's connecting to your QuickBooks instance or your Salesforce, and

Sagi Brody:

you're changing production data, like this whole thing around you.

Sagi Brody:

You can actually poison your production environment by doing DR testing.

Sagi Brody:

So, you know, we talk to our customers about that and you

Sagi Brody:

know, how do you account for that?

Sagi Brody:

And, um, it's not, so easy sometimes,

W. Curtis Preston:

of the major platforms, you know, the say three

W. Curtis Preston:

or four top platforms like that.

W. Curtis Preston:

The one that I think gets that right is Salesforce, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

Because they'll give you that sandbox environment.

W. Curtis Preston:

There's not, I'm not aware, I don't think there's a sandbox.

W. Curtis Preston:

Microsoft 365

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Maybe you clone your SharePoint site

Sagi Brody:

Yeah.

Sagi Brody:

I mean, the sandbox is nice, but now you have to, you know, um, and we've probably

Sagi Brody:

thought about this way too much, but now you have to, um, Where am I doing, Where

Sagi Brody:

am I doing the, the split to the sandbox?

Sagi Brody:

Is it in my application and I have to go tell all my devs to run two

Sagi Brody:

configs and I hit a button in the app?

Sagi Brody:

Am I doing it at the network layer where I'm proxying the connections

Sagi Brody:

and I'm redirecting it to the sandbox?

Sagi Brody:

And you know, going back to what you said, it's all, it's all either

Sagi Brody:

way, it's all complexity and.

Sagi Brody:

I don't think it's a problem, but I think these are some of the things that

Sagi Brody:

people need to think about at the very beginning, before they go and run and jump

Sagi Brody:

on this SaaS or that SaaS or this or that.

Sagi Brody:

You really have to kind of look at the big picture holistically.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah, if, if your DR test is going to be actually

W. Curtis Preston:

changing things in SaaS environments.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah, I hadn't even thought about that actually.

W. Curtis Preston:

But if it is, you absolutely can poison your, your production environment.

Sagi Brody:

I've seen it happen, happen with the hospital where they,

Sagi Brody:

they turned it on and they use a third party, you know, pharmaceutical

Sagi Brody:

service for prescriptions and they put in a test prescription and, you

Sagi Brody:

know, all of a sudden something pops outta the machine for, for John Doe.

Sagi Brody:

And it's not supposed to be there,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Oh

W. Curtis Preston:

That's not good.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah, I can think of all sorts of things where that happens and yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

My, my concern of the SaaS, the modern day SaaS world, as, as much as, you know,

W. Curtis Preston:

I, I work at a SaaS provider, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

But my concern of the modern day SaaS world is, well, two concerns.

W. Curtis Preston:

One is the one you talked about about complexity.

W. Curtis Preston:

You can have hundreds of SaaS providers that do various little things for you.

W. Curtis Preston:

And, uh, I remember, uh, Prasanna, you remember when we interviewed that one

W. Curtis Preston:

person who worked at a, you know, a startup, We asked them how many SaaS

W. Curtis Preston:

providers they said, and they said 450.

W. Curtis Preston:

, Holy crap.

W. Curtis Preston:

Like how do you, how do you, like you said, how do you rein that in?

W. Curtis Preston:

How do you manage, um, you know, provisioning to that and, and,

W. Curtis Preston:

and, uh, sso to that and all that.

W. Curtis Preston:

I mean, I guess that's what Okta's for.

W. Curtis Preston:

But number two, and real, really this is number one, is, um, how many of

W. Curtis Preston:

those SaaS apps have data that is critical to your production requirement

W. Curtis Preston:

that, that your production environment that you're creating in that SaaS.

W. Curtis Preston:

and then there is no backup of that data.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right?

W. Curtis Preston:

And the answer is all of it, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

99% of SaaS customers don't do squat for backup of their SaaS environment, and

W. Curtis Preston:

they think that people like you and me that happen to sell services to do that.

W. Curtis Preston:

We're just being fear mongers when we tell them that Microsoft 365

W. Curtis Preston:

might delete all their data one day.

Sagi Brody:

It's, it's a very, there's so many bad assumptions in, in the industry.

Sagi Brody:

I mean, not, it's not the industry, it's just the complexity.

Sagi Brody:

You know, like it's, it's a good example.

Sagi Brody:

And, uh, you know, with Office 365, certainly they have multiple

Sagi Brody:

data centers and your data.

Sagi Brody:

Is resilient.

Sagi Brody:

If one of those data centers, you know, goes down or blows

Sagi Brody:

up, you know, you're fine.

Sagi Brody:

But, you know, can you, can you hit the rewind button and

Sagi Brody:

bring back your office 365?

Sagi Brody:

And, you know, as it looked like two weeks ago, you know, like you can do

Sagi Brody:

in a, in a traditional environment.

Sagi Brody:

No, you can't do that.

Sagi Brody:

Absolutely not.

Sagi Brody:

And I, I think there's, there's so many gotchas in the market.

Sagi Brody:

I mean, one that, that we have been looking at recently, we actually

Sagi Brody:

launched a product called Observer to kind of try to mitigate it, and it's

Sagi Brody:

kind of been my baby, um, for the last few months, is we realize that the

Sagi Brody:

backup and the backup and replication software running at the customer's

Sagi Brody:

production environments have now become this sort of new attack surface.

Sagi Brody:

Attackers are going after.

Sagi Brody:

And it makes total sense if you're, if your golden life is to ransomware

Sagi Brody:

companies and get as much money as you can outta them, then of course the

Sagi Brody:

first thing you do when you get . In is you're gonna go look for all those

Sagi Brody:

backups and those replicas and the DR site and try to destroy everything.

Sagi Brody:

It increases your likelihood of getting paid.

Sagi Brody:

And what we realized was that a lot of, a lot of people, you know,

Sagi Brody:

mistakenly are using the same authentication for those tools locally.

Sagi Brody:

And if an attacker gets into.

Sagi Brody:

, Um, they can destroy everything at the, you know, at, at the DR site in seconds.

Sagi Brody:

You know, there's no such thing as immutability when it comes

Sagi Brody:

to disaster recovery for almost all, all the tools I've seen.

Sagi Brody:

Um, and even with backups, there's immutability.

Sagi Brody:

But you know, they can also delete stuff beyond that and they can

Sagi Brody:

also disable your jobs and weight out the immutability timers.

Sagi Brody:

So, and so what we did was we realized we're already connected into our customers

Sagi Brody:

on-prem software, like just to pull whatever data we need to manage it.

Sagi Brody:

And so what we started to do was we ran the, we are running the data through,

Sagi Brody:

um, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and we're looking for,

Sagi Brody:

quote unquote suspicious activity that an attacker might perform.

Sagi Brody:

Um, things like, uh, encryption being disabled, um, on backups

Sagi Brody:

or retention being modified, or, uh, jobs being modified, or

Sagi Brody:

all the backups being deleted.

Sagi Brody:

All these, you know, different things.

Sagi Brody:

And we baseline what's normal for that site and what's not normal.

Sagi Brody:

And then we set out threat alerts and we also, you know, integrate it

Sagi Brody:

with some security tools cuz they don't have access to this landscape.

Sagi Brody:

And then we also did this other cool thing where if and when this happens,

Sagi Brody:

we can automatically air gap the offsite disaster recovery and backups environment.

Sagi Brody:

So I'm really excited about that because within my organization everyone's like,

Sagi Brody:

Oh, we should do more for security, we should do more for security.

Sagi Brody:

And it.

Sagi Brody:

How do we, like, we're not a security company, but this is an

Sagi Brody:

area that we know a lot about.

Sagi Brody:

And if most people are coming to us to buy those services because they're concerned

Sagi Brody:

about security, hey, maybe we can, you know, address it in a more direct way.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's another line of defense, if you will, right.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That says,

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

Sagi Brody:

exactly.

W. Curtis Preston:

I want, I wanna ask you Sagi, um, you

W. Curtis Preston:

know, you're, you're a Veeam msp.

W. Curtis Preston:

We, we've talked to Veeam a couple times on the podcast and, you know,

W. Curtis Preston:

I've often wondered, what does a service provider look like for Veeam?

W. Curtis Preston:

And you're actually the first one that, that, that we've actually talked to.

W. Curtis Preston:

I'm, I'm curious to know.

W. Curtis Preston:

Obviously, you know, the value of security in a data protection environment.

W. Curtis Preston:

What is your, how, you know, you don't have to give away secret

W. Curtis Preston:

sauce, but, but how do you think is the proper way to configure Veeam?

W. Curtis Preston:

That's secure and, and also, If you're gonna do DR.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right, um, you know, if you're gonna do DR as a service for somebody,

W. Curtis Preston:

how would you be configuring Veeam.

Sagi Brody:

Um, well, I mean that's, that's, you know,

Sagi Brody:

part of our bread and butter.

Sagi Brody:

Absolutely.

Sagi Brody:

Um, you know, Veeam is, is a software and we're, we're

Sagi Brody:

wrapping our services around it.

Sagi Brody:

Uh, you know, managing.

Sagi Brody:

Monitoring, securing and scaling.

Sagi Brody:

Veeam is not the only data mover that we support.

Sagi Brody:

Um, we support, um, Zerto and, and Itera and a few others.

Sagi Brody:

Again, it's all, you know, what's, what's the use case and what's the best tool

Sagi Brody:

in our, in our tool, tool bag for it.

Sagi Brody:

Um, but you know, there, there's definitely some best

Sagi Brody:

practices technically around it.

Sagi Brody:

What I mentioned before, you know, around, don't tie it into your production AD.

Sagi Brody:

I mean, that's probably the best thing you could do, I would say.

Sagi Brody:

I mean, they support

Sagi Brody:

amu.

W. Curtis Preston:

man.

Sagi Brody:

Yeah, I mean, they support immutability now.

Sagi Brody:

They support hardened repos.

Sagi Brody:

Um, obviously those are part of best practices.

Sagi Brody:

I would just say like, like I said before, just really acknowledge

Sagi Brody:

what business you want to be in.

Sagi Brody:

If, if, if you are a backups administrator and you want to take

Sagi Brody:

this challenge and own it, then great.

Sagi Brody:

I mean, there's tons of good resources out there.

Sagi Brody:

In fact, I've done webinars about, you know, with, with Veeam around

Sagi Brody:

what, what are the best practices.

Sagi Brody:

. Um, we also are selling this observer tool as a standalone.

Sagi Brody:

You know, you can just, you can just layer it on top of your Veeam infrastructure to,

Sagi Brody:

to alert you of these suspicious actions.

Sagi Brody:

You don't necessarily have to use us for offsite backups or DR.

Sagi Brody:

And so that's a nice middle ground, Right.

Sagi Brody:

Um, especially because we're doing a lot more with aws.

Sagi Brody:

So, you know, we want to be able to provide these managed services

Sagi Brody:

without forcing our customers to use any specific target.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right with, with Veeam.

W. Curtis Preston:

So I, you know, I know they supported immutability to like s3 object lock.

W. Curtis Preston:

If you're gonna do dr, though, you, you want that to be on on block, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

If you're gonna do DR from it.

Sagi Brody:

Yeah, So Veeam supports immutability with object.

Sagi Brody:

They also support immutability with their local backup servers.

Sagi Brody:

One of the great things and one of the horrible things about Veeam is

Sagi Brody:

that there's so many components.

Sagi Brody:

Um, if you're a, if you're a big shop, it's good because you can

Sagi Brody:

scale those components individually.

Sagi Brody:

Um, if you would just want the easy button, you can run

Sagi Brody:

it all on one server too.

Sagi Brody:

Um, but I think, I think understanding what bucket you fall, fall into

Sagi Brody:

and find, maybe finding the right information with the right time

Sagi Brody:

might not be the easiest thing when there's so many different variations.

Sagi Brody:

Um, but yeah, you can run immutability locally.

Sagi Brody:

Yes.

Sagi Brody:

When we, when we provide disaster recovery as a service and for anyone who's doing it

Sagi Brody:

on their own in house, you're replicating to production ready infrastructure.

Sagi Brody:

And so it's, it's typically an all flash or a hybrid array.

Sagi Brody:

Um, you know, the VMDK is essentially sitting there

Sagi Brody:

registered, ready to be booted up.

Sagi Brody:

And our customers, you know, there's no, there's no sort of,

Sagi Brody:

um, transformation of the data.

Sagi Brody:

It's, it's immediately available.

Sagi Brody:

But that's also what makes it susceptible to, to what I was saying before, is

Sagi Brody:

if the tool is constantly replicating, And somebody gets into the tool.

Sagi Brody:

Um, and this is not just Veeam, it's, it's, it's the same with

Sagi Brody:

Commvault and Rubric, and even Zerto.

Sagi Brody:

Someone gets in that tool, they can hit a button and say, Hey, let's,

Sagi Brody:

let me delete all the data at the remote rep replica, like instantly.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah, it's a concern that I have.

W. Curtis Preston:

And I'm sure you're aware of the, the news where we've seen of the

W. Curtis Preston:

ransomware folks directly attacking different, uh, backup vendors.

W. Curtis Preston:

I guess I'm wondering if there's any way to, to get around that.

Sagi Brody:

Well, I think, I think using a service provider like,

Sagi Brody:

like us is good because now you.

Sagi Brody:

You have the separation of data, data, plane and control plane.

Sagi Brody:

Um, you have this firewall, you know, in a way between the customer's infrastructure

Sagi Brody:

that's tied to their authentication and the recovery environment.

Sagi Brody:

You also, like, as you were saying before, the, the beauty of the cloud is, you know,

Sagi Brody:

all the spin up and spin down if we're doing disaster recovery as a service.

Sagi Brody:

We're not talking to customers about how many, how much CPU of memory they need.

Sagi Brody:

We basically give 'em an SLA that their applications will perform just

Sagi Brody:

as good or better than production.

Sagi Brody:

There's no cost for the CPU or memory.

Sagi Brody:

We manage all that on the back end.

Sagi Brody:

And, um, you know, we're, we're managing the replication, we're

Sagi Brody:

monitoring it, we're owning the failover fail back testing, all that stuff.

Sagi Brody:

So it makes it very simple for them.

Sagi Brody:

And as you know, there's, you know, a gazillion other things.

Sagi Brody:

All these IT folks need to manage these days, especially with security

Sagi Brody:

so they can kind of move on.

Sagi Brody:

But I do really think that when people think about security, they're

Sagi Brody:

missing the whole DR component.

Sagi Brody:

Um, people also need an isolated recovery environment to, to, you

Sagi Brody:

know, like if you look at the Colonial Pipeline hack, um, it's, it's, it's

Sagi Brody:

not that they were down so long cuz they didn't have backups, you know,

Sagi Brody:

they had a full copy of all their data.

Sagi Brody:

The question though is where do they bring that back up from?

Sagi Brody:

Um, and you're not gonna, you don't wanna override your production environment.

Sagi Brody:

You need to do forensics and see how they got in and what happened.

Sagi Brody:

Um, and so a, a true disaster recovery environment, one where you can kind

Sagi Brody:

of boot off multiple snapshots, gives you the ability to have an

Sagi Brody:

isolated recovery environment to bring up the app in a way that it's not

Sagi Brody:

gonna, in fact, back to production.

Sagi Brody:

And also to bring up a recent copy to, to perform forensics.

Sagi Brody:

And a lot of people kind of throw backups and DR.

Sagi Brody:

In the same bucket.

Sagi Brody:

It's the same thing.

Sagi Brody:

And to your point, no.

Sagi Brody:

Two separate services.

Sagi Brody:

Two separate use cases, two separate goals.

Sagi Brody:

When we sell backups, it's landing on cheap and deep storage.

Sagi Brody:

When we provide disaster recovery, it's it's expensive

Sagi Brody:

performance storage, ready to go.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right, right.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Uh, I, I remember just going back and thinking Curtis

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

to the talk with Tony Mendoza about Spectralogic and sort of the pain they

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

went through to recover from ransomware and how, just like identifying the

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

systems that they can boot from and trying to find like what is a known

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

good copy they could roll back to Right.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Took 'em days in order to just even figure that.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah, their biggest challenge was just

W. Curtis Preston:

figuring out what was infected.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right.

W. Curtis Preston:

What, what servers were infected.

W. Curtis Preston:

So they did this, like what one?

W. Curtis Preston:

I think that's what he said, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

Where they shut everything down and then they brought everything up like one

W. Curtis Preston:

server at a time to see if it was infected before they, Before they moved on.

Sagi Brody:

Yeah, and that's a really good point.

Sagi Brody:

That's half the battle, right?

Sagi Brody:

So, and that's part of another reason.

Sagi Brody:

Kind of when we built Observer, we kind of built it to, to give you

Sagi Brody:

that, some of that information and all that, but that's, it's a challenge.

Sagi Brody:

These are the things that people never think about until

Sagi Brody:

unfortunately something bad.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

happens

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yep.

W. Curtis Preston:

That's why we have people like you and Prasanna and me

W. Curtis Preston:

Sagi, because we just, we just try to get 'em to think about that sort of stuff.

W. Curtis Preston:

That is the whole purpose.

W. Curtis Preston:

Of this podcast.

W. Curtis Preston:

Well, I think it's been a great, great discussion.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, thanks for, thanks for coming on

Sagi Brody:

Thanks for having me.

W. Curtis Preston:

and, uh, Prasanna, you know, as always, and I'll continue

W. Curtis Preston:

to keep you updated on my floor progress.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Good.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I wanna see finished pictures soon.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Tomorrow.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Tomorrow.

W. Curtis Preston:

I'll see what I can do.

W. Curtis Preston:

I'll see what I can do.

W. Curtis Preston:

All right, and, uh, thanks again to the listeners.

W. Curtis Preston:

Remember to subscribe so that you can restore it all.