How to foster a culture of recovery in your organization
Our guest this week (Jim Love from the Hashtag Trending podcast and IT World Canada) touched on something we thought was profound. He felt that some organizations had what he called a "culture of recovery," meaning that they took recovery into account in all aspects of the org. He explained how he fostered this in companies where he worked, and how you can do the same. We also covered generative AI, and he shared several other tips from his many years in the business. Learn the old ways!
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a few minutes into recording this week's episode, our guests use the
Speaker:phrase, a culture of recovery, and then he talked about how to foster
Speaker:that culture in your organization.
Speaker:I really latched onto this idea.
Speaker:There's a lot.
Speaker:In this episode, we talk about generative AI.
Speaker:We also talk about a bunch of great stories from a guy that's been in the
Speaker:it industry even longer than I have.
Speaker:It's a great episode.
W. Curtis Preston:Hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restored all podcast,
W. Curtis Preston:army host w Curtis Preston, a k a, Mr.
W. Curtis Preston:Backup, and with me, I have.
W. Curtis Preston:I can't even say it.
W. Curtis Preston:My senior Tesla consultant.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm so excited.
W. Curtis Preston:Prasanna.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I, oh my gosh.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh my God.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh my God, Curtis, I know you're very, very excited.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Congratulations, by the way, by the way, you should probably actually say
Prasanna Malaiyandi:my name since you haven't actually
W. Curtis Preston:Did I say Prasanna?
W. Curtis Preston:Malli?
W. Curtis Preston:Yes.
W. Curtis Preston:Say my name.
W. Curtis Preston:What do you Walter White.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, yeah, so I am now the proud owner.
W. Curtis Preston:Of a, uh, Tesla model, three blue, beautiful blue.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I've now given it as first full charge, and then today we will go on a
W. Curtis Preston:leisurely drive down to La Jolla, uh, for an afternoon lunch with someone.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And now I think the biggest thing, like I was surprised
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you actually bought it because I know we went back and forth for a while, and then
Prasanna Malaiyandi:yesterday I think I just get the text.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm like, here's what it says.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I haven't been now, or I have an order number.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I was like, wait, what?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And it showed up like six hours later, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No negotiation, no
W. Curtis Preston:part, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:It was, um, basically, I mean, you, you know, the thing I was
W. Curtis Preston:waiting for, I was waiting for the approval from the cfo, right?
W. Curtis Preston:The CFO basically said, uh, we can make this happen.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and that there's some special stuff, uh, as to, as to
W. Curtis Preston:how I was able to pull it off.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, and then once she said, uh, you know, you know, it makes sense given
W. Curtis Preston:all of the unique situation, you know, the circumstances of our situation.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, I basically, I was like, before she changes her mind, I'm gonna put in an
W. Curtis Preston:order and, um, and I ordered it and.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, and you, you just literally, you're like, yeah, I'll take that one.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I chose from existing stock, so it said, uh, you can
W. Curtis Preston:have it by, this was yesterday.
W. Curtis Preston:You can have it by Thursday.
W. Curtis Preston:And I go, wow.
W. Curtis Preston:By Thursday.
W. Curtis Preston:That's great.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay, Thursday it is.
W. Curtis Preston:And then about a half hour later I get a call, um, about a half hour later I
W. Curtis Preston:get a call and actually I'm just gonna.
W. Curtis Preston:Pause there for about a half hour later, I get a call and it's Tesla.
W. Curtis Preston:And they're saying, well, um, we can deliver it now if you want.
W. Curtis Preston:And I'm like, O okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You're like, I'm not gonna say no,
W. Curtis Preston:I'm not gonna say no.
W. Curtis Preston:And then they said, your, your delivery is 12, your delivery window is 12 to four.
W. Curtis Preston:, I mean, what, what, what can I say?
W. Curtis Preston:But Sure.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And so they, they gave me a window of 12 to four and um, but
W. Curtis Preston:they gave me that at like 1230.
W. Curtis Preston:So I was like, so I immediately figured it would be towards the end of the
W. Curtis Preston:window and they said that they would text me, uh, 15 minutes out and then,
W. Curtis Preston:Four o'clock came and went with no text.
W. Curtis Preston:I was like, dang it, don't gimme a window if you're not gonna, you know what I mean?
W. Curtis Preston:Don't get me all excited.
W. Curtis Preston:I was fine waiting till Thursday, but now I want my car.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, it, I, I texted, I got a text at like four 15.
W. Curtis Preston:And then the car just literally showed up at my house.
W. Curtis Preston:I never saw a person, it just showed up outside my, my house, because the way
W. Curtis Preston:the Tesla works, for those of you that don't know, your phone is your key.
W. Curtis Preston:And so they're like, please finalize the delivery in your phone, and
W. Curtis Preston:then your phone becomes your key.
W. Curtis Preston:And I'm like, how amazing is that?
W. Curtis Preston:So, because no one had to hand me keys or anything.
W. Curtis Preston:And then I, but yeah, so basically I sat here in this desk and I ordered a car.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and paid.
W. Curtis Preston:I never spoke to a person.
W. Curtis Preston:I paid the down payment in the app and then that car magically appeared
W. Curtis Preston:about 50 feet from where I'm sitting outside my house five hours later.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's so, it's so much better than having to walk into
Prasanna Malaiyandi:a car dealership haggle with someone.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Sit there while they're like three hours later.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:We're going back and forth with paperwork.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think when they say we're going back to the, to work on your paperwork, I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:think they just like throw it on a desk.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:They go have some drinks or coffee or dinner or whatever else it
Prasanna Malaiyandi:is just to make you wait it out
W. Curtis Preston:speaking as a former car salesman, you're kind of right.
W. Curtis Preston:It, it's just a giant thing that just jerk you around and it just, it just stinks.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, which is why my previous cars, I bought them at CarMax,
W. Curtis Preston:which is a similar experience.
W. Curtis Preston:No haggling, you know, this is the price, you know, uh,
W. Curtis Preston:and you, you get what you get.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but yeah, that was, that was very, very nice.
W. Curtis Preston:But, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Well, congratulations
W. Curtis Preston:you go.
W. Curtis Preston:So I have my Tesla.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, thanks.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, um, now I just have to, you know, figure out what it's gonna
W. Curtis Preston:be like to, to drive this thing.
W. Curtis Preston:I'll throw out our usual disclaimer, this podcast is an independent podcast
W. Curtis Preston:and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of our employers or people
W. Curtis Preston:that we've contracted with either, you know, any of those things.
W. Curtis Preston:Be sure to, um, to, uh, check us out and, uh, rate us on your favorite pod catcher.
W. Curtis Preston:It helps people find us.
W. Curtis Preston:That's very helpful to us.
W. Curtis Preston:And also, if you want to join the conversation, I am w Curtis Preston on
W. Curtis Preston:gmail, and I am WC Preston on Twitter and linkedin.com/in/m backup, uh, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:contact me via any one of those things and we'll get you as a guest on the podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, uh, we've had a few interesting problems with our recording platform
W. Curtis Preston:today, so I hope everything's all right.
W. Curtis Preston:But I want to bring on our guest.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, he has a, a, a very diverse background that includes IT consulting
W. Curtis Preston:for a while with Ernst and Young and Fujitsu Consulting, uh, to his most
W. Curtis Preston:recent role as the CIO and Chief Content Officer for IT World Canada,
W. Curtis Preston:which is Canada's leading it publisher.
W. Curtis Preston:Welcome to the podcast, Jim, love.
Jim Love:Hey, welcome Curtis.
Jim Love:Great, great to meet you, Prasanna It's great.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Hey, Jim.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Nice to have you on the podcast, and I'm sorry, all those technical
Prasanna Malaiyandi:difficulties were my fault, so,
Jim Love:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:we blame, we
Jim Love:it's technology's our business.
Jim Love:It's not our skill, you know?
Jim Love:Yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, it is what it is.
W. Curtis Preston:So why don't you tell us a little bit about it World Canada, uh, for
W. Curtis Preston:those of us who live, uh, south of the border, um, you know that we
W. Curtis Preston:that don't know very much about it.
Jim Love:It World Canada is, has been around for 40 years.
Jim Love:It was, it was a, it was a publishing company that, that my partner Fawn
Jim Love:and I bought, uh, about 10, well, five to 70 years ago, but it had
Jim Love:been around for about 40 years.
Jim Love:Been through one transformation going from, we used to publish magazines
Jim Love:and we would, and, and you know, CIO Magazine and all that sort of stuff.
Jim Love:And we would, you know, people would get them.
Jim Love:And then this thing, the internet.
Jim Love:It that it's gonna catch on any day now, but, you know, but you
Jim Love:know, and, and it, uh, it just decimated the publishing industry.
Jim Love:Of course, magazines like ours.
Jim Love:So we became a digital publisher and that was, that was our big,
Jim Love:our, our big move in there.
Jim Love:So we've been through at least one in our, we're gonna middle of our second digital
Jim Love:transformation cuz uh, and the one thing that, that ai, after we just got lived
Jim Love:through, that AI is gonna come through and wipe out pub publishing publishing.
Jim Love:But we, we are, uh, we are still here.
Jim Love:So that's, that's the one thing we, we have survived and we've survived largely
Jim Love:by, um, I think by trying to get ahead of, of transformations when they happen.
Jim Love:So it's been a, it's been an interesting journey at that point.
Jim Love:And um, I know I don't look at people going like, how could a guy have this
Jim Love:much experience to look this young, but.
Jim Love:But I'm, I'm actually way past retirement.
Jim Love:Um, and, and I, this was my, my second career was, was being part of a publisher.
Jim Love:So that was, that was it.
Jim Love:So, and as you pointed out, I have two titles.
Jim Love:One is I'm head of content and, and I'm also the, the ccio.
Jim Love:Uh, I don't know about you when you guys started.
Jim Love:I was a musician.
Jim Love:I knew nothing about computers.
Jim Love:I just needed a job.
Jim Love:Uh, and, and, and somewhere where I could work and still play in clubs
Jim Love:and working overnight in, you know, in, in a computer room was perfect.
Jim Love:And, you know, and I tore paper off the printers and all that sort of stuff and
Jim Love:I, I sort of like, I dunno if you, if anybody still remembers the, the HMS PIF
Jim Love:four, you know, stick close to your desk and never go to see and you'll be the
Jim Love:captain of the Queen's Navy is the thing.
Jim Love:That's what happened to me.
Jim Love:I was the world's worst programmer, so they made me a project manager,
Jim Love:sucked at project management, so they made me a director.
Jim Love:Really didn't degrade at that.
Jim Love:So I became a cio.
Jim Love:Now the.
Jim Love:Maybe not quite like that, but, but I managed to, I've managed to, to stumble
Jim Love:through this and, uh, and I, and I, I got a degree featuring some computer
Jim Love:science courses along the way just, and have kept educated, and this is
Jim Love:the point where I taught at one of Canada's leading tech universities, but
Jim Love:it was, it was a question of, of learn.
Jim Love:I did it all, learned it on the job.
Jim Love:And, uh, and so I stumbled into this publishing role
Jim Love:and that's where I am today.
Jim Love:I have my own podcast and that's where we met.
Jim Love:Uh, you gotta call Mr.
Jim Love:Backup for a podcast interview.
Jim Love:We in there.
Jim Love:So I have my own podcast, hashtag trending that I do the daily news, but we also,
Jim Love:we're, we're in the states, so we have IT World Publishing here, Canadian
Jim Love:cio, a couple of publications, but Tech Newsday goes into the us that's a solid
Jim Love:US and my podcast hashtag trending and cybersecurity today, uh, which is one
Jim Love:of the number one podcasts in the us believe it or not, on cybersecurity.
Jim Love:So, yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:believe it.
W. Curtis Preston:I believe it.
Jim Love:yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I, I had a question for you, Jim, since you brought it up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Um, earlier you talked about sort of AI is going to destroy publishing, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Could, and could you talk a little bit about that?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I know AI is very hot right now and everyone, and I see it every once in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:a while in like Twitter and Reddit and all the rest are like, Hey, yeah,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:all these sort of like, providing content is just gonna be like AI
Prasanna Malaiyandi:just gonna generate that stuff and publishers are gonna go by the wayside.
Jim Love:It's, yeah, it's, it's, it's more complex than that.
Jim Love:I, I, but it, but it's also gonna happen faster.
Jim Love:I told everybody the internet took seven years to, to really, from, from
Jim Love:what it really caught on, from, from websites were really there before it
Jim Love:really had an impact on publishing.
Jim Love:And, and it hit us, but it also happened overnight.
Jim Love:Like we, we were coasting along, we were making money off websites.
Jim Love:We had our publications.
Jim Love:All of a sudden people stopped buying ads
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Hmm.
Jim Love:and it, it almost happened over like two months in there that we, we,
Jim Love:we just noticed that that's seven years.
Jim Love:This is gonna happen in seven months.
Jim Love:When you think about generative ai, what is generative ai, uh,
Jim Love:doing better than anything else?
Jim Love:Creating and curating content and you know, so, so that, that piece.
Jim Love:So creating content, we will have an explosion of content.
Jim Love:And this is crazy if anybody's old enough listening to this.
Jim Love:Remember we, we, we had the 500 channel universe that was gonna be the internet.
Jim Love:And where would we ever get all the content?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Jim Love:had plenty.
Jim Love:Now we have an absolute surplus of content.
Jim Love:I have been through and, and tracked this stuff.
Jim Love:I marketing material in particular.
Jim Love:Um, I'm sorry, I'm, like I said, my degree is in English.
Jim Love:I'm quite a good writer.
Jim Love:It writes better marketing material than I do if you know how to do it.
Jim Love:There's just, there's no no sands or butts about that as far as just
Jim Love:straight press release journalism.
Jim Love:And there's a lot of that.
Jim Love:As a matter of fact, there's there, there's very few investigative
Jim Love:reporters, especially going down.
Jim Love:But if you have, take a look in the us, the Washington Post, the
Jim Love:New York Times, probably, I think it's that San Francisco Chronicle.
Jim Love:There's, there's about two or three or four major places.
Jim Love:You've got Buzzfeed, which now I think is dying or dead.
Jim Love:Uh, but you know, and and dozen other publishers out there, everybody
Jim Love:else is curating their content.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Jim Love:else is republishing their stories.
Jim Love:When you are a republish you, like you, and you know, if you're a
Jim Love:writer, that, that gets wiped out.
Jim Love:Um, and so what do we do differently?
Jim Love:And that's, we're now reinventing ourselves yet again,
Jim Love:uh, to, to cope with that.
Jim Love:And, you know, and it's like, I'm not one of these guys who says, oh,
Jim Love:this is gonna, you know, You doom and gloom and all that sort of stuff.
Jim Love:But if we hadn't done the work we've done both all along the way, we would be
Jim Love:out of business end of end of sentence.
Jim Love:And I'm not saying that I'm a, that I'm the great visionary or anything
Jim Love:like that, but we're always working thinking, how do you disrupt yourself?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Mm-hmm.
Jim Love:And, you know, and in, in there that, that's, I think has been
Jim Love:the, the secret for us at least, knock on wood, you know, surviving this far.
Jim Love:But anybody who thinks that, that, that, here's the classic things I hear.
Jim Love:AI makes mistakes.
Jim Love:Oh, and I don't like, you know, uh, AI's never going to replace us because
Jim Love:it's, it's never going to, it is never gonna write better than we can.
Jim Love:Nonsense.
Jim Love:Absolute nonsense.
Jim Love:It's read every book that exists.
Jim Love:It's Read Hemingway, it's Read f Scott Fitzgerald, it's
Jim Love:read the Greek philosophers.
Jim Love:The so, so that's what it's got to to work on.
Jim Love:And what have you got to work on the 30 books?
Jim Love:You, you, you remember, or you know, the influences of even an entire lifetime.
Jim Love:So, so there's, there's no doubt about the fact that it's going to have an impact
Jim Love:on the publishing industry, by the way.
Jim Love:It's gonna have an impact on other industries as well.
Jim Love:But, but, but you know, that's generative ai.
Jim Love:It's, which is really good at text and all that, you know, and, and
Jim Love:dealing with, with those things.
Jim Love:Um, and, and what they call it generative cuz it can create
Jim Love:now the next thing happens.
Jim Love:Can it create something new and better?
Jim Love:And the answer is yes.
Jim Love:If you take, if you take a look at the stuff that's happening with
Jim Love:Tree of Thought, um, and, and there, there, everybody say, well, it
Jim Love:can't come up with anything new.
Jim Love:Of course it can, but people don't come up with new things.
Jim Love:There's seven, there's seven stories in life.
Jim Love:Man meets girl, you know, or whatever person meets person, whatever, you know,
Jim Love:man versus society, we learn this stuff.
Jim Love:There's seven stories and we've been working them to, to, to death, you
Jim Love:know, from, you know, and you know, the, the Beatles had some something in the
Jim Love:way she moves George Harrison, right?
Jim Love:Oh, James Taylor had a song, something in the Way, oh geez, we,
Jim Love:we influence each other, you know?
Jim Love:And I won't even get into, he's so fine.
Jim Love:My sweet Lord, you know, we're, we're playing the same tunes.
Jim Love:Over and over again in there.
Jim Love:Now this stuff can also create visuals and music and all that.
Jim Love:So we are, we're in a different world, and you can do one of two things.
Jim Love:You can, you can, you can, you can do what was Mark Twain said?
Jim Love:Denial's not a river in Egypt.
Jim Love:You know, you can be in denial.
Jim Love:And I've heard it from my writers, oh, it'll never write better
Jim Love:than me, or I'll go nonsense.
Jim Love:You know?
Jim Love:Or you can be in fear and say, well, the, you know, like, we,
Jim Love:we don't, we, what can we do?
Jim Love:Well, what can you do?
Jim Love:Figure out what makes you unique.
Jim Love:You know, one of the things I, I'm doing a lot of podcasting myself, why this
Jim Love:can't be done by ai, the, the yet, you know, like you can, you can have avatars
Jim Love:and they can say things, but you can't, you can't tell jokes and you can't get
Jim Love:to know people and you can't, there's just things that you can't do right now,
W. Curtis Preston:so I can, I can, for example, we're using the editor
W. Curtis Preston:that I use, I can actually put in text and it will read it back as me, for
Jim Love:Oh yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Jim Love:Somebody, somebody did that to me.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I can, I actually use it to edit my podcast and I use it when I, when
W. Curtis Preston:I say a word wrong, I can replace that word when I, when I'm editing and it
W. Curtis Preston:will fill it in, in context and Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Which is great.
W. Curtis Preston:But if you give it a paragraph to read, I sound dead.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and,
Jim Love:not, not yet.
Jim Love:There.
Jim Love:There are good ones out there.
Jim Love:There's good, there's good ones out there.
Jim Love:I think it's code, is it 11?
Jim Love:11 steps or 11?
Jim Love:Uh, anyway, but, but somebody did a.
Jim Love:Takeoff on my podcast and it started, it did the same intro.
Jim Love:It read the script.
Jim Love:I could not tell the difference until it started to say things like, and then Jim
Jim Love:talks poo poo the whole, and it, then he, it just, it was, it was hysterical.
Jim Love:So this guy did a whole takeoff of my podcast and, and then just started
Jim Love:making me potty mouth and crazy.
Jim Love:Um, I tracked him down and set it back.
Jim Love:Said, I said, I hope, I hope that you had fun too.
Jim Love:That Cause it was the funniest thing I'd heard.
W. Curtis Preston:The concern that I, or the belief, and you've talked
W. Curtis Preston:about it already, um, you know, I, I'm not sure if I a hundred percent
W. Curtis Preston:agree with your comment of like, you know, there's nothing new.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, although, you know that that's been said before, it's
W. Curtis Preston:been said before that there's
Jim Love:Yep.
Jim Love:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:But, um, but be, because when, when we do new things
W. Curtis Preston:in technology, we have to explain why we're doing this thing right?
W. Curtis Preston:And why this new way of doing something is better than the
W. Curtis Preston:old way of doing something.
W. Curtis Preston:And that, that often requires a unique tack, which I don't think
W. Curtis Preston:yet, um, AI is ready to do, um, once that tack has been decided.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:So, uh, for example, uh, should we back up sas?
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, I'm sure that I can go to Chachi, bt or you know, your favorite l l m and
W. Curtis Preston:I can write both articles of, uh, uh, arguing both sides, because both sides,
W. Curtis Preston:there's plenty, like you said, there's plenty of content out there on both sides.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but, uh, in fact, I recently, uh, there's a, there's a guy that I know
W. Curtis Preston:that, uh, he's a network guy and, uh, Tom Hollingsworth is his name.
W. Curtis Preston:And one of the things that to really poke the bear with him is I tell
W. Curtis Preston:him that when we fully go to IPV six, that will be using Nat routers.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, we're gonna put gnat on top of IPV six and it just tweaks 'em.
W. Curtis Preston:And so I went to chat, gp, pt, and I had it write an article.
W. Curtis Preston:Y in his, in his style, uh, arguing for that, um, just to, just to mess with him.
W. Curtis Preston:But yeah, it's, um, a as a person who creates content,
W. Curtis Preston:I, I am concerned about this.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I think you're right.
W. Curtis Preston:I think you need to focus on what makes you you, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I think for like, in, like in my case, it's my passion.
W. Curtis Preston:It's my sense of humor.
W. Curtis Preston:It's my ability to, to converse.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and it, and it goes back to, you know, it's the passion about backup
W. Curtis Preston:and recovery and related topics.
W. Curtis Preston:No AI model is going to be able to mimic that.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, certainly not.
W. Curtis Preston:It's certainly not yet.
W. Curtis Preston:Well yet.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, we'll see, we'll see.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but yeah, so I, I, I am very concerned, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Mm-hmm.
Jim Love:Well, I think we should be, but, but, you know, but we're looking at this,
Jim Love:you know, the, the, the world evolves.
Jim Love:I mean, there were a group of people looking weavers looking at the first
Jim Love:weaving machines in there, and, and they saw them and they, and they,
Jim Love:they thought saw them as a threat, so they tried to destroy them.
Jim Love:That, how'd that work out?
Jim Love:Not really.
Jim Love:Well, right.
Jim Love:Today we've got machines that will knit a pair of socks in
Jim Love:30 seconds off in, in there.
Jim Love:You know, that, that, that occupation's gone.
Jim Love:But that didn't mean that the craft person, who, who was there, the
Jim Love:designer, the new jobs emerged.
Jim Love:And I think that's something we've been doing in it for, for ages
Jim Love:is, you know, who's still, there's lots of jobs that disappeared in it
Jim Love:and some of that I'm grateful for.
Jim Love:know, the night scheduler.
Jim Love:The night scheduler, remember you used to do in mainframes, you would have
Jim Love:a tracker, like seven people calling jobs, pulling tapes off the floor,
Jim Love:mounting the tape, finding out the job failed, and, and then sending a note
Jim Love:to disappoint the users in the morning.
Jim Love:There's lots of stuff that happened that we are like, so there's some guy who
Jim Love:doesn't have to go pull tapes anymore, and there that job, that career in tape
Jim Love:pulling is, is, is no longer with us.
Jim Love:But you know, that person went on to become the cio.
Jim Love:Oh, you know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But, but, but here's a question I have for you,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Jim, is I totally get the benefits of automating some of these processes,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:simplifying people's lives, letting them go and focus on other things.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Do you feel though that when that happens, the newcomers who
Prasanna Malaiyandi:don't get that experience lack something versus everyone else?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Or is it something that they shouldn't even have to worry about today?
Jim Love:Oh God.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:No, I, I, I, I'm so thankful for when I got into computing because I
Jim Love:understand how everything works in principle in there, you know, the,
Jim Love:the, you know, and, and that, that those foundations have been there.
Jim Love:It, it's like, you know, and I'm, and it may sound like an old guy.
Jim Love:I hired an MBA who, who was gonna work on a project for me in there,
Jim Love:and, and we were doing pricing on a big, it was a big financial system.
Jim Love:We were doing pricing of bonds and all that sort of stuff.
Jim Love:And he pulls in, and this is at the time he's, you know, he's got his Excel
Jim Love:spreadsheet out and he puts it out and I say, did you check the reasonableness of,
Jim Love:of this bond income allocation program?
Jim Love:Oh yeah, I did.
Jim Love:And, and I said, okay, so, Uh, I'm gonna take a look at this bond here.
Jim Love:He said, look at those two prices.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:I said that yield is gonna be like 39% Yeah.
Jim Love:On a federal treasury bond.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:I said, find out where that bond comes.
Jim Love:I want the name of that.
Jim Love:I'm gonna go buy a whole pile of them right now that can't happen.
Jim Love:But he typed the same
W. Curtis Preston:allocation into that.
Jim Love:Yep, same formula.
Jim Love:Copy and paste it into Excel.
Jim Love:But he had no concept of math and it just boggled my mind.
Jim Love:And it's the same way you know, that there are people who know computers.
Jim Love:I'll tell you one quick story, but we were, we were transferring
Jim Love:mainframes at one point.
Jim Love:We were going from one shop to another.
Jim Love:And in those days you had, you had literally took a window and you took
Jim Love:a whole pile of tapes and you drove them over to the new data center.
Jim Love:If you're gonna move a data center and you ran the tapes and you hopefully
Jim Love:to God that you got up in the weekend.
Jim Love:In there.
Jim Love:So you would rehearse this two or three times in there?
Jim Love:Well, we would go back and forth in, into this, this thing and we, we, we'd bring
Jim Love:the tapes over and we'd load them up and all that sort of stuff, and we'd run them
Jim Love:and, uh, like we, we, we just couldn't hit this window and all of the best
Jim Love:programmers on our system worked on it.
Jim Love:We brought in a guy who knew nothing about our system.
Jim Love:Everybody freaked out when we brought him in and, and he
Jim Love:said, he said, you know what?
Jim Love:Like, uh, I don't know.
Jim Love:Understand what business you're in.
Jim Love:I don't understand the banking business.
Jim Love:I don't really care.
Jim Love:He said, but he's, what I'm gonna do.
Jim Love:I'm gonna take these things.
Jim Love:This is data, so I'm gonna block, I'm gonna run these processes in parallel.
Jim Love:I'm going to do these things.
Jim Love:He shrunk our, our, our load times so that we could get in the car
Jim Love:and take these tape from like 12 and a half hours to four hours.
Jim Love:But he knew nothing about the business, but he knew the foundations.
Jim Love:You know, and sometimes a lot of knowledge that we think we have about,
Jim Love:you know, where we get really good at something and we don't have the
Jim Love:foundational knowledge, we miss it.
Jim Love:And that's, I'm, I'm, I'm so glad I had that time to, to learn this, you know?
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:When I think about, you know, the topics of backup and recovery and disaster
W. Curtis Preston:recovery, there are a lot of things that I know for the same reason, Jim, right?
W. Curtis Preston:That I grew up in the old days of tape, right?
W. Curtis Preston:I grew up back when tape was the only option and when, when it was
W. Curtis Preston:the best option, and then it became not so much the best option, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And, and I remember experiencing that why.
W. Curtis Preston:And so I understand a lot of the things about the way the technology
W. Curtis Preston:works that the average person might not understand because they
W. Curtis Preston:didn't experience that, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And a perfect example that I have of that is the way overuse.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, of the term air gap, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, ev everybody in the, everybody in the IT industry wants to advertise
W. Curtis Preston:their solutions as being air gaped and immutable when they're often neither.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, the, you know, it's like, do, do you even know what the term air gap
W. Curtis Preston:means and where it comes from, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It is a gap of error, right?
W. Curtis Preston:That is why it's called air gap.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, and let me explain to you
Jim Love:It's related to the Latin.
Jim Love:There's a Latin, it comes from Airhead, which is, airhead is a person who
Jim Love:actually believes there's an air gap, so.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and the, you know, I mean, at best, you know, you could say
W. Curtis Preston:it's like, look, here's the standard.
W. Curtis Preston:The standard is a thing in a box, in a place that you can't get to.
W. Curtis Preston:That's an air gap.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and like, like in literally in a vault that has a lock with a, with a, with a
W. Curtis Preston:scary person standing in front of it.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and you know, that's an air gap and at best you can approximate that.
W. Curtis Preston:Just tell me how close you get to that.
W. Curtis Preston:But, um, you know, the, you know, lots of companies, uh, use the term air
W. Curtis Preston:gap and they don't even throw the word virtual or, or electro electronic air
W. Curtis Preston:gap or something in front of that, right.
W. Curtis Preston:It does matter to learn those fundamentals.
Jim Love:So while we're on the subject Prasanna where is about
Jim Love:experience and all this stuff, I brought you a list and I brought a
Jim Love:list of all the things I'd screwed up.
Jim Love:That's the other thing that that's great about getting into.
Jim Love:I've managed, I've learned everything I have, I know the hard way.
Jim Love:Um, in, in, in there.
Jim Love:And I will say
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's the best way to learn though.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah,
Jim Love:Well, yeah, sort of.
Jim Love:I mean, yeah, it's, there, there are, it's, there are preferable ways to learn.
Jim Love:I just haven't managed any of them in there and that, that air gap brings
Jim Love:me back to that, you know, so, so I'll go, do you wanna go through my list?
Jim Love:I'll
Prasanna Malaiyandi:yeah, yeah, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No love to hear these
Jim Love:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:want to hear this list.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Jim Love:first one is validate.
Jim Love:Validate after the job runs, whatever you do, validate it in there,
Jim Love:have somebody else validate it.
Jim Love:And I learned, this is my fir my first big and we talk about the, the doing
Jim Love:this data center conversion and we arrive with the tapes and we got all
Jim Love:our window and all that sort of stuff.
Jim Love:Oops.
Jim Love:Uh, there's nothing on them.
Jim Love:melt the tape and it goes rolling through and somebody said, said, you know
Jim Love:what, after this, you know, we should really have validated those backups.
Jim Love:Excuse me.
Jim Love:This is, I'm holding what would restore our mainframe back there
Jim Love:if it were to crash in there.
Jim Love:And you're telling me nobody checks these things?
Jim Love:Well, it rarely goes wrong.
Jim Love:It's automated man.
Jim Love:Like, what could go wrong?
Jim Love:It writes, you know, in there.
Jim Love:So that's my first one is, is trust.
Jim Love:Trust.
Jim Love:No computer valid.
Jim Love:It validated, you know, it's in, in, in, in God we trust.
Jim Love:No, what I can see.
Jim Love:I trust, you know, that was my
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I think, yeah, and I know Curtis, we always talk about,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sort of verify your backups, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Do restore testing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Make sure that what you actually have is working and it does what
Prasanna Malaiyandi:it's supposed to do, and you haven't gotten forgotten pieces, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like you're doing a database backup for an application and you forgot this other
Prasanna Malaiyandi:database that lives over on the side and you can't recover your application.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:And, and so you, you trust nothing about what should work.
Jim Love:You know, Murphy was an optimist, you know, like that's the, you
Jim Love:know, that there's, there's always something can go wrong.
Jim Love:That's my first one.
Jim Love:The second one is, is you talked about your vault and I, I, I
Jim Love:call it Schrodinger's vault.
Jim Love:You know, I, either the backups in there are good or they're not, or maybe they're
Jim Love:both, you know, but store it safely.
Jim Love:I can't, I, you know, I've, I've had people who say, oh yeah, we
Jim Love:got a, we got, we got a backup in there, and where's it stored?
Jim Love:Oh, now, in the old days it was you, there were, you know, discs that we moved and
Jim Love:stuff like that, but I, I'm still finding people who are storing backups in the
Jim Love:most, you know, oh, it's, it's stored, you know, I've got my, all my air gapped
Jim Love:backup, but it's sitting over there.
Jim Love:I've literally, in this career, I've pulled tapes out of
Jim Love:the backs of people's cars.
Jim Love:You know why?
Jim Love:Well, we wanna take it off site.
Jim Love:It's in the trunk of your car.
Jim Love:No, no.
Jim Love:You know, and so that's, you know, you might wanna choose where you, no.
W. Curtis Preston:We talked about the, um, that, that one, the, um, basically
W. Curtis Preston:the, the properly storing the, the other copy, uh, you know, there was a
W. Curtis Preston:major fire in, um, in Europe, right?
W. Curtis Preston:The, the, is it O H
Prasanna Malaiyandi:O B H
W. Curtis Preston:uh, o vh, I always get the, the acronym.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:O VH in, um, the cloud provider in Europe.
W. Curtis Preston:And they had their other copies stored literally over in the corner.
W. Curtis Preston:And that's why, um, hundreds of, uh, uh, their customers lost their data.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Anyway.
Jim Love:That literally happened in our, our, one of our beach airports.
Jim Love:Their backup system and their backups were in the basement.
Jim Love:They had a flood.
Jim Love:Water tends to flood basements.
Jim Love:Just a thought.
Jim Love:You
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I have to tell, I have to tell you, Jim, the company that I worked for when
W. Curtis Preston:I very first started my career, we, uh, we hired an offsite vaulting company.
W. Curtis Preston:It wasn't Iron Mountain, it was the other company that was available to us.
W. Curtis Preston:And they, their big advertisement was that they had a World War II like bomb
W. Curtis Preston:shelter, uh, as their vault, right.
Jim Love:yep,
W. Curtis Preston:But it's in the basement and we knew that.
W. Curtis Preston:And so whenever, um, there was threat of flood, like because we were in
W. Curtis Preston:Delaware, whenever there was threat, threat of a hurricane or a flood coming
W. Curtis Preston:up, the Delaware River, uh, we, we would call them and we would pay them
W. Curtis Preston:extra money to move all the tapes.
Jim Love:yep.
Jim Love:So you'd be surprised they were there.
Jim Love:So my third thing,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Jim Love:you backing up everything?
Jim Love:I had, I, I, this is, I, I was, I, I was the, the, the director
Jim Love:of the, of, of, uh, a fairly large financial company here in Canada.
Jim Love:When the VP of IT came into my office.
Jim Love:Now I was on the pecking order, although I was in charge of, of the business
Jim Love:and the technology for, for this area.
Jim Love:So I was, I was, I had some sort of authority, but he
Jim Love:was the vice president of it.
Jim Love:In those days, would would've been a cio, walked to my office, got
Jim Love:somebody sheepishly at my door.
Jim Love:They don't, these guys don't come to see me, to tell me that
Jim Love:they had lost their source code.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh.
Jim Love:the data was backed up.
Jim Love:All the, the stuff was there, but they lost the backup of the source code.
Jim Love:Nobody thought you had a backup source code.
Jim Love:We could always recompile it.
Jim Love:Hello.
Jim Love:It's, you know, and that's what I mean.
Jim Love:You, you, this is where your experience comes in and knowing that, that there's
Jim Love:lots of things that are required to make something run, not just the data.
Jim Love:Bless, I, data is king, data is wonderful, data is everything, but there's more,
Jim Love:you know, and that was my, my first one was going around saying, do I have
Jim Love:everything it takes to run this system?
Jim Love:You know, if, if, if somebody decides that, that I, my source code is corrupt,
Jim Love:am I gonna be able to recompile it?
Jim Love:Am I gonna be able to, you know, it'll bring it back and, and, you
Jim Love:know, am I gonna be able to get that?
Jim Love:Um, and e even with the, the way we've got to, to, to now store interpreted
Jim Love:language and stuff like that, and the way we, you know, we have all, we have much
Jim Love:better storage and thing, but you go and look at the spaghetti that's in there.
Jim Love:You know how many times things have been forked, whether
Jim Love:or not stuff is still there.
Jim Love:You know, just because you got it in repository and people say, oh no,
Jim Love:we've got a method of doing this.
Jim Love:I know because I've worked with really good programmers and gone
Jim Love:back and found code, and you say, we could never reconstruct this, you
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Thi this is why I'm such a fan of auto discovery, uh, of both systems
W. Curtis Preston:and file systems and databases.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, because, and, and then just say, just get all the, just get all the things.
W. Curtis Preston:People argue against it, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, they argue against getting all the things.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm like, if you know something is, Absolute trash and has no value,
W. Curtis Preston:then exclude that specifically.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but just back up all the things.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I, you know, the number of times Jim, I've seen, uh, the, the
W. Curtis Preston:best one I have was a, was a very, very, very large entertainment company.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and this, but you know, the very household name entertainment company
W. Curtis Preston:and their, it they were using where they were specifically picking which
W. Curtis Preston:folders they wanted to back up.
W. Curtis Preston:And I said, you need to stop that.
W. Curtis Preston:We need to go with all, uh, it was a net backup environment, all local drives.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, the size of their backup increased.
W. Curtis Preston:Their entire backup increased by 50% when we went from selected drives
W. Curtis Preston:to, to, to backing up all the things.
W. Curtis Preston:And I'm like, there's no way you can tell me that, that, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:there wasn't anything valuable that, that was being missed.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Jim Love:Oh yeah.
Jim Love:And if it, and if it is absolute trash, then research it properly and delete it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Jim Love:Like, you know, if, if you feel that confident about it, just,
Jim Love:you know, press the, press the button, you know, and, and, and delete it.
Jim Love:You won't do that, will you?
Jim Love:So, back it up.
Jim Love:You know, storage is cheap.
W. Curtis Preston:like, I like the way you think, Jim.
W. Curtis Preston:I like the way you think.
W. Curtis Preston:All right.
W. Curtis Preston:What's next?
Jim Love:here's my, here's my next one.
Jim Love:Here's my next one.
Jim Love:Snapshots versus full backup.
Jim Love:Hit hit me on one system, right?
Jim Love:Because everybody thinks, well, I'm backing it up.
Jim Love:Did a snapshot.
Jim Love:Great, wonderful thing in there.
Jim Love:This was done by a very big shop that was running a system for us.
Jim Love:When they phoned us and said, our, we had a server meltdown.
Jim Love:We can't restore from the snapshot.
Jim Love:No, you can't, because the database was hot and the snap doesn't pick everything
Jim Love:up when you're writing in there.
Jim Love:So, You know, it's another variant of test it out, but don't when some, just because
Jim Love:somebody says we're backing stuff up.
Jim Love:Don't, don't go ask big questions.
Jim Love:We had, you know, you'd rather a, you'd rather have checked that out
Jim Love:than when I would talk to my director of it who was working with 'em and
Jim Love:saying, and you, and you read this contract and you, you did what?
Jim Love:You know?
Jim Love:Um, yeah.
Jim Love:I mean, it was, it's, it, nobody wants to end their career because
Jim Love:they, they, they thought this was backed up, you know, and, and, no.
Jim Love:So that's,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that's all.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So that's also difficult because vendors make it very confusing, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because they're like, oh yeah, we backed that up, and they'll throw out
Prasanna Malaiyandi:all these terms, which, unless you really know what backup is, right,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you'll think, oh, it's all the same.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:And no matter how much you know, it, I think courtesy is probably the same.
Jim Love:Is, is he, I'm gonna ask questions.
Jim Love:Show me, teach me like I'm a little kid.
Jim Love:Don't gimme this.
Jim Love:Where we get this and we get this agreement where we're all data
Jim Love:pros and we all know that stuff.
Jim Love:We toss the terms around, no, no, no, this, this is important.
Jim Love:Walk me through it, you know, and, and tell me how I'm gonna, I'm
Jim Love:gonna deal with this, you know,
Jim Love:So my other one, fat fingers are stupidity.
Jim Love:You, you, you be the judge in this one.
Jim Love:Somebody goes into our server cage, puts a, a, a disc in
Jim Love:and wipes out our, our, our.
Jim Love:S our disc and our, our, our backup disc.
Jim Love:Now, I e every, every, there's always a capability to do that.
Jim Love:And we, in the early days, like we, I had a friend one time and in the old we
Jim Love:didn't, this is the olden days before we had security on the IT terminals.
Jim Love:And we would go and, and we would take programs.
Jim Love:And if we wanted to know what a program did, we'd type in the name of the program
Jim Love:and it would give us the conversation.
Jim Love:And then an, okay, a friend of mine on, on his last day with a
Jim Love:company, uh, I emphasized last day, typed in wipe and wipe, didn't
Jim Love:have an okay and it wiped the disc.
Jim Love:And I thought that one was 30 years, 40 years, or 40, more
Jim Love:than 40 years ago in there.
Jim Love:And, but this happened to me actually in a small system where somebody
Jim Love:walked in and came out and, and I, I didn't know that could happen.
Jim Love:You know, anybody who gets into your cage, anybody who touches anything in there.
Jim Love:If you don't have an, a truly air gapped backup for any work anybody's
Jim Love:doing anywhere and why this would happen, nobody knows, you know, but,
Jim Love:but like, is it, is it fat Fingers?
Jim Love:Did you hit the wrong key combination?
Jim Love:Is it just pure stupidity?
Jim Love:I don't know.
Jim Love:But like I said, the lesson is anybody working on your system anywhere
Jim Love:that you, where you don't have an backup before that work started?
Jim Love:Don't let 'em do it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The other thing I think going along with that, Jim, is also like, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:also scope down the privileges, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like, did that person actually need to be able to access the backup system, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Or should that have been completely siloed off?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So I think that goes kind of hand in hand as well, which hopefully more
Prasanna Malaiyandi:organizations are doing that, but not sure
W. Curtis Preston:well, here, here's again, go.
W. Curtis Preston:Going back in the day, Jim, you, you, you know, one of the things that we've
W. Curtis Preston:always said is that physical access trumps all security protocols, right?
W. Curtis Preston:If I have physical access to your server, I could do whatever I want.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay?
W. Curtis Preston:And, and at, at best, you can frustrate my efforts, but you are not going to
W. Curtis Preston:be, I mean, if, if, if, especially if all I want to do is do damage, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because, you know, torches are a beautiful thing, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but the, the problem is that the, when we look towards the
W. Curtis Preston:cloud, Like physical access isn't even really, it's not the same.
W. Curtis Preston:It's not about physical access.
W. Curtis Preston:It's anyone that can gain access to your cloud administrative console
W. Curtis Preston:essentially has the same thing.
W. Curtis Preston:And that's why Prasanna you know, it's a great point about lease privilege.
W. Curtis Preston:That's why we need to do lease privilege.
W. Curtis Preston:We need to do separation of, of powers so that you minimize the blast radius
W. Curtis Preston:when a cloud account gets compromised.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and also that we can't do a, an actual air gap back up in the cloud.
W. Curtis Preston:Not at least nobody I know does an actual air gap cloud in the backup.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm sorry, actual air gap backup in the cloud.
W. Curtis Preston:Sorry, it took, took me a minute there.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but they, but they, but you can, you can approximate it,
W. Curtis Preston:but whatever you do, don't have everything stored in the same place.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:The, the cloud, the cloud equivalent to storing all your backups in the same cage.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, is storing aria backups in the same account in the same region?
W. Curtis Preston:Don't, don't, don't do that.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Because, you know, like you said, fat fingers or, or
W. Curtis Preston:stupid people, uh, or malicious
Prasanna Malaiyandi:malicious sec.
Jim Love:Malicious people, it doesn't matter, you know, it's, it's, it's zero.
Jim Love:This concept of zero trust and, and you've actually got it prisa, the zero trust,
Jim Love:the reduced privileges for your own good.
Jim Love:You shouldn't have privileges.
Jim Love:You don't need the, you know, and, and, and you should get them.
Jim Love:Like I said, I don't wanna do the, the old guy, I think all through the whole
Jim Love:broadcast, but in the olden days you had, there was a password that would
Jim Love:get you by everything in a mainframe.
Jim Love:Everything in there.
Jim Love:It was stored in a vault.
Jim Love:Two people had to open it.
Jim Love:They had watched the person open that thing.
Jim Love:They had to take the password out, they had to log it, they did the work.
Jim Love:You printed out the code that you did for that fix.
Jim Love:This was, this was middle of the day type hot fix type of
Jim Love:things or things like that.
Jim Love:You, you then had called audit.
Jim Love:They issued a new password, they sealed it in envelope, they put it back under lock
Jim Love:and key two people con and, and everybody says, well, that takes a long time.
Jim Love:Yeah, but do you really want to be responsible for knowing that password?
Jim Love:Like not a chance, you know?
Jim Love:And so that, that, you know, that that's the thing.
Jim Love:Um, my, my last two are,
W. Curtis Preston:saying the old guy thing all the time, Jim.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't have a problem with bringing out these, the old guy wisdom.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:But the, the, the other one is, is cannot restore.
Jim Love:This is, this is, we've got a backup, but we can't restore.
Jim Love:And I will, uh, I will, uh, I, I won't say the firm and I'm
Jim Love:not even gonna say the number.
Jim Love:They, they got hit with ransomware and they had all these backups.
Jim Love:They couldn't restore them right in there.
Jim Love:So you, you count and just, and again, you go back to all the reasons why
Jim Love:backups might not work in there.
Jim Love:And I, so I, I, after one episode, and, and I, I do this now, and actually the one
Jim Love:of the p the person who, who takes over for me operationally in our company, has
Jim Love:now started to repeat my old guy's story.
Jim Love:And I'm happy about it.
Jim Love:And that my old story is, I will phone you from my car from vacation.
Jim Love:I will go, I will come in, I will just tap on your shoulder.
Jim Love:And here's the deal.
Jim Love:We're a great place to work.
Jim Love:We love you.
Jim Love:We, you're a valuable member of the team, but if you cannot
Jim Love:restore that file, you are fired.
Jim Love:Instantly pack your desk and leave.
Jim Love:It's the only sin.
Jim Love:And because I, I went through this, make sure you test your
Jim Love:backups and all this stuff, and then I, I just said, no, no, no.
Jim Love:You know something, I, I'm not interested anymore.
Jim Love:I'm just gonna point to you and I'm gonna say, you're one of the operations team.
Jim Love:You should be able to go and restore a file.
Jim Love:It's in this system.
Jim Love:I'm, I'm telling you, that system crashed.
Jim Love:I need you to mount a server and restore that system, and then I wanna see it work.
Jim Love:And that's, and I, I urge everybody who, especially if you're a guy who's
Jim Love:more, or, or lady who's more business than, than tech in there that take that
Jim Love:one tip and just say, you gotta be able to show me that you can restore this
Jim Love:system and you don't need a big deal.
Jim Love:You don't need a, you don't need a, you walk in one morning and
Jim Love:you say, we're gonna do this.
Jim Love:And that I, I think, is, is, has permeated our culture.
Jim Love:And, and you know that that's a gift you can give to a company, especially a
W. Curtis Preston:like that.
W. Curtis Preston:I like that a lot, Jim.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, what it does is it shows respect to a part of the organization
W. Curtis Preston:that often gets no respect.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, it, it, and it, and it, it, if you are on a regular basis,
W. Curtis Preston:restoring even something small, right.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I, I think it should.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I like, I like what you're saying and I like that.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, you know, you're doing it much more often, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because a lot of environments that are like, oh, we do a re we do
W. Curtis Preston:a recovery test, you know, every six months or whatever, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Those are important to do a big recovery test, but it's also
W. Curtis Preston:important to do a small recovery test, um, much more frequently.
W. Curtis Preston:And to do it off the, off the cuff like you're talking about.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, just say, Hey, go restore this file and go put it over here.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, because what it does is by doing it, uh, by making, restore everyone's
W. Curtis Preston:responsibility, um, what that does is it, it creates a backup person
W. Curtis Preston:as well as a backup system, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because too many times the backup person is the only one that knows anything about
W. Curtis Preston:the backup system, and they're the only one that knows how to do any kind of
W. Curtis Preston:restore, and that is definitely wrong.
W. Curtis Preston:I like, so I like that.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I like that idea
Jim Love:no.
Jim Love:Every, everybody who's on your ops team at least needs to know how to do it,
Jim Love:you know, or you know, or what their way they would do if you, if they were
Jim Love:the person there, you know, in there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, just, just on that gem, I think one of the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:critical aspects there is to also sort of identify what are those scenarios
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that people aren't regularly testing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:For instance, in a help desk environment, you might constantly
Prasanna Malaiyandi:having people say, Hey, I need to restore this file from the file server.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Versus maybe I'm not really doing like the application level restores ever.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so I think that might be maybe a nuance, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Something to consider as you're thinking about this, is how do you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sort of round robin, if you will, across all your data, rather than
Prasanna Malaiyandi:always saying, Hey, I wanna restore a file from this file server, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Just to, because that might be something they're doing all the time and building
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that muscle memory as well, right?
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:And, and I think it boils down to, in this, this thing is that,
Jim Love:that recovery is a culture.
Jim Love:It's not a technology.
Jim Love:It, it, it's a culture.
Jim Love:The companies that are going to recover are, are going to recover
Jim Love:because that's part of their dna.
Jim Love:You know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I like
W. Curtis Preston:What's your final piece of wisdom You got Jim?
Jim Love:Well, yeah.
Jim Love:Uh, air gap, we'll just take it right back to air Gap.
Jim Love:There's no such thing as an air gap.
Jim Love:There's always, there's only Airheads, there's no air gaps.
Jim Love:You can't count on them in there.
Jim Love:And, and my favorite, my favorite was we, we do have two p things that,
Jim Love:that, and, and it was an operational system that I saw, and this guy said,
Jim Love:there's an air gap you can't reach this operational system from, from anywhere.
Jim Love:And I said, so, okay, but how do you give this operational system
Jim Love:commands if it's got this air gap?
Jim Love:And it doesn't?
Jim Love:Oh, I use my laptop.
Jim Love:Oh, the same laptop you connected the other systems with?
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:Okay.
Jim Love:So like, like I said, if, if, if somebody tells you is there
Jim Love:an air gap, don't believe them.
Jim Love:You know, it, it's, it, treat it like it's not, not true.
Jim Love:And.
Jim Love:The, uh, the sophistication level, as you probably know, you guys probably
Jim Love:know, there are all kinds of ways that systems communicate, even if
Jim Love:they are not connected by wires.
Jim Love:It's called wireless and magnetism, you know, magnetic
Jim Love:communication and things like that.
Jim Love:There's all kinds of ways to get in an air gap's, not an air gap.
Jim Love:It's, it's, it's a concept at that point.
Jim Love:And that's, that was the one I just, like I said, it was just you, you think you're
Jim Love:gonna learn nothing new until this, until somebody said, you ask a really, what I
Jim Love:thought was a really dumb question, you
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, I, I'm.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna agree and disagree with you on this one, Jim,
W. Curtis Preston:so be, be because, um, I, I, I think the core concept there is don't trust
W. Curtis Preston:what somebody is calling an air gap.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, be, but I do think it's really important in today's environment
W. Curtis Preston:specifically to at least attempt to get as close to an air gap as you can.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Saying that it's just impossible, which technically it kind of is
W. Curtis Preston:impossible unless somebody is taking stuff out and putting it in a, in
W. Curtis Preston:a hard drive, in a box, in a vault with a scary dude in front of it.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, which no one's doing that.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the, I mean, yeah, okay.
W. Curtis Preston:There's three people doing that, but, but it's nobody, no,
Jim Love:and one of them's the scary dude.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the, um, we, we need to at least attempt, because so many
W. Curtis Preston:people don't even attempt it.
W. Curtis Preston:They're like, they have the backup, they have the copy of the backup sitting
W. Curtis Preston:right next to the backup, or they have the backup in the server and they have
W. Curtis Preston:the, you know, let's, you know, pick a, pick your favorite, um, backup system.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I'll, I'll use data domain, you know, as a, as a target, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So back up the data domain and then I have my, my data domain
W. Curtis Preston:replicate to another data domain and I can, I can ssh to both of these.
W. Curtis Preston:This is a problem, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, and that's not picking on data domain.
W. Curtis Preston:That would be true of any, any, any box, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And I know that data domain, uh, cuz I know Prasanna has brought it up before.
W. Curtis Preston:Data domain has some features to do this.
W. Curtis Preston:Use those features, right?
W. Curtis Preston:None of them are perfect.
W. Curtis Preston:That's where, where I agree with you, Jim.
W. Curtis Preston:None of them are perfect, but we need to at least freaking try.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I think one of the best ways to do it is to sort of cross systems, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Use a different system than the primary system.
W. Curtis Preston:So at least it, you've got some sort of security by obscurity.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I dunno if you have any thoughts on it, Jim.
Jim Love:no, I think, I think you, you and the story's just not as funny.
Jim Love:If I don't, if I don't tell it as if the air gap is absolute, the fact is that
Jim Love:there's always a way to beat everything.
Jim Love:There's, everything can break down, but it's like, if, if so
Jim Love:is the answer to do nothing.
Jim Love:No.
Jim Love:The answer is to do everything in your power.
Jim Love:And there's, there's a, there's something in it that we, we do that just drives
Jim Love:me crazy because we can't do everything.
Jim Love:We do nothing.
Jim Love:That's silly.
Jim Love:Everything you do, everything you do adds another layer.
Jim Love:And that's, that's the, the trick is, you know, is to have it in layers.
Jim Love:Every single layer that you have.
Jim Love:Everyone's better, by all means get to, to, to perfection.
Jim Love:But do something.
Jim Love:Don't, don't do nothing because you know, don't say, don't have an air
Jim Love:gap because somebody can beat it.
Jim Love:Have the best you can have, you know, try to make it better each time and,
Jim Love:and learn from the mistakes of others.
Jim Love:That was my, my, my message.
Jim Love:I hope for everybody learn from the mistakes of others.
Jim Love:It's so much funnier and so much, so much easier.
Jim Love:When you hear somebody's old story and you learn from that,
Jim Love:then learning it yourself.
Jim Love:You know, lying in bed with your gut aching going, will I have a job tomorrow?
Jim Love:You know?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And one of the things I also liked with your, Hey, now I never had to administer
Prasanna Malaiyandi:backup systems, so that's probably why.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Uh, but I've made other mistakes in technology.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So, uh, the one thing, Jim, that I also liked from your stories is, Sort of like
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sometimes we get so fixated on a specific problem or the technology aspects that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:we don't sort of bubble up and be like, what are we really trying to solve?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And like asking some of those basic questions to get people thinking, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like the example you just gave about the air gap, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's like you're so focused on one particular aspect, you sort
Prasanna Malaiyandi:of forget about everything else.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so I think being able to sort of bubble back up and ask those questions,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:important questions, even though they might seem simplistic, but they're
Prasanna Malaiyandi:important to really figuring out what does your solution actually solve.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:What, what is the outcome you're trying to get?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Jim Love:You know, the, and that's, that's what, that's, that's what we forget
Jim Love:is we, we, we don't work towards outcomes.
Jim Love:We work, you know, we think, we think in terms of, well, I've got this
Jim Love:process, this name, this term, this, this, and all this sort of stuff.
Jim Love:Now we're working towards an outcome.
Jim Love:Our outcome is, and it's to provide the security of a business.
Jim Love:It's to provide that business with continuity.
Jim Love:It's, you know, it's to provide the resilience for that business to be able
Jim Love:to survive something we didn't anticipate,
Jim Love:That's, that's, that's, that's my, my fun.
Jim Love:I, I called it backup bingo when I put it together.
Jim Love:You know, you could, you could, you can do it as a drinking
Jim Love:game too, if you've had one.
Jim Love:You have to take a drink, you know, whatever, however you wanna play,
W. Curtis Preston:Never, never have, never have I ever, uh, restored, tried to
W. Curtis Preston:restore a tape that I never tried before.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I actually had that one Jim.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I was at a large, I was at a telecommunications company and this
W. Curtis Preston:was very early in my career and we had been backing up like crazy
W. Curtis Preston:and it wasn't until we went to go to restore the tapes one time.
W. Curtis Preston:We found out that we couldn't read from the tapes.
W. Curtis Preston:We, I mean, I honestly, to this day, I still don't know
W. Curtis Preston:what happened to those tapes.
W. Curtis Preston:It was a perfectly nice, it was a, it was what at that
W. Curtis Preston:time was a high end tape drive.
W. Curtis Preston:It was a 35 94 from ibm.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I, my, my numbers might be wrong, but it was, it was a high-end tape drive
W. Curtis Preston:back in the day and never did figure out why we had made all these backups, but,
W. Curtis Preston:um, you know, weren't able to restore.
W. Curtis Preston:But yeah, that, that, that thing of like, anytime I, I'll tell,
W. Curtis Preston:I'll tell you who gets this, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And that is, you know, you talked about validated the, the biotech, um, industry.
W. Curtis Preston:They have this concept called validated systems.
W. Curtis Preston:And you, you have to, it's like required by law that if you change any part of
W. Curtis Preston:the system, you then have to validate.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, this entire process, you have to validate what's been documented,
W. Curtis Preston:validate that you have all the steps.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, and then you can say that this is a validated system,
W. Curtis Preston:like, it's like with a capital V.
W. Curtis Preston:And only then can that system be used for, um, you know, biotech, uh, type data.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I think we can learn a lot from those folks.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:Well, it goes back to that thing.
Jim Love:It's the outcome.
Jim Love:Focus on the outcome.
Jim Love:The outcome is not backups.
Jim Love:The backups are an enabler of the outcome, which is the ability to
Jim Love:restore your, or to make sure that you've got the right system, that
Jim Love:it's all going to work, you know?
Jim Love:It's, uh, and, and it, like I said, it's really easy to get into your own
Jim Love:space and think, I think in terms of I do this, you do this, you do this.
Jim Love:And that's, that's what I mean by, by restoration being cultural.
Jim Love:Like if you want, if you, you know, the ability to restore is a, is
Jim Love:a cultural thing cuz it's a team.
Jim Love:Everybody knows you.
Jim Love:You've gotta be a team and you have to understand what, what you're doing.
Jim Love:And that's, that's, anyway, that's, that's,
W. Curtis Preston:I really, I really like that Jim Restore is a culture.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, uh, there are some environments that have it and there are some
W. Curtis Preston:environments that don't have it.
W. Curtis Preston:And I think the ones that have it are the ones that do better when
W. Curtis Preston:things like ransomware happens.
W. Curtis Preston:So, uh, I want
W. Curtis Preston:to thank you very much, Jim, for coming on the podcast.
Jim Love:thank you.
Jim Love:This has been fun.
Jim Love:Great to meet you.
Jim Love:Uh, uh, Prisa.
Jim Love:Great to see you again, Curtis.
Jim Love:And.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, thanks again, Prasanna even with all of your technical
W. Curtis Preston:problems that you had this week.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I know.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm sorry, but No, Jim, thank you for sharing your stories.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I always like hearing about, I know you said old people stories, but I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:love hearing about it because like you said, I get to learn a bunch about
Prasanna Malaiyandi:like how things were done in the past.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like I learned so much about tape just talking to Curtis.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I never touched tape and I still haven't touched tape, but at least learning about
Prasanna Malaiyandi:some of the issues and challenges is
Jim Love:Well, and you got, you're got a little gray hair there.
Jim Love:You're not like, you know, not a baby yet.
Jim Love:There's these little gray hair there.
Jim Love:It doesn't take long to get to this, you know, before you know, it just, yeah.
Jim Love:Just two or three restores that don't happen.
Jim Love:You're, you're, you'll go gray.
W. Curtis Preston:exactly, exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:That's why, that's why he doesn't have gr that much gray hair yet, cuz he hasn't,
W. Curtis Preston:he hasn't used, uh, tape in anger.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, well anyway, um, we also want to thank our listeners.
W. Curtis Preston:We would be nothing without you and remember to subscribe so
W. Curtis Preston:that you can restore it all.
W. Curtis Preston:There was file but deleted,
W. Curtis Preston:needed you.
W. Curtis Preston:To fix it
W. Curtis Preston:on Facebook don't
W. Curtis Preston:was.
W. Curtis Preston:System isn't worth a space.
W. Curtis Preston:Just for
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