The Merging Worlds of Information Security and Data Protection
In this episode of the Restore It All podcast, W. Curtis Preston, a.k.a. Mr. Backup, and Prasanna Malaiyandi are joined by Chris Groot and Stefan Voss from N-Able, a company specializing in backup, data protection and security systems. Nable focuses on serving the needs of managed service providers to deliver excellent service to small and medium-sized businesses. They discuss the importance of catering to the "Fortune 5 million," which includes businesses with 20 to 2000 employees, highlighting the significant role that small businesses play in our economy. Tune in to learn more about Nable's approach to the cloud data protection space and their goal of making backup admins indispensable.
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Have you noticed a merging of the data protection and
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information security worlds.
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I know.
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I have.
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Backup people increasingly need to understand the world.
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World of information security.
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And then information security people definitely need.
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Need to learn about a lot about backup.
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Hi, I'm Debbie Curtis precedent.
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AKA Mr.
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Backup, I've been specializing.
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In backup and disaster recovery since the early nineties.
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And I'm the.
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Host of this podcast.
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It's purpose is to turn under appreciated.
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Backup admins and to cyber recovery.
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The heroes.
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This episode features two representatives of cov data.
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Data protection.
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And we talked to them about two merging worlds.
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That sounded a lot of like date.
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Data protection and information security.
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We also talk about how this is leading the migration to.
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A sas based data.
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data protection services Because This episode.
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episode is full of great.
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great lessons for anyone in backup Yup.
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And date of protection I hope you enjoy it
Curtis:
hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restore It All podcast.
Curtis:
I'm your host, W.
Curtis:
Curtis Preston, AKA Mr.
Curtis:
Backup, and I have with me a guy who I am now calling coach, Prasanna Malaiyandi.
Curtis:
How's it going, Prasanna?
Pras:
I'm good, Curtis.
Pras:
I'm happy to be your coach, but wasn't I your coach before?
Pras:
Like your financial coach?
Pras:
Your
Curtis:
you were my non, my financial non advisor.
Curtis:
That's what you were before, financial non
Pras:
also your medical, er, doctor, non doctor, and your non legal
Curtis:
But now you are my non physical, non professional, yeah.
Curtis:
So I've started calling you coach to my wife.
Curtis:
like I'll be like, coach is calling coach is calling for our daily walk.
Curtis:
I gotta go.
Curtis:
so here's the thing.
Curtis:
So why am I calling you coach Prasanna?
Pras:
Because every day we go on walks together, and when we're on
Pras:
our walks, we talk to each other.
Pras:
And so I've actually gotten to, so I've been going on walks
Pras:
regularly for the last, two, three months, multiple times a day.
Pras:
And I was like, hey, Curtis, you should start walking too.
Pras:
It'll be good for you.
Pras:
And so the one way to do that is, is like, Hey, Curtis, let's go on a walk.
Pras:
And so we talk on the phone all the time while we're both walking in different
Curtis:
Yeah.
Curtis:
We go on a walk
Pras:
About 500 miles apart.
Curtis:
and, we'll see how that goes.
Curtis:
today is a special day.
Curtis:
We have two guests today from Enable, a company with backup data
Curtis:
protection and security systems that they say will make Groot.
Curtis:
nable1-chris: Oh, Curtis, hello Prasanna.
Curtis:
Thanks for having me.
Curtis:
I
Curtis:
Glad to have you.
Curtis:
I also want to welcome the VP of Product Management for the Cove Data
Curtis:
Protection Products, Stefan Voss.
Stefan:
Hey, Curtis.
Stefan:
Hi, Prasanna.
Stefan:
It's nice to see you again.
Pras:
Yeah, been a while.
Pras:
Good to see you joining the cloud data protection space and
Curtis:
so you, you've had the pleasure of working with Prasanna in years past?
Stefan:
I have.
Stefan:
It was a long time ago, but one of those storage, Boston based
Stefan:
storage companies, Prasanna?
Stefan:
BMC, right?
Curtis:
I think the first question that I want to ask, and I think I'll ask this
Curtis:
of you, Chris, is why don't you just give us a little bit more information
Curtis:
about, maybe a summary about enable and where you think you fit in the market
Curtis:
nable1-chris: Yeah, sure.
Curtis:
Thanks, Curtis.
Curtis:
Enable really is an organization that is focused on the needs of managed
Curtis:
service providers to deliver excellent service out to all the small, medium
Curtis:
sized businesses that exist out there.
Curtis:
So often, the backup vendors were often thinking about the Fortune 500 and how
Curtis:
we're going to service them and so on.
Curtis:
Where we play is what I call the fortune 5 million.
Curtis:
So we're talking, 20 employees up to 2000 employees, but certainly as you go down,
Curtis:
like closer to a hundred employees, that's where a lot of, our, industry and our, our
Curtis:
economy runs on is those small businesses.
Curtis:
That's primarily where, managed service providers tend to play, and have the
Curtis:
most, impact in terms of customers.
Curtis:
And that's where, from a data protection play, that's where Cove data protection
Curtis:
really lives, focused on the needs of, that, that service provider and how they
Curtis:
can deliver essentially enterprise level.
Curtis:
Service to many small businesses that are, distributed in different industries.
Pras:
just a quick follow up to that, Chris.
Pras:
So unlike a lot of other backup products, which really focus on like a backup
Pras:
admin, I'm sure with enable and what you're doing with code data protection,
Pras:
it's really about how do you enable the MSP to scale and manage the solutions
Pras:
across tens, hundreds of customers that they might have, is that right?
Pras:
nable1-chris: you're exactly right.
Pras:
So it starts with, first of all, it needs to have the right level RTO, RPO,
Pras:
service levels that, is a non negotiable.
Pras:
It's got to be secure, non negotiable, but then once you got those out of the way.
Pras:
How do you, essentially add more and more organizations to your service
Pras:
offering without adding more and more people every time you do that.
Pras:
And so having that ability to run it, highly efficiently in terms of that
Pras:
labor score, our personal mandate is, if you're spending a hundred hours
Pras:
on backup, we'll take you down to less than 10, like really having that
Pras:
level of service level of efficiency.
Pras:
Centralized console, multi tenancy, so that you can just, um, you know,
Pras:
rock and roll as you, as you start to, you know, build out customers,
Pras:
and add more and more workloads without adding more and more labor.
Curtis:
yeah.
Curtis:
I've been in backup now for over 30 years and backup was always sort of
Curtis:
the, you know, back of the bus, right?
Curtis:
and one of the things that people.
Curtis:
Often would say was like, how hard can it be to just copy stuff, from A to B, right?
Curtis:
And, the answer is, not that hard, except they keep changing the A and
Curtis:
they keep changing the B, right?
Curtis:
it's we're going to use tape.
Curtis:
We're going to use disk.
Curtis:
We're going to use cloud.
Curtis:
We're going to use.
Curtis:
We're going to, we're going to go from Linux.
Curtis:
We're going to go to Windows.
Curtis:
we want much more frequent backups, right?
Curtis:
instead of just the daily, nightly backups, we want maybe
Curtis:
something more frequent than that.
Curtis:
Oh, and by the way, we're just going to take all the computers and we're just
Curtis:
going to scatter them to the world.
Curtis:
data center, what's a data center, right?
Curtis:
and then we're not even going to have servers anymore.
Curtis:
Let's do this thing called containers.
Curtis:
And, uh, right.
Curtis:
And so it's just, it's just a mess.
Curtis:
Uh, but I think what's really happened and I'm just curious, what you guys
Curtis:
think about this, what has happened?
Curtis:
It's always been the back of the bus, but what's happened in the last,
Curtis:
say, five years or so has been the massive increase in cyber attacks.
Curtis:
against both the primary and, now, especially against the secondary
Curtis:
systems, the backup systems.
Curtis:
I think that backup, and I speak very broadly when I say backup, right?
Curtis:
basically anything that's, keeping the data safe, basically.
Curtis:
that it's finally coming into its own.
Curtis:
And I'll start with you, Chris.
Curtis:
what do you think about that idea?
Curtis:
nable1-chris: I think you're absolutely right in terms of the awareness.
Curtis:
Like it was always important, but the feeling of risk.
Curtis:
Was never that high.
Curtis:
It was just more like paying an insurance policy.
Curtis:
Now the risk feels much more imminent, in terms of most people know a
Curtis:
friend who know a friend that have experienced some sort of, cyber
Curtis:
incident and it becomes very personal.
Curtis:
And when things like that become personal, the risk seems much more real.
Curtis:
And, certainly that's been a, it's changed, the value of what's going
Curtis:
on, but also it's, yeah, because it's been monetized so greatly, right?
Curtis:
And it's the profit motive that is different than the, the weather that,
Curtis:
might, you know, cause the need for your backups to be, super important to you.
Curtis:
yeah.
Curtis:
I like what you said.
Curtis:
You changed the value.
Curtis:
I would argue that the value is the same, but the perceived
Curtis:
value has gone up, right?
Curtis:
you've always needed a good backup system.
Curtis:
Or, some would call it a recovery system.
Curtis:
And, I'm fine with that.
Curtis:
but I think, like you said, it's like with COVID, right?
Curtis:
When COVID happened, once it...
Curtis:
Came to the point where you knew somebody, right?
Curtis:
It became much more real, right?
Curtis:
Especially if you knew somebody that died, right?
Curtis:
I knew people that died of COVID and that made it much more real I think
Curtis:
you said like a friend of a friend or something I think you know, I think
Curtis:
most of us might even know just one person like meaning that like we know
Curtis:
someone directly That got impacted.
Curtis:
You know for me I remember Years ago, like at the very beginning of ransomware, what
Curtis:
we now think of a ransomware has actually been around a long time, but the modern
Curtis:
era ransomware for me started around 2014.
Curtis:
And that's when I got my first call from my dad who had a business partner.
Curtis:
Who had been, who had his entire business operation, which was on a
Curtis:
computer and he had been asked for, you remember these days, 400, right?
Curtis:
He'd been asked for 400 to get his entire company back and
Curtis:
the guy didn't have backup.
Curtis:
And, he really had no choice but to pay 400.
Curtis:
We have come a long way since that.
Curtis:
But even since those early days, for me personally, I felt a
Curtis:
much closer connection to it.
Curtis:
Stefan, how about you?
Curtis:
what do you think,
Stefan:
it's interesting because I was still in technical marketing in 2005.
Stefan:
I didn't really care about backup, right?
Stefan:
I was in another BU and EMC storage and all that.
Stefan:
You're laughing, Prasanna, it's true.
Stefan:
And then, my boss came to me and said, Hey, the Sony attack happened
Stefan:
and, we have customers that are freaking out and they want to know.
Stefan:
And what can they do in terms of, making it, Possible and more likely
Stefan:
that they can actually recover.
Stefan:
And it's mind boggling because EMC has always done well with replication,
Stefan:
storage based replication and blah, blah, blah, backup products, so many
Stefan:
technical solutions, but yet they weren't necessarily architected properly.
Stefan:
And I remember we had a mystery.
Stefan:
Federal customer that did some really crafty stuff with air gapping, actually
Stefan:
pulling cables and why that is, is because the ransomware at the time wasn't
Stefan:
a thing, but brute force, wiperware, you name it, was actually already
Stefan:
targeting the backup infrastructure.
Stefan:
So it's fascinating.
Stefan:
And that was, for me, eye opening for one, but also really exciting because
Stefan:
it puts this aspect of recovery, on the map also for security people.
Stefan:
So that now means, we can actually sell stuff to people who are
Stefan:
CISOs and they have big budgets, but we also have to design it.
Stefan:
So it's really an engineering dream if you think about it.
Stefan:
So they're different requirements, same technology.
Stefan:
And yeah, that, that kind of led me down the path of, data.
Stefan:
data protection, but also being a PM.
Stefan:
And, we came up with this thing called cyber recovery at the time.
Stefan:
yeah, it's just confusing.
Stefan:
it's fascinating.
Stefan:
And, my boss then Beth said, look, you can see that the worlds of
Stefan:
security and data protection or backup, That they're really merging.
Stefan:
they're discrete swim lanes.
Stefan:
Don't get me wrong, but they're merging.
Stefan:
I was able to also see this at the first RSA conference I went to and I tried
Stefan:
to do my thing, pitch a little bit.
Stefan:
Hey, there's backup.
Stefan:
And they're like, yeah, go away.
Stefan:
500 vendors on the floor about, left of breach, anomaly
Stefan:
detection, backup, whatever.
Stefan:
And then the second year, the very next year, it was already much more of a thing.
Stefan:
We got a keynote or those are more panel discussions, but it's very interesting
Stefan:
how fast it actually became also a thing in the context of security.
Pras:
Just going back to one of the things Curtis touched
Pras:
upon, like the shifting, right?
Pras:
For, I know he talked about going from tape to disc to cloud, right?
Pras:
Decentralized versus your data center.
Pras:
so I know there's been and we've talked about it on the podcast
Pras:
before, this notion that, Hey, once I put my data in the cloud, I don't
Pras:
really have to worry about it, right?
Pras:
It's secure.
Pras:
Or if I use like a SaaS service, I don't need to worry about it.
Pras:
It's protected, right?
Pras:
How do you see customers evolving in terms of their comfort with those
Pras:
types of false statements, if you will?
Pras:
And maybe Chris, I'll start with you on that.
Pras:
nable1-chris: specifically, you're talking SaaS first, because there has
Pras:
been this shift, if we go back 20, 10, 8 years ago, everyone had their exchange
Pras:
server, everyone had their file server, that sort of, and that's all, we've seen
Pras:
this migration that, the train has left the station with Microsoft 365, clearly.
Pras:
But, the second train, the backup train was a little slower to leave the
Pras:
station in terms of people's mindsets.
Pras:
and yeah, if you had this conversation in, 2018, I would say eight out
Pras:
of 10 people would say backup.
Pras:
Why would you back up?
Pras:
That's not a thing.
Pras:
fast forward to today.
Pras:
it's not, if it's who are you going to use, right?
Pras:
It's more of the question.
Pras:
So we've seen that, change in mindset.
Pras:
even in the last two years, it's really accelerated.
Pras:
So now it's de facto, I haven't met someone in the last six months
Pras:
that didn't agree that this was a priority, or that it was like a, an
Pras:
unnecessary conversation, let's say.
Pras:
So after, the Microsoft 365 backups as an example, in addition, what
Pras:
we've noticed in terms of the change in mindset, over the last eight years
Pras:
has really been the idea of needing to really own and touch that local storage.
Pras:
For other primary systems.
Pras:
So that's a secondary, mindset that we've seen, especially in our, like the market
Pras:
where we typically play the most, we've seen that, there was a very conservative
Pras:
mindset, need to touch it, to today it's whatever gets me the outcome, that's
Pras:
what, that's how I want to get there.
Curtis:
Yeah, I Agree that I think there was definitely a long moment, right?
Curtis:
where there was this sort of fight against backups that I don't control.
Curtis:
and then I think that all the other IT systems, people found out, no
Curtis:
one, for example, no one misses their exchange server, right?
Curtis:
No one is wow, I really wish I had my exchange server on prem.
Curtis:
and I don't think anyone misses their backup server, right?
Curtis:
those that have gone to SaaS backup, I remember like all these
Curtis:
things I used to do to manage the
Curtis:
physical.
Curtis:
So, well, yeah, well, I was just thinking of like, like, I remember,
Curtis:
does anybody remember a Sun E450, you guys remember these things?
Curtis:
The Sun E450, I loved it as a backup server.
Curtis:
Why?
Curtis:
Not because it was the most powerful server for computing infrastructure, but
Curtis:
because it had the most PCI slots, right?
Curtis:
And I could put all this hardware and I could do all this, IO throughput.
Curtis:
It was about IO throughput.
Curtis:
That was a lot of work designing those systems for the perfect, right?
Curtis:
And man, I do not miss that world, right?
Curtis:
That's what I'm saying.
Curtis:
I think you're right, Chris, that basically it's, we
Curtis:
are making that same shift.
Curtis:
The shift that happened with 365 and, exchange that we're making that
Curtis:
same shift with backup, That there were a lot of people I remember,
Curtis:
when I used to work with my previous employer, that again, this was what,
Curtis:
six years ago now that I had to say, okay, so, you know, exchange, right.
Curtis:
And you know, like 365 and how like 365 is like a service.
Curtis:
But it's like exchange and they're like, yeah, I'm like, this is
Curtis:
like that, but backup, right?
Curtis:
It was like a new idea, right?
Curtis:
It's like that's how I do explain it.
Curtis:
Cause, for two reasons.
Curtis:
One was that it was a relatively new concept and it was somewhat
Curtis:
like breaking the mold.
Curtis:
But the other was that there are products in the world that are advertised as SaaS.
Curtis:
that aren't really SaaS.
Curtis:
I'd say my perfect example is the entire Adobe suite, right?
Curtis:
that is subscription based pricing, but they call it SaaS.
Curtis:
And I'm like, that's not SaaS.
Curtis:
That's subscription based pricing.
Curtis:
Yes.
Curtis:
I understand you're giving software via a service, but it's not SaaS.
Curtis:
so that was the other reason I had to do that.
Curtis:
so we always did things in a certain way back in the day.
Curtis:
And then suddenly there is this SaaSification of the backup world.
Curtis:
why do you think we did that?
Stefan:
Great question.
Stefan:
I know we did these, QBRs, in my previous employers, and we always
Stefan:
wondered, where are the backup admins?
Stefan:
Where are they?
Stefan:
You know what I mean?
Stefan:
It was like a smaller and smaller, it's a shrinking buyer base.
Stefan:
And I think it has a lot to do with, yeah, it's pretty expensive,
Stefan:
spending a lot of time, you mentioned the example of Exchange.
Stefan:
I remember we had a team and we produced 200 page best practice
Stefan:
documents to how to set up the DAGs and do this, the storage tuning.
Stefan:
And you like that DAG that I remembered?
Stefan:
And how do you set it up?
Stefan:
And the LUN distribution, blah, blah, blah.
Stefan:
None of this you have to do, right?
Stefan:
So why is backup any different?
Stefan:
Is what it's mind boggling, right?
Stefan:
That we have such a resistance.
Stefan:
But backup is an application.
Stefan:
Like exchange, right?
Stefan:
So you would think that the same principles apply, especially in our
Stefan:
segment that, like as Chris highlights, it's also a bit different when you
Stefan:
move down market, honestly, you can't really, continue to afford, having
Stefan:
to patch, maintain, procurement cycle, that's got to be fun.
Stefan:
Just coming out of COVID, just buying a stupid server.
Stefan:
gosh.
Stefan:
And We just think about this openness as an age.
Stefan:
I think that was one of the nasty vulnerabilities that went around.
Stefan:
And I think, Curtis, you did a nice sort of write up on the topic, even if you
Stefan:
run into something like that, and then you have to do a vendor coordination
Stefan:
and you got to get a maintenance window, you got to get the payload and then
Stefan:
hopefully you Oh gosh, you have the upgrade actually works and then you can
Stefan:
resume your backups the next day, right?
Stefan:
Isn't it nice to not have to worry about, right?
Stefan:
worry about storage management, disk expansion.
Stefan:
I know it's a thing and it might make people feel good,
Stefan:
but is it really smart, right?
Stefan:
You just mentioned the threat landscape, right?
Stefan:
And you have 10 hours that you have to invest.
Stefan:
Wouldn't you rather invest nine hours learning about Azure or learning about
Stefan:
the threat landscape as opposed to.
Stefan:
swapping drives and things like that, right?
Stefan:
So that, that's kind of
Pras:
I think Curtis might like swapping drives, honestly,
Stefan:
I like
Curtis:
I, I miss, I miss swapping
Stefan:
But I...
Curtis:
You know, uh, Stefan, I, I think we've always, if somebody
Curtis:
could make this problem go away.
Curtis:
'cause it's a giant pain in the butt, right?
Curtis:
If somebody could make the backup problem go away, then I think there were a lot
Curtis:
of people that would have done that.
Curtis:
And the, you alluded to, one of the problems is that the
Curtis:
backup admin is a dying breed.
Curtis:
There's, there, there's no, you can't go get a, master's degree in backup ship.
Curtis:
you can't get a, you can't get a bachelor's degree in it, right?
Curtis:
and, but there's three technologies, I think, that have enabled this
Curtis:
solution, the SaaS based backup.
Curtis:
The first would be obviously just the cloud, right?
Curtis:
this seemingly unlimited amount of infrastructure that someone
Curtis:
can call upon when they need it.
Curtis:
The second would be deduplication.
Curtis:
the fact that once we get that first backup, which we often
Curtis:
call the seed and we can do that often via, Sneakernet, right?
Curtis:
Do that first backup via Sneakernet once we get that first backup,
Curtis:
because, I'll digress for a second.
Curtis:
One of the problems that you said, it's just like an application.
Curtis:
It is, but it's got a unique problem and that is it's got all the stuff, right?
Curtis:
Physics has always been the enemy of backup, right?
Curtis:
It's just literally, I've spent my entire career fighting physics.
Curtis:
but dedu.
Curtis:
This idea of actually slicing things all the way down to their, subcomponents
Curtis:
and then figuring out which ones are redundant, which ones are new and
Curtis:
only sending those new things that made it much more bandwidth friendly.
Curtis:
and then I think really the golden goose here is object storage, because what
Curtis:
that does is it solves all that stuff.
Curtis:
That's what made me think about when you were talking about all this, the disk
Curtis:
swapping and the disk management that we used to have to do back in the day.
Curtis:
even more so is the volume management, right?
Curtis:
you had to constantly manage the capacity, of your disk storage, but now you don't.
Curtis:
It's just magic, right?
Stefan:
Unlimited!
Curtis:
yeah.
Curtis:
Yeah.
Curtis:
I always say seemingly unlimited, right?
Curtis:
Because Yeah.
Curtis:
Yeah.
Curtis:
It, yeah.
Curtis:
Thanks.
Curtis:
Thanks.
Curtis:
was that efan that said that?
Stefan:
Yeah, I thought I'd say something, profound here.
Curtis:
Yeah.
Curtis:
, no,
Stefan:
for granted, right?
Curtis:
that's the other thing about object storage is that it built
Curtis:
into it is the idea of redundancy.
Curtis:
and immutability and constant checking that the data that we put on it, Three
Curtis:
months ago is still the data that's there.
Curtis:
we never did that with tape, right?
Curtis:
We never did it with regular disk.
Pras:
Yeah, so I know we were talking previously about sort of SaaS and backup.
Pras:
And one of the things, um, that I've seen in the past is sort of a lot of
Pras:
companies when they're like, Oh, companies are shifting to like Microsoft 365.
Pras:
They would produce these solutions, which.
Pras:
didn't really solve the problem, Stefan, that you were talking about, making
Pras:
it simple and easy to do the backups.
Pras:
And they would sort of do like lift and shift, where it's like, hey, you
Pras:
still manage your server, you still manage everything else, even though
Pras:
you're doing like Microsoft 365 backups.
Pras:
And so, Chris, I guess a question for you is sort of, what got, uh, enabled
Pras:
into sort of the space of, okay, let's now try to offer or start to offer
Pras:
a cloud data protection solution?
Pras:
nable1-chris: so the origin story is truly, uh, a backup administrator
Pras:
that got angry one day and said, there must be a better way, um, but
Pras:
that's going really far back in time.
Pras:
Um, and, but it really was the origins were sort of in that period where.
Pras:
The internet was rising, you know, disk storage was rising.
Pras:
There was, uh, you know, this from tape, you know, this is going back a long time,
Pras:
but like the, the shifts were happening and just recognizing that, um, you
Pras:
could in theory, you know, protect, you know, data that is residing anywhere.
Pras:
And bring it to one central location or many locations, depending on the, the
Pras:
target, um, and do that in such a way that it just simplifies the process.
Pras:
And so from day one, the architecture of Cove was really
Pras:
designed about solving for.
Pras:
Which, especially, you know, 10, 15 years ago was a bigger problem,
Pras:
which was that you needed to drive essentially a Mack truck through a
Pras:
garden hose and ideally do, ideally do that like several times per day, right?
Pras:
And that is a physics problem that I think Curtis would, uh, you
Pras:
know, mentioned he agreed with.
Pras:
And, uh, and so the question was really, how do you solve that problem?
Pras:
And so.
Pras:
If you start from day zero on solving for that problem, then that's sort of like
Pras:
solving all the rest of your problems.
Pras:
So that's the origin story.
Pras:
And, and really those early decisions in terms of the right architectural,
Pras:
uh, uh, uh, decisions, the also just the focus on, on solving kind of the
Pras:
root physics problem that had to be overcome at the time of, uh, Moving
Pras:
large amounts of data over small pipes on a very consistent, reliable basis,
Pras:
um, and being able to monitor that across, you know, many locations, et
Pras:
cetera, that those core, uh, you know, focusing on solving for that particular
Pras:
problem, um, has led to, you know, that, you know, the, the outcomes that.
Pras:
Overcame some of those early fears of customers of transitioning from just
Pras:
that traditional way of running backups, where you always had to land it locally.
Pras:
And then if you wanted to get offsite, you had to do a secondary process,
Pras:
whether you use the internet or the sneaker net or however you did it.
Pras:
Um, that mindset, um, it really, it did take some time for the world
Pras:
to accept that that was a viable.
Pras:
Means of data protection.
Pras:
So I was actually going to bounce over to Stefan, I know in our past, right?
Pras:
We've worked on deduplicated appliances, right?
Pras:
Dedup's been around for quite a while.
Pras:
What were some of the challenges that needed to be solved in order
Pras:
to, like Chris said, take a Mack truck worth of data and send
Pras:
it over a garden hose, right?
Pras:
So what are some of the things that Cove does differently?
Pras:
That allows for that to happen or to be supported.
Stefan:
Yeah, the short answer is this cool architecture.
Stefan:
There's two levels of architecture.
Stefan:
One is The topology, right?
Stefan:
We're moving data from the edge to the cloud, right?
Stefan:
and, if you have 160, 000 customers, they're small, they're
Stefan:
all over the place, right?
Stefan:
They probably have a really small pipe.
Stefan:
that's not even a garden hose, right?
Stefan:
How do you get the data that central location?
Stefan:
so I think that's the short answer.
Stefan:
and yes, to your point, there are some.
Stefan:
Thank you.
Stefan:
Products that just do it very well.
Stefan:
Remember Avamar?
Stefan:
that was like one of those cool like source side deduplication,
Stefan:
other words.
Stefan:
So conceptually, this is similar, but better.
Stefan:
so we do an ingest and think of it as a content level.
Stefan:
Backup.
Stefan:
So we don't worry about putting the whole file and have to do change
Stefan:
block tracking regardless of whether the content change or not, right?
Stefan:
It always produces a arguably higher change rate and more that has to
Stefan:
be picked up by the scan, right?
Stefan:
We don't worry about that.
Stefan:
We operate one level above in the stack.
Stefan:
But the cool thing is we can do an image level restore.
Stefan:
You just have to assemble the right files and that gives you that image level.
Stefan:
So it's just architecturally.
Stefan:
Different and, fascinating way ahead of its time, right?
Stefan:
when you believe in, yeah, there's a move to the cloud.
Stefan:
There's exponential growth of data and then more and more
Stefan:
distributed environments.
Stefan:
this, architecture is really coming into its own.
Stefan:
what we can then do is we only have to really worry about if you have a
Stefan:
thousand files or 100, 000 files, we only really have to worry about the ones
Stefan:
that were, there were any changes at all.
Stefan:
And that seems to be, it always typically is a small number.
Stefan:
and then within that, when we pick up the hash, we go through and
Stefan:
we really only select the 256K blocks or segments, package them
Stefan:
up and move those over the wire.
Stefan:
So you don't really have to worry about, Oh, I did a defrag.
Stefan:
So my, my, I nodes are all, all over the place again, or I move
Stefan:
the file from here to here, same file, but the block disk layout
Pras:
a logical level, right?
Pras:
That you're looking at the data rather than at the lower level.
Pras:
Gotcha.
Pras:
So, okay.
Pras:
So, and I know one of the questions that sometimes people
Pras:
get concerned with about the cloud.
Pras:
I know you talked about, okay, now I can actually move the data via
Pras:
the garden nodes into the cloud.
Pras:
One challenge that some people bring up is when it comes to
Pras:
the restores and the recoveries.
Pras:
even if I can efficiently move the data to the cloud, if I need to, say, restore
Pras:
an application that is local, how do I do that in an efficient fashion, right?
Pras:
Because I am still, once again, going to be limited a little by physics, right?
Pras:
are there things that you offer that help alleviate that concern?
Stefan:
Yes, and it's nice that you call out that not one architecture
Stefan:
is perfect in every aspect that you could possibly imagine, right?
Stefan:
So clearly, when you're moving things from far away from the edge into
Stefan:
the cloud, and you have to go the other way, laws of physics apply, and
Stefan:
that is Difficult to solve, right?
Stefan:
So the efficiency is one layer.
Stefan:
and so I think that TrueDelta, I was going to get into the benefits.
Stefan:
I talked about the how, but obviously when you do that, the
Stefan:
backup frequency can be very,
Stefan:
small, right?
Stefan:
We can often get away with an hourly backup, right?
Stefan:
So it's not quite CDP, but it's nice.
Stefan:
But on the restore, whenever you move data, it will help you as well.
Stefan:
you still might have to live with it.
Stefan:
A couple of hours depending on the data set to do the restore
Stefan:
because you're pulling the bits.
Stefan:
So just for the record, we can actually put a copy, a second copy on
Stefan:
the local, on a local share, right?
Stefan:
so we can accommodate.
Stefan:
We just go to the cloud first.
Stefan:
So that's number one, but we have this nifty thing called the standby image.
Stefan:
So you, let's say you have a Hyper V server at Azure VM.
Stefan:
What we do is we take a backup and then we need immediately do a continuous restore.
Stefan:
We can have it ready either on your server or a NAS or an Azure instance.
Stefan:
So it's actually a quite effective way to keep that copy ready.
Stefan:
And then, of course, your recovery time objective is really
Stefan:
contracted, goes down in minutes.
Stefan:
Right.
Pras:
Because it's basically just spinning up from that copy, right?
Stefan:
correct.
Stefan:
It's already spun up.
Stefan:
It does it proactively.
Stefan:
So it's a continuous.
Stefan:
So I, that's actually a nifty way to do it.
Stefan:
And I love this Azure because, who wants to build a DR site, that you hope
Stefan:
you'll never, ever have to use size it.
Stefan:
Remember the catalog, all this stuff.
Stefan:
And here you can use resources that are there.
Stefan:
You have a cloud formation template and then, yeah, you
Stefan:
have to pay for the storage.
Stefan:
But you really only have to pay for the compute when you light up the VM, right?
Stefan:
Do your sandbox testing and so forth.
Stefan:
It's got
Stefan:
some nice benefits.
Curtis:
I've often been fan of this idea of the pre restore, right?
Curtis:
Because, the fastest restore that ever is ever gonna be is one that's
Curtis:
already done when you need it.
Curtis:
I like that.
Curtis:
I like that a lot.
Curtis:
So if you support that for what workloads?
Stefan:
So we do it.
Stefan:
So it really mostly makes sense for servers, right?
Stefan:
Because that
Stefan:
those are typically the critical.
Stefan:
I mean, we can talk about desktop laptop, but really, or, you know, like, M365,
Stefan:
so it's really a server thing, right?
Stefan:
Where RTO is.
Stefan:
tends to be critical.
Stefan:
and, Hyper V, let's face it, in our segment, this is important
Stefan:
also to understand because I know the podcast also covers a lot of
Stefan:
enterprise vendors, but Microsoft ecosystem is like the 90 plus percent
Stefan:
ecosystem our partners live in, right?
Stefan:
So Hyper V, Azure, VMs, right?
Stefan:
Those would be The main culprits and, we are going to obviously add that for
Stefan:
other hypervisors, like, I don't know, um, VMware, right?
Curtis:
So today you support it for Hyper V and also for physical
Curtis:
servers or just for Hyper V?
Curtis:
nable1-chris: physical virtual servers living like in, in a
Curtis:
hypervisor or in a hyperscaler.
Curtis:
So they the, like they can be in a w s or
Curtis:
Oh, so you, you support this for, for Hyperscalers as well.
Curtis:
Okay, cool.
Curtis:
nable1-chris: key is that we're in the guest, so we don't care
Curtis:
about the hypervisor level.
Curtis:
And that gives us a, the efficiency of moving a lot less data.
Curtis:
And, and then secondly, it gives us that, that horizontal coverage
Curtis:
of basically it doesn't matter where that computing happens.
Curtis:
So that is interesting.
Curtis:
So what I'm hearing you say is that even for the likes of AWS and Azure,
Curtis:
you're still doing a guest level backup.
Curtis:
and what you're doing is you're creating an image that you
Curtis:
can then restore anywhere.
Curtis:
Is that, that accurate?
Curtis:
nable1-chris: You nailed it.
Curtis:
because, as you know, what most people are doing is they're
Curtis:
doing snapshots in AWS and Azure, and then they can copy those and
Curtis:
restore those to other places.
Curtis:
But that requires additional, Work, would be the nicest way.
Pras:
So Stefan, I know you talked about the DR aspects and having this standby
Pras:
copy, but are there other use cases that this can be beneficial other than
Pras:
Hey, I need to quickly restore my data.
Stefan:
yeah, one thing Cove does really well is an item level restore.
Stefan:
It's just in the nature of being that file content level.
Stefan:
But the other primary one that we get all the time is how do I recover
Stefan:
from a destructive cyber attack?
Stefan:
I don't even want to just limit it to a ransomware attack, right?
Stefan:
and that's our sweet spot, I think, because we have what I just described,
Stefan:
a lot of flexibility, right?
Stefan:
Whether you do a standby image or a one time.
Stefan:
On demand restore, the ability to put it either on a server, in your
Stefan:
co location center, on a NAS, or in Azure gives you a lot of flexibility.
Stefan:
So what does that mean?
Stefan:
you can premeditate.
Stefan:
What does the restore look like?
Stefan:
Typically you go in the sandbox first, then run some scans, you
Stefan:
do a password rotation, and then you bring it back into production.
Stefan:
And sometimes when you're hardwired, when you're limited to an array to
Stefan:
array replication, it's great for site to site failover, natural disasters.
Stefan:
Probably preferable.
Stefan:
But when it comes to ransomware tech, you have a lot of flexibility
Stefan:
with Colt because I can just spin it up in Azure and have my
Stefan:
Sentinel 1 instance running already.
Stefan:
Yes, it can be used as a sandbox, and then I can restore it back into production.
Stefan:
I don't want to trivialize the steps, right?
Stefan:
As you can see, a lot of it is actually processed.
Stefan:
But, the technology stack.
Stefan:
Afford that high degree of flexibility that you're probably going to
Stefan:
need right in that restore flow because every customer, every MSP
Stefan:
managed service provider will have a different sort of, data center
Stefan:
under contract and so forth, right?
Curtis:
Well, I appreciate that.
Curtis:
It's been a good conversation.
Curtis:
I, when I'm talking with companies, I always try to find, what is if
Curtis:
there's at least one thing that, really makes them different.
Curtis:
And I think the biggest thing that I've picked up in this particular, discussion
Curtis:
is this idea that you're protecting.
Curtis:
Physical, on prem virtual, and virtual workloads in the cloud, all the same
Curtis:
way, meaning that you're running an agent, which is definitely different,
Curtis:
and it comes with some distinct advantages when you have this DR,
Curtis:
this pre restored DR capability.
Curtis:
I think that's a fascinating, way to do things.
Curtis:
I would certainly like to hear when you add that, that other, uh, hypervisor
Curtis:
that's out there, but I get that you're very focused on the Microsoft, world
Curtis:
and there's nothing wrong with that.
Curtis:
I wanted to thank both of you for, for taking the time to talk with us, Chris.
Curtis:
I will thank, your Canadian self, first.
Curtis:
nable1-chris: thank you for having us, man.
Curtis:
It was great to be here.
Curtis:
Glad to have you.
Curtis:
And Stephan, also, thanks for being on.
Stefan:
Yeah, thanks Curtis.
Stefan:
It's awesome to see you again.
Stefan:
Be well.
Stefan:
Great.
Stefan:
Yeah.
Stefan:
Great podcast.
Stefan:
Thank you.
Curtis:
Always happy to reunite, old friends.
Curtis:
And, speaking of old friends, thanks for listening, folks.
Curtis:
we'd be nothing without you.
Curtis:
Remember to subscribe so that you can restore it all.
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