Data protection at AWS re:Invent - CTO Advisor 071

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All right, welcome to another sponsored episode of the CTO advisor, but this is not an ordinary Sponsored episode we're at AWS reinvent I'm joined by our sponsor Druver Jesse and Jesse. I'm sorry your last name I don't want to I don't want to munch it. Well. It's a Jessica chapas the chapters From Druva se traditional se role But I want to make sure we capture a lot of what's going on from an activity perspective at AWS Riven Jesse 42,000 people Have you on a VMworld before I have it so VMworld is a big show Yeah, a bit overwhelming at times, but it's nice because we know the community We know the people there at this show It took a couple of days before I saw somebody that I actually knew at this show I see a bunch of vendors on the show floor that I've that I recognize some brands Nutanix VMware Some of the folks out of the traditional infrastructure community, but this isn't an infrastructure show right so with that said Druva I know Druva from a lot of the other shows and environment Why is Druva at AWS really right?

That's a good question. That's it, so It reinvent really plays into what what our message is right so Druva is a work where a cloud data protection data management solution So we were born in the cloud our cloud happens to be within AWS so when we architected the solution We architected it within Amazon deployed it with Amazon and manage it within it within Amazon So this is this is right up our alley right. We're kind of viewed as a kind of a You know trade the transitional technology in the kind of a legacy space.

I'll say yeah This is this show is like right up you guys alley you're some of the you're born in the cloud some of your customers You know I think I was talking to Can't remember who it was that I was talking to on stage, but it was basically some customers with 75,000 in users so huge footprint and And a huge footprint and a huge conference, let's talk about some of the the vibe of the booth have you worked the booth at all Yeah, yeah, what has what's been some of the vibe as people have come to the booth?

What what have those conversations been yeah? It's interesting. I mean like you said it's a different conversation. It's a different It's a different crowd right I get yeah, I kind of summed it up as it's not an operational cloud It's a it's a DevOps cloud right right and and this crowd of folks is started It's having the challenges that the the operational people had Traditionally, but they they haven't been exposed to so now they're kind of being exposed to it because now they're running these workloads up in AWS And and you know from a government standpoint They're being told to you know you need to meet these certain requirements that we're meeting on the on-premises stuff right and so it's new To them and and this this this this crowd of folks is they're really looking at just solutions, right?

They want simplicity. This is why AWS works so well for them kind of the ability to deliver and develop quickly and and the solution like ours takes that kind of cumbersome legacy Problem and makes it really easy for them to to kind of get where they need to be so so yeah Andy Jassy on stage yesterday said this is a builders conference AWS is about Reducing not as exact words, but to the effect reducing friction Which you know? Reducing friction in my crowd my I speak mainly to enterprise IT CTO enterprise architect Reducing friction means Eliminating kind of what they do so VM world and VMware was on stage when I don't necessarily on stage They were mentioned on stage several times not in a competitive sense, but because of the teaming of VMware cloud on AWS But that VMware world is very much old guard traditional backup agents Etc and that the concept of reducing friction means that we need to reduce that footprint and Introduce this new solution that enables builders What are some of the builders saying when they see the Druva API the Druva interface?

Compared to what they've used in an agent based backup, right? so it's a great question because in our space right in the data protection space the You know the the challenges around the infrastructure you have to build and maintain to you know Ultimately do the things the operations you need to do right so that that's the hard part is the maintaining and building an architect in The infrastructure to store all the backups maintain all the backups replicate all the backups So what our what our what our pitch is is that all that's done already you just simply consume it, right?

So you you you install where you need to install you create your policies to protect the data And we handle the rest that we have an SLA time to it and we take care of all that so we take that off Your plate the same way that they look again. They look at AWS as instant on infrastructure, right? They don't have to physically build the infrastructure to leverage the technology They just consume the technology when they need it, and that's really where we come in from you know on the data protection side So I like to talk about what customers are doing with that new capability so you free up the it was pretty interesting Conversation that I had with some folks from a fortune 500 just randomly walking in and having hallway conversations at AWS Re-event which is part of the value come to the shows and I asked them What was one of the most exciting announcements from the day?

and they said the serverless Aurora the distributed database that they have or actually, I were I'm not sure as a distributed database, or if it's a rational database, but it's their Amazon's Oracle competitor and the the Conversation centered on serverless Aurora the ability to Just consume the database and they I could see the wheels turning as they were thinking through okay now What can I build when I have the freedom and not worrying about the infrastructure? Where can I redirect my energies to how can I?

Provide veteran these were corporate IT folks. How can I provide better corporate IT? Can you talk to how? Organizations the this direct listener of this show benefits from Basically serverless backup because that's what you guys are serverless backup. Yeah, I mean it's that that on-demand availability of the solution rights again removing that infrastructure removing the whole point the planning piece of it removing the Purchase and deploy of all the components that go along with with a solution that you know like data protection so even with scale out Solutions, I still got to order a box So the best-case scenario Even if I swiped a credit card, I still got to wait for shipping I still have to connect it so you're looking at at best-case scenario if I had a magic wand seven days Between when I run out of physical space in the data center, and I expand my backup solution exactly And so we're moving that off the customer's plate and just delivering a consumption based service I mean, that's the value and we like to say that you know cloud isn't a technology.

It's a it's a business decision, right? It's a delivery model, and that's how we position ourselves the technology You know we get into technology conversations about how we build our infrastructure just to have those the technical conversations But at the end of the day the value to the customers you don't doesn't matter to you. What how this is built Yeah, I love that uh any Jackson a quote from the keynote. He said we don't build cool technology We don't build technology because it's cool.

We build technology because it solves problems actually so Druva has sponsored the podcast from an ad spot perspective for the past few episodes, and we talked about the different aspects of Druva for you know from the VMware administrator the CFO's perspectives to assist those perspective you know kind of the the four big pillars of enterprise IT as you've Discussions this week have you have you seen the range of customers come through is it just the developer and infrastructure guys or is it a Completely broad audience that includes CISO and business you yeah, it's been across the board so we've had conversations with with Kind of infrastructure guys that are now you know they're coming to the show because you know they're being sent here to kind of learn And keep up what's going on because their company's adopting AWS in some way And you know deploying a hybrid cloud strategy And then we had the TED the DevOps guys who come to us specifically with the challenges that they're having with their applications that they're Building in the cloud and being told again that they need to to employ a data protection strategy to that data And they don't you know there's there's ways of doing it, but it's really manual It's you know very cumbersome, and you know there's no automation to it And so we're having those conversations with them to solve their problems So so that the two groups are we we we want to see what what the new options are out there for this You know old problem that we have that continues to grow and then the the guys that are now being told they have to solve This problem for their you know for their new workloads that they're that they're managing so they we're really getting across the board Groups of people and this is why this show has just been really eye-opening for me It's my second year here, and I said when I left here last year So this is really this has been the best show I've been to in years Wow And I've done VMware for the last couple years as well in Dell EMC world and this is just a very different show And I think from the growth you can totally tell like everyone sees that as well, so let's talk a little bit about This ideal of DevOps So DevOps I would have argued that DevOps was the future The we're getting to a point where I've heard and this might be the first show that I've heard this at But we're we're getting to the point where DevOps might be an old thing the the where it goes from I heard of no ops that that kind of transition to DevOps to now no DevOps where Operations and this stuff that really doesn't add business value at the end of the day you know backup as business value Administering backups doesn't add business value having your data protected having the ability to take your data and Move it off on prem to off prem has value But even if I was to say okay developer focus your energies on putting You know grandfather son Backup strategy inside of your application.

That's DevOps what we heard from the show this week was Developers shouldn't have to worry about that. That's not that's not solving a problem How does Druva help solve the data protection problem without adding operations burden to Developments it's a great question because in that sense that was we just remove the infrastructure the idea that we just provide a turnkey Solution right exactly what they're looking for right so the idea that they don't have to architect anything right I just have to turn it on and consume it so even when turning on with consuming if I don't have to there's You know we've abstracted the way of we've abstracted the way The infrastructure so I can consume backup, but in some solutions You know consuming backup actually have to think about it are there ways to create policies in which developers as you know if I'm the infrastructure admin traditional backup guy can I create policies in which the Developer doesn't even have to think about back.

Yes, so that and that's again The whole value there is that you know when you when you when you go and configure policies say in a traditional sense with Backup you have to consider your infrastructure right it has to be able to meet those demands of those policies that you're enforcing and so by just allowing the DevOps guy to not even to just enforce the policies that they're told to enforce that they need to enforce without any Implication of having to manage the infrastructure in the back end it solves a big problem so even conceptually they're not even so they're not Thinking about disk pools.

They're not even thinking about a they're not even thinking about AWS buckets They're just saying you know what how much storage where it needs to be how long to keep it exactly So let's shift the conversation up to product itself. Well. What is the product so we're a data protection solution, so we have Juva currently has Two products that we're shipping and then another one that's coming out in q1 the first Juva started an endpoint backup So laptop desktops, we've expanded beyond the backup piece to a whole governance engine Compliance engine right really focused on user data enterprise user data right laptops desktop mobile devices and also cloud apps so integration with the office on exchange online officer 65 G suite box and Salesforce and then what we've done is we Then we moved into the infrastructure space about three or four years ago and started going on-premises for for server workloads So I can back I can back up a VM with this you can back up a VM infrastructure and as infrastructure physical servers SQL servers We have customers that are backing up You know you see two workloads in the cloud with us This is all our agent up there, and they can we can back up that data, so that's the interesting point So I've talked to some born in the cloud backup solutions And they're just focused just on cloud solution that the they've they've they've looked at the data center And they say you know what that is the old guard will give that away to the convolts of the world Yeah, they do a great job backing that stuff up, but you guys Know not so much, so you're I know that you're the the model that your user focus But this concept that now I don't need two solutions potentially to back up for data protection I can use one solution.

I guess the argument the pushback on that would be that can't any solution be One solution can't possibly back up every use case where's the sweet spot for Druva and where's the things that you guys look to partner with other product or yes, that's a great question So you know we you know high value data distributed data Long-term retention right highly regulated industries that that's where we shine right it's again from a delivery standpoint Just being able to consume and not having to architect a solution the clouds a perfect solution for that right You know within the architecture We take care of everything that goes on with it with the backup solution as far as replication the data management the data You know the keeping the integrity of the security all that's wrapped into our solution And again being able to you know our greatest customers have three four hundred remote sites with data On all the sites, and we're protecting all those with a single policy engine right and a single view into the the entire Environment and they can audit they can see you know everyone's meeting those requirements Data protection and retention standpoint, so just that's that's our sweet spot lots of data spread across you know a big area So let's talk about GDPR GDPR is the big European regularization regular regular day I always have trouble with that word regulation Close enough.

Yeah coming. Yeah, it's it's actually Already official now. It's going to be enforced beginning May 2018 We've had a lot of conversation on this podcast around it GDPR I think at this point is table stakes from a backup and Solution perspective, but refresh the audience why should they be concerned about GDPR? And how does Druva help meet some of those concerns right so the GDPR rate is the the? European right to be forgotten right so the you know if you if a Consumer or a person wants you know you to erase all their all the references to them Or you know their data personal data you you have to do you're liable for yeah So I have tapes you know I have tapes this man.

You know seven years old So if I don't have written permission to keep their data forever Yeah, and I'm not even clear on even if written permission to keep your data forever is Enough anymore, I think I get the impression the regulators really want European citizens to be able to Control their data irregardless of what they might have signed five years ago, so if I have tapes sitting in a warehouse today I'm responsible from a GDPR perspective for that data They're still on that tape from that regular regular regular regulation numbers.

I'm gonna avoid that word I need to find a new world work to say, but I'm still on the hook Going forward how does Druva help with with something like that? I mean we eliminate tape right so we don't use tape We don't use removable media right and they're kind of looking forward right so you know our We like to say our technology was born in the cloud and what that means is that we built it at web scale leveraging cloud Technologies right so we were natively you written to use object storage right scalable object story How resilient things like Glacier and so on and you know?

I think we I see it, and I think a lot of people see it. Is that you know the GDPR is an example of how data management is changing right pretty quickly and the requirements to it's actually To manage that data are changing in the traditional ways of unplugging a tape and putting it into a vault you know miles away Yet not really carrying What's on it anymore those days are coming to an end right so you know data is a new oil in that sense so it has To be mineable it has to be available so Druva as a technology as a cloud data platform We're building in all these tools around indexing searchability of the data being able to identify the data And then actually destroy the data right so if Larry Smith from France That's pretty bad Larry Smith from France said you know what sent a request to the CTO advisor So you know what you you wrote up a article on me three years ago Remove that article remove all backups of that content What is that experience like for so so we have in the NSYNC world in our endpoint world We can do full text ending on the data so we can search the content of the data So if and then we can actually delete data out of backup sets right okay?

So yeah, we have the ability to actually take the best action to do it right right I think anything it really can Especially when you introduce removal media into so it's all about that service of being able to provide that right so if you look at Legacy model of data protection You know there are a couple companies out there that have plugins for search and discovery Those are huge infrastructures that you need to manage again on top of your backup infrastructure to you know to index data and manage all those indexes and so on like And so being able to offer that as a simple turnkey solution to a customer has an enormous value right so We can provide that to you as a feature so let's let's go to inverse data that I have to keep so FDA Legal let's say a FD or even a legal hold which is kind of random I have a policy that says obviously I can take a set of retention parties policy that says 12 months And I have ongoing litigation that's going to expand beyond that 12 months And there's a legal hold and I have to potentially keep this data for three years How's that experience with roots?

It's it's a couple clicks actually so you identify the custodians of the users that you need to retain their data You put on a you walk through our legal hold wizard and and in that it tells you you have us An option to retain all their data only their their last backup the last copy of their data Or you can do a date range right so if you're only supposed to do it for a three-month period January to March you can put that on at that point once that hold is created That data is frozen in the cloud it is frozen in an archived state We create a chain of custody report behind it You can actually click and generate that and bring it to court if it ever goes to trial But the idea is that it's the data is it can't be tampered with And we can do that in three or four clicks of a mouse literally And then we can also offer third-party access into that data So we partner with a couple of e-discovery companies a couple that are run within AWS themselves And they can tie right into the the archive set through a web dev link and extract that data straight out into their application at that Point so we can help in the EDRM model the first half of it the collection preservation of the data And then pass it off to the to the folks who process it later All right, so we're coming to the close of the podcast any last thoughts you want to leave the audience with What's kind of the the hook that you want to leave us with when it comes to Drew?

Yeah, I mean Juva is a forward-thinking You know cloud data protection data protection Company where the technology we're developing you know we're looking you know it's still a phrase But you know skating to where the puck's going right? You know our Apollo release is something that's right in line with that with AWS workloads And so that's how we see ourselves as a company is an innovator in a in an old space That has new challenges that need to be met and so we want to want to solve those for Christmas All right with that said we're Jesse.

I really appreciate you coming pleasure up to we're in the plaza With actually a wonderful view of the wind golf course makes me want to stay If anything ever wanted me to made me want to stay in Vegas another night that views Helps out a little bit, but until then you can find me on the web the CTO advisor There's the website at CTO advisor is the Twitter handle Jesse. Are you on social media? com all right All right and until then talk to you next CTO advisor subscribe to the podcast rate us in iTunes it helps with discoverability talk to you next CTO advisor