Deep Dive Into Cloud Backups, Tapes, AaaS & More

This is the second part of the interview between co-founder at Assurance IT and Senior System Engineer from Veeam. In the first section, they revealed a 360 view on ransomware and its prevention methods. To read the first part, click here. In this part, they do a deep dive into cloud backups, tapes, advanced AaaS and more. They discuss how the cast & acquisition saves enterprises, what enterprises have coming for them and why VMware Cloud is being used by remote workers. Keep reading to hear even more.

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THE REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RTO & RPO 

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LUIGI:  

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Yeah, no, I, so you said something interesting. You said RTO RPO. I'd like to believe, and I laugh when I say that, but I'd like to believe that that customers actually know that information. So, you know, the persona, that assurance it talks to for the most part, is it director or IT manager, maybe a CISO from a cybersecurity perspective. I'm a systems engineer, or you know, IT admin, right? Anyone who's responsible for the uptime or the infrastructure being available? What happens is, this is, I guess, more of an opinion than actual factual, quick, you know, factual response.

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But what happens when you sit down with an IT admin or an IT manager, right at a relatively, you know, I'd say mid-market customer, and you ask them what their RTO and RPO you know, levels are, and they don't have an answer. I mean, what happens? What goes through your mind? Because I'll give you what goes through my mind. And I'm just curious as to what you think.  

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BRANDON: 

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 Yeah. So well, it's interesting. Like, you know, this is my first it jobs have been here for years now. So, I know quite a bit about Veeam and data protection, I really enjoy what I do. But when I get asked these questions, sometimes whether it's a webinar or like these interviews, or when I talk to people, I surely, they know, RTO RPO, because I know it like the back of my hand. But right, but that's just because that's what I do every day. So, when they talk to,  

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I guess, you could say expert in the field, you know, the recovery point objective, you know, they asked what that is, right. So, and I explained recovery point is, you know, how far back do you need to be able to go right, how much data loss can you afford? The recovery time objective is how quickly do you want to be up and running. And of course, some people say, well, I want to be able to go back all day, every day, and I want to be able to restore in two seconds all the time, well, then we start talking about price, and then they have to make you know, those harder decisions. And we talk about tier one applications, tier two, and so on. 

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LUIGI:  

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Right? Okay, so you try and segment the applications based on it. So, and that that was my, you know, again, my opinion is that we often come to come into contact or communicate with clients that may not know, RPO or RTO, right? They may know it, but not in that context. Or they may not know and in that acronym, right, they know, they need to get stuff up running quick. It's never been discussed as our qR deal. Right? So, for us that we see a huge maturity gap there.

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And then that's where we have to really sit down and help them later on, or layer in the different aspects of enterprise protection and more so than data protection, because I think at that point there, they need to understand, you know, have you really done an impact assessment? Right, have you done? Have you done an impact assessment? Have you done an understanding of what your business, you know, can have more, but what can happen to your business? In the event? You know, you don't do that. Right.

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So, I think, you know, that's why I asked, because for us, it's also a sensitive question to ask sometimes, because, you know, some team members, I've been working with this, I've sat down with the customer and have asked them what their SLA czar, and they don't always know. So yeah, I mean, I think like you said, there's a there's some blurred lines between, you know, continuing business or business continuity and protecting the business. I think there's definitely a there's definitely some maturity that needs to be kind of brought in. And, you know, that's we're happy to do that, because that demonstrates us as an industry expert, or thought leader as well.  

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DATA PROTECTION OR CYBER SECURITY 

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LUIGI:

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 Let me just switch gears here? Do you sir, do you often get brought into the conversation when it comes to cybersecurity? Or are you strictly talking data protection?  

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BRANDON: 

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 So, it does kind of blur the lines. But typically, I stick to the recovery, data protection recovery, right? I'm not I don't have any kind of certifications in the cybersecurity's things like that. But we touch on so many things, right. So, we have to understand how different platforms like VMware work or how the cloud works. And you know how this different hardware is because Veeam is software, and we integrate with so many things. And ransomware is kind of dark cloud hovering over all that right, so we definitely have to be aware. But typically, I just kind of rely on our best practices and some of the things that I've learned and try not to veer too far out of my lane when it comes to cybersecurity. 

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WHAT’S COMING NEXT FOR ENTERPRISES?

LUIGI:  

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I get it. So now we're talk a little about Veeam What's, what's new and exciting at Veeam last few months, what do you see coming down the pipe? What's differentiating between? And really, you know what customers are excited about? 

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BRANDON:  

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Yeah, well, man, I could probably go on and on. So, you know, it's been a fast ride here every year. Sometimes even sooner than that. We're having new releases, right. I've seen Veeam. I'm sorry Veeam backup for Office 365. On version one, when I started four years ago, it's already on version five, right? We just release team support got multi-factor authentication. In terms of our flagship product backup and replication, we went from 10 to 11 in just one year, and the releases are crazy, right? We've got CDP or continuous data protection. We've got these immutability features that I mentioned earlier, support for so many more platforms, we released version one of the Mac agents, and made some improvements to some of our other physical operating systems. And in a lot of integrations with some hyper scalars in the public cloud as well.

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So those are the big releases. In terms of what's coming down the pipe, just more of that I can't really speak too much on roadmap right now, because we just had all of our major releases. One thing is Veeam has always had a specialized focus, starting with VMware backups. And then we had we added additional hypervisors. Now physical now, cloud, SAS offerings, how do we bring that all together as much as possible and integrate a lot of those products? So, you're not just buying the whole, you know, all a cart kind of thing?  

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WHAT IS THE CAST & ACQUISITION? HOW IT HELPS ENTERPRISES? 

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LUIGI:  

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Yeah, I mean, definitely. Veeam is the cutting edge of backup technology. So that's one of the reasons why assurance it partners have been a while back. So definitely can attest to the speed and how things are going from a technology perspective. Brandon, can you comment on the cast and acquisition? Is that something that you see on a regular basis? I haven't heard I mean, I've seen and heard about it, but I mean, can you talk a little about what that is and what it does and how it's helping customers?  

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BRANDON:  

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Yeah, I can talk to it from a technical perspective, and a little of what I've seen, so yeah, so Caston was acquired by Veeam. Which is interesting, because all of them stuff has always been in house, there's been there's been some talks in the past about little things that never came to fruition. But Caston is the first major player where we've, you know, we brought them in house, they are still a separate entity in terms of purchasing, I think the price book is just now, as we as this video gets released, it may be on the books, but it's right around the corner from being a Veeam product you can purchase.

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And yeah, I think that, you know, when you see the evolution of it from these legacy hardware systems to virtualisation to the cloud, I think that next step is, you know, containers and Kubernetes, and things like that. I haven't seen a ton of it. You know, maybe it's the tier of partners that I work with, or the kind of people that I'm focused with, but definitely a lot of talk in the industry as a whole on, you know, containers and things like that. 

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LUIGI:  

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So traditionally, Veeam has been kind of mid has kind of targeted the mid-market. Right. Safe to say, I got what I would imagine, we know, targeting mid-market, does the cast and acquisition and backing up Kubernetes? And, you know, bringing data protection to Kubernetes. Does that, that potential for Veeam to really target some larger enterprises in the long run?  

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ALL ABOUT DATA PROTECTION AND VMware CLOUD  

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BRANDON:  

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Yeah. So, this is just the resonant nerd speaking. But I think so. And that's probably why I'm not seeing it as much. You know, I'm working with service providers. And a lot of the run rates that I see are, you know, VMware, little cloud. But yeah, I think the larger enterprise companies, commercial sectors, and maybe even some government entities, are some of these larger enterprises that, you know, honestly may be a little more mature in their offerings. And so yeah, the Kubernetes and you know, things caston Yeah, I think those are definitely going to be targeting those larger markets. For sure.  

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LUIGI:  

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Okay. And you mentioned something fascinating earlier. So, you're talking about, you know, the, how Veeam is releasing new products, and new feature sets, and so on. And you mentioned Mac OS. And so, you made me think about something so the last 18 months, obviously, due to where we are from a you know, from a world perspective, we've seen a huge spike or uptick in teleworking and remote working. What's your experience? Maybe I'm not on the service provider side, but what's your experience? In regard to the backing of the endpoint? You mentioned? Office 365? You know, that's pretty much covered for the most part, what's VMs stance on the endpoint? And you're, you see a lot of that happening with customers? 

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BRANDON:   

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Yeah, for sure. So, when I started, and I don't know if Veeam specifically said this, but you know what I had heard from other employees that been there a long time is that Veeam is not going to support physical machines. We're a virtualization software company. And we want to really focus in on that. But that didn't last long, right? We did release the agents for Windows and Linux. And we went Windows, Linux, different versions. We're on version five of the Linux and Windows agents, lots of really cool features. And yeah, now the Mac agent version one, which was another surprise to me, but I think a lot of that does a test to the endpoint backups and needing those, you know, solutions at home.

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That's another thing we've added into our ransomware webinar over the last year or so is there's so many endpoints now and people are working from home on their home networks, and they're a little, maybe a little less cautious about where they're browsing, or you know what they're clicking on. So, we definitely want to have those endpoint protections for sure.  

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LUIGI:  

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Okay. Very good. Okay. Before we end the conversation here, it's been wonderful, actually, I appreciate the expertise and your input here. So, what do you see happening? I mean, you know, what do you see happening over the next 12 to 18 months, from a data protection perspective as a whole on this? You think we're going to see customers much more, I guess, more aware or more worried about protecting their data? Or is this something I mean, I see with our customers, I mean, there's just more data being secured more data being protected? What's your thought process? If you just have to, you know, give me a 30 second here elevator? 

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DATA PROTECTION AND SECURED DATA 

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BRANDON: 

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Yeah, I think one big thing is we're going to continue to see an evolution to the cloud. There's still a lot of people that I talked to that, you know, their bosses or whoever, hold the keys are not comfortable with the cloud, you know, but I think that we're starting to show that, hey, you know if you work like, like, for instance, working with you guys, right? Somebody who's a value-added reseller, right, an MSP, who's actually going to sit down with you and has and can walk you through all this versus a do-it-yourself approach is very important. But I still think that a lot of end users, like you said, or they're focused on so much, which again, is why having someone like an assurance it can really help to handle a lot of that for you.

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So, you can get back to what you're doing. And I think Veeam is just going to continue to innovate and come out with more solutions. Even though we are data protection, we're not a ransomware company, per se, I have seen a lot of features that are in response to security kind of thing. So, we are starting to focus a lot of that very heavily.  

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LUIGI:  

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Okay. Interesting. And you brought up another good point, when you talk about, you know, more applications, more SaaS enabled applications or more platforms as a service that are released. You mentioned Office 365. So obviously, obviously, Office 365 is the know, the major one out there we talk about what other applications that you know, over that you can speak of is Veeam going to be protecting in the cloud. I mean, I have a lot of customers who are using, you know, SFDC, they're using HubSpot or using QuickBooks.

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Right. And I mean, online, these are just to name a few. I mean, workday, you've got the next week, you've got a bunch of SaaS based applications. Does Veeam play in that space? I know they're doing Office 365. Today, it's a natural it fit. But what happens to the SaaS based applications that people often use and forget to back up?  

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ADVANCED SaaS BASED APPLICATIONS 

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BRANDON:  

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Yeah. So, in our forums, I've seen a lot of talk of things, but I haven't heard anything official. So, I can't really comment on anything outside of Oh, 365.  

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LUIGI:  

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Yeah, I figured, yeah, unfortunately. 

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BRANDON:  

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But just in terms of the cloud in general. So, we are starting to see workloads in the cloud being backed up, right. So, a lot, like I mentioned a lot of the hyper scalars, we're starting to back up those workloads. And, you know, that's a great play for a Cloud Connect to write a cloud-to-cloud solution so that you're not backing up things in the same cloud, even though these massive hyper scalars are, you know, very durable, we do see outages, we do see attacks, but you know, we do see glitches and bugs, so cloud to cloud solution, we're probably going to focus a lot more on that.

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So not only backing up the virtual machines running in these hyper scalars, but also, you know, relational database services, and network configurations and things like that. So Veeam is starting to step outside that image-based backup and focusing on other applications that aren't necessarily bound to, you know, a common computer. 

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LUIGI:   

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Yeah, that's very important. Because like you said, there's a lot more hyper scalars are definitely, you know, doing their job, by hosting and protecting data, you know, we have to give it to them. But there are outages associated and kind of the analogy we use, you're obviously putting a lot of your eggs in the same basket.

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So, you want to be able to kind of get that data off, you know, off that off cloud or off that are often environment just in case something does go wrong. Right. And it's your it's your data, right, it's again, it's your data, so you need to have a plan for it. So yeah, that's interesting. I think that's, that's one of the spaces we've been, we've been talking about a lot over the last few months to customers, from what I'm hearing from the team, who's out in the field.

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I think what they're what they're asking a lot of customers are asking is, well, you know, I've got my Salesforce data. And yeah, maybe Salesforce is backing it up, for that matter. But how about the day I want to leave Salesforce? Right? Well, how do I do that? Right? How do I get that data out of there, right? So, you end up in this vendor lock in situation, and you don't know how to get your data out?

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So, I mean, there's always ways to export that data. But is it really a comprehensive approach to backing up and retaining and archiving that data? I don't, I don't believe so. Doesn't look like it right. So, I'm sure there's going to be some stuff coming out, and I've seen some providers or some individual companies out there trying to create some individual backups for these pieces of software. It's just Part of a long-term strategy. Unfortunately, it's a one-time snapshot thing. Right? 

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BRANDON:  

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Right. No. 

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LUIGI:  

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I appreciate the insight here, you know, kind of comparing notes and comparing what we've seen in the industry. So, this is good. 

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LUIGI:  

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Alright, I want to thank you today for your time for your insight. I think it was a pleasure. And it was also insightful for me to hear about business continuity from an industry expert like yourself. Also, I want to thank you and I want to wish you a great day, Brandon, thank you very much. 

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BRANDON: 

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Thank you, you too. 

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