 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and about 14,000 other people that are here live in Las Vegas. We're joined by a couple of folks from Dell EMC. We've got CUBE alumni, Beth Phelan, president of Data Protection Division and Sherrod Rustogi, senior vice president of product for data protection. Great to have you guys on the program. Thank you. Good to be here. So day one, very high energy keynote talking about four ways in which companies that are going to be successful can transform. Security, workforce, digital, IT. Beth, what are some of the trends in IT that you're seeing now in relation to data protection? Yeah, data protection is transforming in the same way that the rest of the IT environment is. The move towards simplicity, automation, converged infrastructures, hyper-converged infrastructures are all playing out in data protection. And it's a really hot and dynamic market right now. So there's a ton of interesting things going on. And of course, we like the rest of IT is looking at how to help our customers best take advantage of the cloud. Well, speaking of cloud, how has cloud affected your business generally and specifically how are you responding? I mean, I think cloud is going to be a massive trend as we've already seen that, right? And I think there are really two dimensions of how the change is happening. And one I think is just the workloads are migrating from on-prem to cloud. And we are really helping our customers save and store more data in the cloud and do better disaster recovery from the cloud. At the same time, people are thinking about lifting and shifting their existing workloads to the cloud and also having more cloud-native applications. How do you sort of protect that, right? So we're doing a lot of work in terms of how those trends happen and how we help them. At the same time, with the cloud, data protection itself is evolving, right? It's no longer just about protecting the data, but it's also about compliance and visibility. It's about governance of the data. It's really about management, making it available. So those are trends in which I think this industry is going to basically evolve over time. I mean, one of the challenges with data protection and generally backup specifically, it's always been an afterthought. Oh, we have a bolt on. I got one size fits all. The industry obviously has been very much aware of that and working hard to address that. Is it a, what's the fix? Is it software? Is it hardware? Is it mindset process? What if you could address that, Beth? What are customers doing to make data protection more resilient? I think making sure the data protection is tightly integrated with their applications. So whether you're the VM admin or the database admin, you don't want to have to have some other interface to go to, it just has to be a natural extension of what your day-to-day job is. So as we work to make our products very well integrated with the end applications and at the same time give that overall visibility and governance, we can meet both needs. And so automation is part of that, obviously. Unlike my iPhone where the backup never works, I have to go manually initiate it, even though it's supposed to work that way. But where does automation fit? So we really want to automate and simplify the workflows for data protection, right? Make it very easy for our new users, like the VM admins, the database admins, the cloud admins, how do you make it easy for them to protect the data? How do you sort of create role-based access for them? So we're really simplifying and amplifying that as we go forward. So I want to touch, Beth, for you on security transformation. As I was mentioning earlier, Michael Dell talked about those four transformative elements that businesses need to undertake to be successful. And security transformation is one of that. But what does security transformation actually mean? If we look at, and one of the things Michael Dell also said in the keynote is, you know, obviously proliferation of data keeps growing and growing and growing as do attack surfaces. So how does a company leverage data protection, not as an afterthought like you were saying or both on as it was before, but as part of a strategy to actually transform from a security perspective? I mean, data protection can make sure that, excuse me, data protection helps ensure that they can get to their data after something happens. So you can protect all that you want. There's still no 100% guarantee that you're going to be able to keep the malware out. So with things like cyber recovery, we're able to give customers the confidence that they're going to have a good copy of their data independent of what happens to them. So it's really the flip side of the coin of security. You have to provide security. You also have to provide confidence that you're going to be able to recover if you are attacked. So ransomware has obviously been a big topic in the news last couple of years. You know, the prescription I was always, you know, create an air gap and then you talk to the guys, you know, the black cast, and they say air gap. I get through that, no problem. So what are your customers doing? Obviously it's a big concern of a lot of executives. It comes up in the boardroom. What do you guys recommend? I think this is actually, you're absolutely correct, right? It's a big board level conversation today about how do you protect your most mission critical, most valuable data? And yes, there are attacks. Yes, there are threats, but really it's about how do you recover back to a stable, steady state? And you know, air gaps are valuable. I mean, they do prevent you from external threats. And with our cyber recovery solution, you know, we're actually helping our customers think about first about what is your most mission critical data and then how do you sort of protect it and how do you make it available? You know, if and when that disaster does strike you and make it easy for you to recover back to your steady state. And I would think part of that is your response mechanism and the process by which you respond, quickly you can respond. Does Dell EMC play a role in that process part of it and what role do you play? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. So, you know, the, what's most important in our cyber recovery is actually you get back to a safe state, right? It's a little bit different than a classic disaster recovery, you know, where you have weather or some other event which is striking that, right? So, what's different on cyber recovery versus classic DR is that you actually have a little bit more time, but you don't want to get back to the right steady safe state. So, you also do a lot of checking of the data, your sandbox data, you make sure it's actually all safe. There's no external malware in there, you protect it and then you make it available and you recover it when you do need to. So, it's a little bit different than a classic disaster recovery. Right. So, I was looking on the Dell EMC website the other day and saw a couple of stats that I'd like to get some insight on from a real world customer perspective. And I read that Dell EMC protects 150 petabytes of data in the cloud and two X more data in the cloud is managed by Dell EMC technology than the closest competitor. Give us an example, Beth, of a customer that you've really helped to facilitate resiliency, really this theme of business resilience. So, absolutely, and especially working with Virtustream, customers are able to seamlessly extend their data domain storage capacity into a cloud. And so, by setting up their cloud tier, data domain will automatically, based on a time policy, move backups into that cloud, into the cloud configuration. One customer that comes to examples in the medical field and you can imagine both the importance of privacy and the importance of retention of records in the medical field. And so, they come to mind that somebody has really taken advantage of being able to do cloud tiering to keep their TCO down, but at the same time meet the requirements around record retention. All right, so takeaways from Dell Technologies World. What should we know? What do you want your customers to take away from this event? I think, number one, I'd say, for data protection, there's a huge value in terms of low cost, high performance, those are key requirements to remain. Simplicity, flexibility are also very important in their coming, and then finally I would say that, think about cloud workloads and how to use a cloud to better protect your data. Okay, and then Beth, I wonder if we could ask you, what should we be watching over the next, near term, mid term, even long term, if you want to throw that in there from Dell EMC? One, you're going to see us bringing even more products to the market that are easy to deploy, easy to configure, easy to use, in all kinds of new and exciting creative ways. And two, as people's data sources become more and more disparate and they're moving to SaaS and using a cloud-native environment, we will continue to be working with our customers to make sure they can still protect their data. So we're going with our customers on that cloud journey. Well, thank you guys so much for stopping by and sharing with us some of the trends in IT where data protection's concerned, the innovation that Dell EMC is doing and how you're helping customers to really embark on a successful security transformation. Yeah, thanks Lisa. Great, thank you so much. Thank you. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're live in Las Vegas. Day one of Dell Technologies World Stick Around. We'll be right back after a short break.