 The rapid rise of ransomware attacks has added yet another challenge that business technology executives have to worry about these days. Cloud storage, immutability, and air gaps have become a must have arrows in the quiver of organizations data protection strategies. But the important reality that practitioners have embraced is data protection, it can't be an afterthought or a bolt on it, has to be designed into the operational workflow of technology systems. The problem is oftentimes data protection is complicated with a variety of different products, services, software components, and storage formats. This is why object storage is moving to the forefront of data protection use cases because it's simpler and less expensive. The put data, get data syntax has always been alluring but object storage historically was seen as this low-cost niche solution that couldn't offer the performance required for demanding workloads, forcing customers to make hard trade-offs between cost and performance. That has changed. The ascendancy of cloud storage generally in the S3 format specifically has catapulted object storage to become a first-class citizen in a mainstream technology. Moreover, innovative companies have invested to bring object storage performance to parity with other storage formats. But cloud costs are often a barrier for many companies as the monthly cloud bill and egress fees in particular steadily climb. Welcome to secure storage hot takes. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be your host of the program today where we introduce our community to Wasabi, a company that is purpose-built to solve this specific problem with what it claims to be the most cost-effective and secure solution on the market. We have three segments today to dig into these issues. First up is David Friend, the well-known entrepreneur who co-founded Carbonite and now Wasabi. We'll then dig into the product with Drew Schlesel of Wasabi and then we'll bring in the customer perspective with Kevin Warrenda of the Hotchkiss Cool. Let's get right into it. We're here with David Friend, the president and CEO and co-founder of Wasabi. The hot storage company, David, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, Dave, nice to be here. Great to have you. Look, you hit a home run with Carbonite back when building a unicorn was a lot more rare than it has been in the last few years. Why did you start Wasabi? Well, when I was still CEO of Wasabi, my genius co-founder, Jeff Flowers, and our chief architect came to me and said, you know, when we started this company, a state-of-the-art disk drive was probably 500 gigabytes and now we're looking at eight terabyte, 16 terabyte, 20 terabyte, even 100 terabyte drives coming down the road. And sooner or later, the old architectures that were designed around these much smaller disk drives is gonna run out of steam because even though the capacities are getting bigger and bigger, the speed with which you can get data on and off of a hard drive isn't really changing all that much. And Jeff Force saw a day when the architectures of sort of legacy storage like Amazon S3 and so forth was going to become very inefficient and slow. And so he came up with a new highly parallelized architecture and he said, I wanna go off and see if I can make this work. So I said, you know, good luck, go to it. And they went off and spent about a year and a half in the lab designing and testing this new storage architecture. And when they got it working, I looked at the economics of this and I said, holy cow, we can sell cloud storage for a fraction of the price of Amazon, still make very good gross margins and it will be faster. So this is a whole new generation of object storage that you guys have invented. So I recruited a new CEO for Carbonite and left to found Wasabi because the market for cloud storage is almost infinite. When you look at all the world's data, IDC has these crazy numbers, 120 zettabytes or something like that. And if you look at that as the potential market size storing that data, we're talking trillions of dollars, not billions. And so I said, look, this is a great opportunity. If you look back 10 years, all the world's data was on prem. If you look forward 10 years, most people agree that most of the world's data is going to live in the cloud. We're at the beginning of this migration. We've got an opportunity here to build an enormous company. That's very exciting. I mean, you've always been a trend spotter and I want to get your perspectives on data protection and how it's changed. It's obviously on people's minds with all the ransomware attacks and security breaches but thinking about your experiences and past observations, what's changed in data protection and what's driving the current very high interest in the topic? Well, I think from a data protection standpoint, immutability, the equivalent of the old worm tapes but applied to cloud storage is become core to the backup strategies and disaster recovery strategies for most companies. And if you look at our partners who make backup software like Veeam, Commvault, Veritas, ArcServe and so forth, most of them are really taking advantage of mutable cloud storage as a way to protect customer data, customer's backups from ransomware. So the ransomware guys are pretty clever and they discovered early on that if someone could do a full restore from their backups, they're never going to pay a ransom. So once they penetrate your system, they get pretty good at sort of watching how you do your backups. And before they encrypt your primary data, they figure out some way to destroy or encrypt your backups as well so that you can't do a full restore from your backups. And that's where immutability comes in. In the old days, you wrote what was called a worm tape, write once, read many. And those could not be overwritten or modified once they were written. And so we said, let's come up with an equivalent of that for the cloud. And it's very tricky software. You know, it involves all kinds of encryption algorithms and blockchain and this kind of stuff. But the net result is, if you store your backups in immutable buckets in a product like Wasabi, you can't alter it or delete it for some period of time. So you could put a timer on it, say a year or six months or something like that. Once that date is written, you know, there's no way you can go in and change it, modify it or anything like that, including even Wasabi's engineers. So David, I want to ask you about data sovereignty. It's obviously a big deal, I mean, especially for companies with a presence overseas, but which really is any digital business these days. How should companies think about approaching data sovereignty? Is it just large firms that should be worried about this? Or should everybody be concerned? What's your point of view? Well, all around the world, countries are imposing data sovereignty laws. And if you're in the storage business like we are, if you don't have physical data storage in country, you're probably not gonna get most of the business. You know, since Christmas, we've built data centers in Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, Singapore, and I probably forgotten one or two. But the reason we do that is twofold. One is, you know, if you're closer to the customer, you're gonna get better response time, lower latency. And that's just a speed of light issue. But the bigger issue is if you've got financial data, if you have healthcare data, if you have data relating to security like surveillance videos and things of that sort, most countries are saying that data has to be stored in country. So you can't send it across borders to some other place. And if your business operates in multiple countries, you know, dealing with data sovereignty is going to become an increasingly important problem. So in May of 2018, that's when the fines associated with violating GDPR went into effect. And GDPR was like this mainspring of privacy and data protection laws. And we've seen it spawn other public policy things like the CCPA and it continues to evolve. We've seen judgments in Europe against big tech and this tech lash that's in the news in the US and the elimination of third party cookies. What does this all mean for data protection in the 2020s? Well, you know, every region and every country, you know, has their own idea of about privacy, about security, about the use of even the use of metadata surrounding, you know, customer data and things of this sort. So, you know, it's getting to be increasingly complicated because GDPR, for example, imposes different standards from the kind of privacy standards that we have here in the US. Canada has a somewhat different set of data sovereignty issues and privacy issues. So it's getting to be an increasingly complex, you know, mosaic of rules and regulations around the world. And this makes it even more difficult for enterprises to run their own, you know, infrastructure because companies like Wasabi, where we have physical data centers in all kinds of different markets around the world. And we've already dealt with the business of how to meet the requirements of GDPR and how to meet the requirements of some of the countries in Asia and so forth. You know, rather than an enterprise doing that just for themselves, if you running your applications or keeping your data in the cloud, you know, now a company like Wasabi with, you know, 34,000 customers, we can go to all the trouble of meeting these local requirements on behalf of our entire customer base. And that's a lot more efficient and a lot more cost effective than if each individual country has to go deal with the local regulatory authorities. Yeah, it's compliance by design, not by chance. Okay, let's zoom out for the final question, David. You're thinking about the discussion that we've had around ransomware and data protection and regulations, what does it mean for a business's operational strategy and how do you think organizations will need to adapt in the coming years? Well, you know, I think there are a lot of forces driving companies to the cloud. And, you know, and I do believe that if you come back five or 10 years from now you're going to see a majority of the world state is going to be living in the cloud. And I think storage, data storage is going to be a commodity, much like electricity or bandwidth. And it's going to be done right. It will comply with the local regulations. It'll be fast, it'll be local. And there will be no strategic advantage that I can think of for somebody to stand up and run their own storage, especially considering the cost differential. You know, the most analysts think that the full all-in costs of running your own storage is in the 20 to 40 terabytes per month range. Whereas, you know, if you migrate your data to the cloud, like Wasabi, you're talking probably $6 a month. And so I think people are learning how to, are learning how to deal with the idea of an architecture that involves storing your data in the cloud as opposed to, you know, storing your data locally. Wow, that's, that's like a 6x more expensive in the cloud. It's more than 6x. Yeah, I think you did, go get it please. In addition to which, you know, just finding the people to babysit this kind of equipment has become nearly impossible today. Well, and with the focus on digital business, you don't want to be wasting your time with that kind of heavy lifting. David, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Great Boston entrepreneur. We've followed your career for a long time and looking forward to the future. Thank you. Okay, in a moment, Drew Schlessel will join me and we're going to dig more into product. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Keep it right there. Oh, Brandon Sales got an email. Click here for a trip to Bombay. It's not even called Bombay anymore but she clicked it anyway. And now our data's been held hostage. And now we're on a sinking ship and the hackers in our system just cause Brenda wanted a trip. She clicked on something stupid and our data's out of our control into the hands of a hacker. Joining me now is Drew Schlessel who is the senior director of product marketing at Wasabi. Hey Drew, good to see you again. Thanks for coming back on theCUBE. Dave, great to be here. Great to see you. All right, let's get into it. You know, Drew, prior to the pandemic, zero trust, just like kind of like digital transformation was sort of a buzzword. And now it's become a real thing, almost a mandate. What's Wasabi's take on zero trust? So absolutely right. It's been around a while and now people are paying attention. Wasabi's take is zero trust is a good thing. There are too many places where the bad guys are getting in. And I think of zero trust as kind of smashing laziness. It takes a little work, takes some planning, but done properly and using the right technologies, using the right vendors, the rewards are of course tremendous. You can put to rest the fears of ransomware and having your systems compromised. Well, and we're going to talk about this, but there's a lot of process and thinking involved and design in your zero trust. And you don't want to be wasting time messing with infrastructure. So we're going to talk about that. There's a lot of discussion in the industry, Drew, about immutability and air gaps. I'd like you to share Wasabi's point of view on these topics. How do you approach it and what makes Wasabi different? So in terms of air gap and immutability, the beautiful thing about object storage, which is what we do all the time, is that it makes it that much easier to have a secure immutable copy of your data someplace that's easy to access and doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to get your data back. We're working with some of the best, partners in the industry. We're working with folks like Veeam, Commvault, Arc, Marquis, MSP360, all folks who understand that you need to have multiple copies of your data. You need to have a copy stored offsite and that copy needs to be immutable. And we can talk a little bit about what immutability is and what it really means. You know, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about Wasabi's solution because sometimes people don't understand. You actually are a cloud. You're not building on other people's public clouds and storage is the one use case where it actually makes sense to do that. Tell us a little bit more about Wasabi's approach and your solution. Yeah, I appreciate that. So there's definitely some misconception. We are our own cloud storage service. We don't run on top of anybody else, right? It's our systems. It's our software deployed globally and we interoperate because we adhere to the S3 standard. We interoperate with practically hundreds of applications. Primarily in this case, right? We're talking about backup and recovery applications and it's such a simple process, right? I mean, just about everybody who's anybody in this business protecting data has the ability now to access cloud storage. And so we've made it really simple. In many cases, you'll see Wasabi as, you know, listed in the primary set of available vendors and, you know, put in your private keys, make sure that your account is locked down properly using, let's say, multi-factor authentication and you've got a great place to store copies of your data securely. I mean, we just heard from David Friend. I did my math right. He was talking about, you know, one-sixth the cost per terabyte per month, maybe even a little better than that. How are you able to achieve such attractive economics? Yeah, so, you know, I can't remember how to translate my fractions into percentages, but I think we talk a lot about being 80%, right? Less expensive than the hyperscalers. And, you know, we talked about this at V-Mon, right? There's some secret sauce there. And, you know, we take a different approach to how we utilize the raw capacity to the effective capacity. And the fact is we're also not having to run, you know, a few hundred other services, right? We do storage, plain and simple, all day, all the time. So we don't have to worry about overhead to support, you know, up and coming other services that are perhaps, you know, gonna be a loss leader, right? Customers love it, right? They see the fact that their data is growing, 40, 80% year over year. They know they need to have some place to keep it secure. And, you know, folks are flocking to us in droves. In fact, we're seeing a tremendous amount of migration actually right now, multiple petabytes being brought to Wasabi because folks have figured out that they can't afford to keep going with their current hyperscaler vendor. And immutability is a feature of your product, right? What's the feature called? Can you double click on that a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. So the term in S3 is object lock. And what that means is your application will write an object to cloud storage and it will define a retention period, let's say a week. And for that period, that object is immutable, untouchable, cannot be altered in any way, shape or form. The application can't change it. The system administration can't change it. Wasabi can't change it, okay? It is truly carved in stone. And this is something that it's been around for a while but you're seeing a huge uptick, right? In adoption and support for that feature by all the major vendors. And I named off a few earlier. And the best part is that with immutability comes some sense of, well, it comes with not just a sense of security, it is security, right? When you have data that cannot be altered by anybody, even if the bad guys compromise your account, they steal your credentials, right? They can't take away the data. And that's a beautiful thing, a beautiful, beautiful thing. And you look like an S3 bucket, is that right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're fully compatible with the S3 API. So if you're using S3 API based applications today, it's a very simple matter of just kind of redirecting where you want to store your data. Beautiful thing about backup and recovery, right? That's probably the simplest application, simple being a relative term, as far as lift and shift, right? Because that just means for your next full, right? Point that at Wasabi, retain your other fulls for whatever, 30, 60, 90 days. And then once you've kind of made that transition from vine to vine, you're off and running with Wasabi. I talked to my open about the allure of object storage, historically, the simplicity of the get put syntax, but what about performance? Are you able to deliver performance that's comparable to other storage formats? Oh yeah, absolutely. And we've got the performance numbers on the site to back that up. But I forgot to answer something earlier, right? You said that immutability is a feature. And I want to make it very clear that it is a feature, but it's an API request, okay? So when you're talking about gets and puts and so forth, the comment you made earlier about being 80% more cost effective or 80% less expensive, that API call is typically something that the other folks charge for, right? And I think we used the metaphor earlier about the refrigerator, but I'll use a different metaphor today, right? You can think of cloud storage as a magical coffee cup, right? It gets as big as you want to store as much coffee as you want and the coffee's always warm, right? And when you want to take a sip, there's no charge. You want to pop the lid and see how much coffee is in there, no charge. And that's an important thing because when you're talking about millions or billions of objects, and you want to get a list of those objects or you want to get the status of the immutable settings for those objects, anywhere else it's going to cost you money to look at your data with Wasabi, no additional charge. And that's part of the thing that sets us apart. Excellent, thank you for that. So you mentioned some partners before. How do partners fit into the Wasabi story? Where do you stop? Where do they pick up? And what do they bring? Can you give us maybe a paint a picture for us, an example or two? Sure. So again, we just do storage, right? That is our sole purpose in life is to safely and securely store our customer's data. And so they're working with their application vendors, whether it's active archive, backup and recovery, IoT surveillance, media and entertainment workflows, right? Those systems already know how to manage the data, manage the metadata. They just need some place to keep the data that is being worked on, being stored and so forth, right? So just like, you know, plugging in a flash drive on your laptop, right? You literally can plug in Wasabi as long as your applications support the API. Getting started is incredibly easy, right? We offer a 30 day trial, one terabyte and most folks find that within, you know, probably a few hours of their POC, right? It's giving them everything they need in terms of performance, in terms of accessibility, in terms of sovereignty. I'm guessing you talked to, you know, Dave Friend earlier about data sovereignty, right? We're a global company, right? So there's got to be probably, you know, wherever you are in the world, someplace that will satisfy your sovereignty requirements as well as your compliance requirements. We did talk about sovereignty, Drew. This is really, what's interesting to me, I'm a bit of an industry historian. When I look back to the early days of cloud, I remember the large storage companies, you know, their CEOs would say, we're going to have an answer for the cloud and they would go out and for instance, I know one bought a competitor of Carbonite and couldn't figure out what to do with it. They couldn't figure out how to compete with the cloud, in part because they were afraid it was going to cannibalize their existing business. I think another part is because they just didn't have that imagination to develop an architecture that in a business model that could scale to see that you guys have done that is I love it because it brings competition, it brings innovation and it helps lower clients cost and solve really nagging problems like, you know, ransomware, mutability and recovery. I'll give you the last word, Drew. Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, the on-prem vendors, they're not going to go away anytime soon, right? There's always going to be a need for, you know, incredibly low latency, high bandwidth, you know, but, you know, not all data is taught all the time and by hot I mean, you know, extremely hot, you know, let's take, you know, real-time analytics for maybe facial recognition, right? That requires sub millisecond type of processing. But once you've done that work, right? You want to store that data for a long, long time and you're going to want to also tap back into it later. So, you know, other folks are telling you that, you know, you can go to these like, you know, cold glacial type of tiered storage. Yeah, don't believe the hype. You're still going to pay way more for that than you would with just a wasabi-like hot cloud storage system. And, you know, we don't compete with our partners, right? We compliment, you know, what they're bringing to market in terms of the software vendors, in terms of the hardware vendors, right? We're a beautiful component for that hybrid cloud architecture. And I think folks are gravitating towards that. I think the cloud is kind of hitting a new gear, if you will, in terms of adoption and recognition for the security that they can achieve with it. All right, Drew, thank you for that. Definitely, we see the momentum. In a moment, Drew and I will be back to get the customer perspective with Kevin Morenda, who's the director of information technology services at the Hotchkiss School. Keep it right there. Hey, I'm Nate, and we wrote this song about ransomware to educate people. People like Brenda. Oh, God, I'm so sorry. We know you are, but Brenda, you're not alone. This hasn't just happened to you. No! Colonial oil pipeline had a guy who didn't change his password. That sucks. His password leaked. The data was breached, and it cost his company four million bucks. A figure of date was sent to people working for the meat company, JBS. That's pretty clever. Instead of getting new features, they got hacked and had to pay the largest crypto ransom ever. And $20 billion, billion with a B, have been paid by companies in health care. If you wonder why your premium keeps going up, up, up, up, up, now you're aware. They are getting cocky when they lock you dirty, you know. It has gotten so bad that they demand all of your money and it gets worse. They go and they throw you with a Facebook. It seems too good to be true. Like a reason to let it go. Just check with me first and I'll give you. It's a pretty sweet car. I'll keep it out there. You know, it's not very nice. To learn more about things. Do that. Because if we are... Drew and I are pleased to welcome Kevin Warrenda, who's the director of information technology services at the Hotchkiss School, a very prestigious and well-respected boarding school in the beautiful northwest corner of Connecticut. Hello, Kevin. Hello, it's nice to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you bet. Hey, tell us a little bit more about the Hotchkiss School and your role. Sure, the Hotchkiss School is an independent boarding school, grades nine through 12, as you said, very prestigious and in an absolutely beautiful location on the deepest freshwater lake in Connecticut. We have 500 acre main campus and a 200 acre farm down the street. My role as the director of information technology services essentially to oversee all of the technology that supports the school, operations, academics, sports, everything we do on campus. Yeah, and you've had a very strong history in the educational field from that lens. What's the unique or not unique but depressing security challenge that's top of mind for you? I think that it's clear that educational institutions are a target these days, especially for ransomware. We have a lot of data that can be used by threat actors and schools are often underfunded in the area of IT security, IT in general sometimes. So I think threat actors often see us as easy targets or at least worthwhile to try to get into. Because specifically you are potentially spread thin underfunded, you got students, you got teachers. So there really are some, are there any specific data privacy concerns as well around student privacy or regulations that you can speak to? Certainly because of the fact that we're an independent boarding school, we operate things like even a health center. So data privacy regulations across the board in terms of just student data rights and FERPA, some of our students are under 18. So data privacy laws such as COPA apply, HIPAA can apply, we have PCI regulations with many of our financial transactions, whether it be fundraising through alumni development or even just accepting the revenue for tuition. So it's a unique place to be. Again, we operate very much like a college would, right? We have all the trappings of a private college in terms of all the operations we do. And that's what I love most about working education is that it's all the industries combined in many ways. Very cool. So let's talk about some of the defense strategies from a practitioner point of view. Then I want to bring in Drew to the conversation. So what are the best practice and the right strategies from your standpoint of defending your data? Well, we take a defense and depth approach. So we layer multiple technologies on top of each other to make sure that no single failure is the key to getting beyond those defenses. We also keep it simple. And I think there's some core things that all organizations need to do these days, including vulnerability scanning, patching, using multi-factor authentication and having really excellent backups in case something does happen. Drew, are you seeing any similar patterns across other industries or customers? I mean, I know we're talking about some uniqueness in the education market, but what can we learn from other adjacent industries? Yeah, you know, Kevin is spot on and I love hearing what he's doing. Going back to our prior conversation about zero trust, that defense and depth approach is beautifully aligned with the zero trust approach, especially things like multi-factor authentication always shocked at how few folks are applying that very, very simple technology and across the board. I mean, Kevin is referring to financial industry, healthcare industry, even the security and police, right? They need to make sure that the data that they're keeping evidence, right? Is secure and immutable, right? Because that's evidence. Kevin, paint a picture for us, if you would. So you were primarily on-prem, looking at potentially using more cloud. You were a VMware shop, but tell us, paint a picture of your environment, kind of the applications that you support and the kind of, I want to get to the before and the after wasabi, but start with kind of where you came from. Sure, well, I came to the Hatchett School about seven years ago and I had come most recently from public K-12 and municipal. So again, not a lot of funding for IT in general, security or infrastructure in general. So Nutanix was actually a hyper-converged solution that I implemented at my previous position. So when I came to Hatchett's and found mostly on-prem workloads, everything from the student information system to the card access system that students would use, financial systems, they were almost all on-premise, but there were some new SaaS solutions coming in play. We had also taken some time to do some business continuity planning, in the event of some kind of issue. I don't think we were thinking about the pandemic at the time, but certainly it helped prepare us for that. So as different workloads were moved off to hosted or cloud-based, we didn't really need as much of the on-premise compute and storage as we had and it was time to retire that cluster. And so I brought the experience I had with Nutanix with me and we consolidated all that into a hyper-converged platform running Nutanix AHV, which allowed us to get rid of all the cost of the VMware licensing as well. I mean, it is an easier platform to manage, especially for small IT shops like ours. Yeah, AHV is the Acropolis Hypervisor and so you migrated off of the VMware avoidant, the V-Tax avoidance, that's a common theme among Nutanix customers. Now, did you consider moving into AWS? What was the catalyst to consider Wasabi as part of your defense strategy? We were looking at cloud storage options and they were just all so expensive, especially in egress fees to get data back out. Wasabi came across our desks and it was such a low barrier to entry to sign up for a trial and get a terabyte for a month. And then it was $6 a month for a terabyte after that. So we can try this out in a very low stakes way to see how this works for us. And there was a couple of things we were trying to solve at the time, it wasn't just a place to put backup, but we also needed a place to have some files that might serve to some degree as a content delivery network. Some of our software applications that are deployed through our mobile device management needed a place that was accessible on the internet that they could be stored as well. So we were testing it for a couple of different scenarios and it worked great. Performance wise, fast, security wise, it has all the features of S3 compliance that works with Nutanix and anyone who's familiar with S3 permissions can apply them very easily. And then there was no egress fees. We can pull data down, put data up at will and it's not costing us any extra, which is excellent because especially in education we need fixed costs. We need to know what we're going to spend over a year before we spend it and not be hit with bills for egress or because our workload or our data storage footprint grew tremendously. We can't have the variability that the cloud providers would give us. So Kevin, you explained to your hypersensitive about security and privacy for obvious reasons that we discussed. Were you concerned about doing business with a company with a funny name? Was it the trial that got you through that not whole? How did you address those concerns as an IT practitioner? Yeah, anytime we adopt anything we go through a risk review. So we did our homework and we checked. The funny name really means nothing. There's lots of companies with funny names. I think we don't go based on the name necessarily, but we did go based on the history, understanding who started the company, where it came from and really looking into the technology and understanding that the value proposition, the ability to provide that lower cost is based specifically on the technology in which it lays down data. So having a legitimate reasonable excuse as to why it's cheap, we weren't thinking, well, you get what you pay for. It may be less expensive than alternative is, but it's not cheap. It's not, you know, it's reliable. That was really our concern. So we did our homework for sure before even starting the trial, but then the trial certainly confirmed everything that we had learned. Yeah, thank you for that. Drew, explain the whole egress charge. We hear a lot about that. What do people need to know? First of all, it's not a funny name. It's a memorable name, Dave. Just like the cube. Let's be very clear about that. Second of all, egress charges. So, you know, other storage providers charge you for every API call, right? Every get, every put, every list, everything, okay? It's part of their process. It's part of how they make money. It's part of how they cover the cost of all their other services. We don't do that. And I think, you know, as Kevin has pointed out, right? That's a huge differentiator because you're talking about a significant amount of money above and beyond what is the list price. In fact, I would tell you that most of the other storage providers, hyperscalers, you know, their list price, first of all, is far exceeding anything else in the industry, especially what we offer. And then, right, their additional costs, the egress costs, the API requests, can be two, three, 400% more on top of what you're paying per terabyte. So, you used a little coffee analogy earlier in our conversation. So, here's what I'm imagining. Like, I have a lot of stuff, right? And I had to clear up my bar and I put some stuff in storage, you know, right down the street. And I pay them monthly. I can't imagine having to pay them to go get my stuff. That's kind of the same thing here. Oh, that's a great metaphor, right? That storage locker, right? Yeah. Can you imagine every time you want to open the door to that storage locker and look inside having to pay a fee? No, no, that would be annoying. Or every time you pull into the yard and you want to put something in that storage locker, you have to pay an access fee to get to the yard, you have to pay a door opening fee, right? And then if you want to look and get an inventory of everything in there, you have to pay, and it's ridiculous. It's your data, it's your storage, it's your locker. You've already paid the annual fee probably because they gave you a discount on that. So, why shouldn't you have unfettered access to your data? That's what Wasabi does. And I think, as Kevin pointed out, right? That's what sets us completely apart from everybody else. Okay, good, that's helpful. It helps us understand how Wasabi's different. Kevin, I'm always interested when I talk to practitioners like yourself in learning what you do, outside of the technology, what are you doing in terms of educating your community and making them more cyber-aware? Do you have training for students and faculty to learn about security and ransomware protection, for example? Yeah, cyber security awareness training is definitely one of the required things everyone should be doing in their organizations. And we do have a program that we use and we try to make it fun and engaging too. This is often the checking the box kind of activity, insurance companies require it, but we wanna make it something that people want to do and wanna engage with. So even last year, I think we did one around the holidays and kind of pointed out the kinds of scams they may expect in their personal life about shipping of orders and time for the holidays and things like that. So it wasn't just about protecting our school data. It's about the fact that protecting their information is something you do in all aspects of your life, especially now that the folks are working hybrid, often working from home with equipment from the school. The stakes are much higher. And people have a lot of our data at home. And so knowing how to protect that is important. So we definitely run those programs in a way that we want to be engaging and fun and memorable so that when they do encounter those things, especially email threats, they know how to handle them. So when you say fun, it's like you come up with an example that we can laugh at until of course we click on that bad link, but I'm sure you can come up with a lot of interesting and engaging examples. Is that what you're talking about, about having fun? Yeah, I mean, sometimes they are kind of choose your own adventure type stories. You know, they stop as they run. So they're telling a story and they stop and you have to answer questions along the way to keep going. So you're not just watching a video. You're engaged with the story of the topic. And that's what I think is memorable about it, but it's also, that's what makes it fun. It's not, you're not just watching some talking head saying, you know, to avoid shortened URLs or to talk to make sure you know the sender of the email. Now, you're engaged in a real life scenario of story that you're kind of following and making choices along the way and finding out, was that the right choice to make? Or maybe not. So that's what I think the learning comes in. Excellent. Okay, gentlemen, thanks so much. Appreciate your time. Kevin, Drew, awesome having you on theCUBE. My pleasure. Thank you. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks. Okay, at a moment, I'll give you some closing thoughts on the changing world of data protection and the evolution of cloud object storage. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. Some things just don't make sense. Like showing up a little too early for the big game. How early are we? Couple months. Popcorn? On and off season, the Red Sox cover their bases with affordable, best in class cloud storage. These are pretty good seeds. Hey, have you guys seen a line for the bathroom? Wasabi hot cloud storage. It just makes sense. You don't think they make these in left hand, do you? We learned today how a serial entrepreneur along with his co-founder saw the opportunity to tap into the virtually limitless scale of the cloud and dramatically reduce the cost of storing data, while at the same time protecting against ransomware attacks and other data exposures with simple fast storage, immutability, air gaps, and solid operational processes. Let's not forget about that, okay? People and processes are critical. And if you can point your people at more strategic initiatives and tasks, rather than wrestling with infrastructure, you can accelerate your process redesign and support of digital transformations. Now, if you want to learn more about immutability and object block, click on the Wasabi resource button on this page or go to wasabi.com slash object block. Thanks for watching secure storage hot takes made possible by Wasabi. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We'll see you next time.