 From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this episode of CUBE Conversations. I'm here from our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program, Doug Matthews. He's the vice president of product management with Veritas coming to us from Atlanta. Doug, thanks so much for joining us. Nice to see you. Hey, great to see you Stu and thanks for having me today. Yeah, so, you know, Doug obviously, you know, 2020, there's a lot of change going on, you know, globally, a lot of things happening financially, but you know, one of the ongoing changes that we've been watching and has had huge ripple effects is of course the impact on cloud. So why don't you bring us in a little bit, you know, tell us, you know, what you work on and how cloud has been impacting what's happening with data protection or resiliency in your world. Sure, so Veritas Technologies is a long brand of focus on data protection. And we, you know, are highly focused on protecting data regardless of where it lives, whether it lives on a customer's premise or whether it lives in a cloud public cloud architecture or even in a cloud application. So for us, this has been a transformational change as more and more people begin to adopt cloud services as the work from home trend starts and we're seeing a much higher emergence of ransomware. Yeah, so, you know, cloud of course is, you know, unevenly distributed if you look at, you know, if you look at countries, if you look at industries, I'm wondering, you know, what you're hearing from customers, you know, what's kind of the 2020 snapshot of where we are with the overall cloud wave? Sure, yeah. What we're seeing is a much more rapid adoption of cloud services as businesses and organizations begin to wrestle with the fact that they can't bring people into the office. So the work from home trend, the access to resources needs to be delivered through the cloud applications. Even data centers, we're now beginning to see, you know, some supply chain hiccups that are causing the supply chain fulfillment of server orders beginning to slow down. So customers are beginning to think more broadly about, you know, cloud gives you agility, operational ability to react to change. So people are accelerating their adoption of cloud resources because they're almost being forced to. Yeah, is there anything specific you're seeing, again, any data maybe with coronavirus as to, you know, what services in the cloud and what impact that's having on your customers? Yeah, so dramatic change, right? So for example, Azure cloud services are up something like 775%, which is just astounding number. VDI, virtual desktops up over 300% and just massive adoption of these cloud resources is just a continuing compelling trend. Yeah, and how about from a data protection standpoint and security, obviously, we've seen that the malicious attacks, you know, have increased unfortunately and when you have more people outside of the enterprise walls itself, there's more things we need to make sure that our data is secure. Yeah, absolutely. And we have without a doubt seen a rise in ransomware attacks and malware attacks. What's interesting to note is, you know, increasingly the consumer is placing the blame for these attacks less on the perpetrators and more on the organization and business leaders. For example, over 40% of consumers actually hold the business leader responsible for a ransomware attack that their business suffers and percent would actually say that they would stop buying from an organization that suffers from malware or has been a victim of an attack. So the mindset here is no longer placing the blame on the perpetrators, but on the business leader and owner that didn't protect their data in such a way that kept the user from being exposed. Yeah, Doug, why don't you bring us inside and explain how Veritas is helping in these environments to, you know, protect our data? And so I think the first thing is, you know, as you begin to, as a business leader begins to think about their cloud contract, they need to understand their SLAs and how that maps to what that cloud provider is going to provide for them. We actually found recently, we produce a report called the truth in cloud report. And in that report, we talked to cloud architects and business leaders, over 1600 of them that respond. And one of the things that we found pretty interesting is that 85% of the respondents said that the cloud service provider is responsible for protecting their data, but that's completely disconnected from the actual fact that over 53% or so of those that responded actually had an SLA that was higher than that cloud service provider could provide. So they believe it's supposed to be done by the cloud provider, but it isn't being done by the cloud provider to meet their needs. So people really need to think about and analyze who's protecting their data and how they're protected when they move into that cloud architecture. Yeah, I have to say, I'm a little surprised to hear those results. The drumbeat that I've heard from the security industry for the last couple of years has been about the shared responsibility model. There have been some, you know, rather public and, you know, highly visible failures where, you know, if somebody made a false assumption that something would be turned on and the cloud service providers have come back and said, hey, you know, there's these things you need to do. And, you know, just because there's a lock on the door, if you don't lock it, you know, we're not responsible for it is kind of the analogy I use. So it's, you know, shouldn't we by 2020 now, you know, cloud is not new. I would have thought that we would have gotten through some of these, you know, rather basic understanding of, you know, who's responsible for what and, you know, ultimately, you know, who needs to answer for these things. Yeah, I think we're still in that adoption life cycle. And I think there was the, you know, we mapped this as a hype cycle of our own of, you know, where people were at in the adoption of cloud. And we believe that, you know, classically cloud architects, probably 20 to 25% of organizations have actually fully adopted cloud at this point in our aggressively adopting cloud. But there is such a rush now to get in from these business leaders who and architects who haven't really, you know, taken the time to frame and understand things that they're now being pulled along in this journey and rediscovering this thing. So we have to keep that drum beat up as some of the, you know, cloud laggers or more mainstream technology adopters are beginning to adopt cloud. They haven't stayed aware. I completely agree with you. We've been talking about the shared responsibility model for a long time, but these survey results show that it's still a problem. Doug, you make a great point. Talk about, you know, companies have had to compress their cycles and well, normally they would have been able to really plan things, walk through what they were going to do. They're often rushing into things a little bit more. So what advice would you give, you know, either companies that are now been dipping their toe, but, you know, jumping into cloud or they need to accelerate what they're doing. What advice would you make sure that people don't get in a little over their skis or, you know, do something that they're going to regret? Sure, so the first thing I would say is have a recovery plan and make sure you rehearse it. You know, again, back to the blame here is falling on business leaders, so don't get caught by it. Make sure that you understand your recovery plan, make sure that you rehearse it and that it works. The second thing is I would absolutely read that fine print of your contract and make sure that your required SLAs match up with what your cloud services provider provides or you need to adapt technology that helps you to adjust to make sure that you achieve that SLA. And then the final thing is you're doing all this. So many people look at cloud for cost optimization as an outcome, make sure you don't overpay because there are various levels of cloud storage. Cloud storage is extremely expensive. Cloud resources are expensive. You know, typically people think about the actual host itself or the instance itself. Make sure that you think about the storage as well. So use things like deduplication or lower tiers of storage to optimize your cost efficiency. All right, so Doug, as we mentioned earlier in the discussion, Veritas has been around for a while, you know, really well understood how you help customers help connect us as to, you know, what you're doing for the cloud specifically. Sure, so, you know, specifically for cloud, let's focus on an upcoming release. I think most people that are probably watching this are familiar with our product called NetBackup. It's the enterprise leader in data protection. NetBackup is designed to solve the data protection challenges across all infrastructure, whether it's your typical on-premise infrastructure or new cloud architectures. So in these new cloud architectures, we've done things to make sure that you efficiently use, utilize cloud storage. So we do things like deduplication. We also control network bandwidth and make sure that you minimize rather your impact on network bandwidth. So you minimize your overall cost requirements associated with cloud or data protection. The other thing that we're doing in this next release, which I think is really exciting, is we're going to take our cloud point solution and our resiliency platform solution. These solutions are designed to help customers efficiently recover in cloud, as well as do it in a very quick and automated fashion. And we're going to bake those into our NetBackup product. So the NetBackup consumer will automatically have access to these two new technologies that we've been developing for the last several years. So it's really exciting for us to be including those with our NetBackup product. All right, and Doug, when we talk about cloud, is this supported across any cloud or there's specific integrations that we should understand or just where does this fit in the entire kind of multi-cloud ecosystem? Yep, so the one other thing again about NetBackup being a platform, we support over 1,400 different data sources, over 800 different data targets, and that includes over 60 cloud providers. So it supports this broad ecosystem of cloud architectures. But where it makes sense, we always go deep. So we go deep with your traditional cloud providers like AWS or Azure, provide that deeper level capability for those cloud providers. All right, great. What else should we know about what's new from Barotas' cloud offering? Yeah, I think when we build our cloud solutions, we focus on a four-stage a lifecycle of a customer. For example, we realize that customer wants to migrate the cloud, they want to protect their resources in cloud, they want to be able to recover when the time comes and the need to optimize their cloud footprint. So we tend to focus in those four pillars to achieve success for our customer. Yeah, a question on that. I think about moving to the cloud. There's a lot of discussion about how do I modernize my environment? And often it's I move to the cloud, but then how do I really become cloud native if you will? So I'm making updates and I'm making changes. If I think about backup traditionally, it was let me get something, let me put it in place, and I'm going to run it that way for years. So how does Barotas make sure that as I'm modernizing, as I'm making changes that my data is still going to be protected no matter where I am along that journey? Sure, so I think as customers are migrating to an adopting cloud, the first stage on the train or the first station that they come to on the train is that lift and shift approach. We're going to take everything from on-premise and we're going to move it to the cloud. So we have technologies that will help a customer do that with automated feedback. So they can set up the replication solution, push a button, now they're up and running in cloud, hey, it didn't work, push the button, they're back down in their on-premise environment, adjust and do it when it makes sense and they're ready to make it work. So we have a fairly robust set of technologies that can help in that lift and shift process. The other thing that we provide is for those infrastructure as code guys, the guys that are further out that are thinking, how do I natively build cloud-based solutions? We have a very full suite of APIs, so that the customer can implement their infrastructure as code requirements right there through that Swagger interface that you would expect and deploy infrastructure as code environments in cloud, utilizing our enterprise cloud APIs. So we're purpose-built to be able to help customers get the cloud and then also support those cloud applications that are built there native. Yeah, I'm wondering, do you have either a customer example, maybe anonymized you can share or just any general cloud learnings about where your customers are and how Veritas is helping them? Sure, so one of the first things that we see customers try to accomplish is the move of their backup storage infrastructure into long-term storage in cloud. So they might use it as a replacement for tape, they might use it as a replacement for disk, they want to live in the cloud environment. So we have a capability we call cloud catalyst that moves data very efficiently from on-prem into the cloud, keeps it de-duplicates, de-duplicated, optimizes it for wide area network transmit and really efficiently moves that data into cloud. And then really what's important is once it gets into cloud, it doesn't touch that data. So we have a large customer who's got over a couple of petabytes of data in Europe wanted to make that migration to cloud. They were using another provider at the time. So we came in and we were actually able to save them over 98% of their overall operational costs associated with moving and migrating that data just based on this one capability. So that's a key element, as people are moving that data to cloud, make sure that it stays efficient, optimized, de-duplicated and stored efficient. All right, Doug, I'll give you the final word. Yeah, I think my warning for customers is to make sure that they are well protected with their data as state and cloud. Understand what your cloud service provider provides, make sure that your SLOs, your service level objectives are going to be met by the technologies that you deploy in order to solve your cloud problems. And then think about things holistically. Think about it first from the migration, then how you protect it. Then once you get there, what do you do to recover it? Make sure you test that. And then once you've got everything kind of thought through and ready to implement, make sure that you've optimized it to be efficient and it's cost utilization and it's operations. All right, well, Doug Matthews, thank you so much for the updates. Really appreciate you sharing some important tips for customers as they go along their cloud journey. Thank you so much, Stu. All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.