 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're getting towards the end of 2019 where we've had a bevy of cloud conferences. I've attended Microsoft Ignite, CUBECon, CloudNativeCon, and the big, the Super Bowl for our industry, AWS re-invent is right on the horizon and happy to talk about some of the data protection items related to cloud, welcoming back to our program, Rhea Atushparit, who is the vice president of marketing in the data protection group at Dell EMC. Rhea, great to see you. Great to see you, Stu. Nice to be back. All right, so Rhea, obviously cloud has had such a huge impact on our entire industry, transforming what's happening there. Bring us inside how some of those trends are really impacting your organization and your customers. Yeah, definitely. I think one of the things that no one would be surprised about is that organizations today are managing seven times the data that they were managing just two years ago. So, last year, in 2018, there was a study done by Vansenborn, an analyst firm. It's called the Global Data Protection Index Study, where they surveyed over 2,200 IT decision makers. And they asked specifically about their data protection challenges. One interesting data point is more than 76% of the surveyed had faced some sort of data disruption in the last 12 months, the preceding 12 months before the survey, and close to 30% or 27 to be exact had lost data, costing upwards of millions based on that disruption. So, before you even get into some of the market trends that's complicating protection, I think a lot of customers are still very challenged with their data protection just in any regular environment. Now, the challenge around data protection and even more broadly, data management, because again, there's the 80-20 rule. A lot of your data is actually in the tertiary, secondary copies of your data. It's getting more complex. So, a couple of big trends that you and I talk about all the time. Data growth, we kind of talked about that. Data distribution. Data is more distributed than ever. You have it across multiple clouds. You have data-hungry technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning that's basically generating data volumes that's unprecedented and that will be generating data volumes that are unprecedented. And some of these technologies are actually also fueling data growth at the edge. So, I think that I saw a number or I think Michael Dell was talking about how the data at the edge is actually going to surpass data in all of the clouds combined in the near future. Then you have application transformation. So, that's where cloud really comes in. A lot of our customers are speeding their time to market and their exchanges and interactions with their customers by really transforming their application development and using cloud-native application deployment to really fuel how they're developing apps and that's requiring new ways of data protection. Then you bring into effect all the regulatory rules. There's one coming up very shortly, I think in January. So, you have increasing governmental regulations. You have increasing privacy laws and mandates. So, again, data protection is getting into this area where you would say it's in the eye of the storm. Yeah, so many challenges. What we've really loved to document over the last few years is the opportunity around data. Business is creating new business value, creating new lines of business and really extracting information. Use the word transformation even. We've really defined is what defines a company that has successfully gone through digital transformation is it is data that is driving decisions in companies there. So, you've talked to a lot of customers, you've got some survey data. Bring us inside, what are some of those leading edge customers? What differentiates kind of the leaders and ones that become winners in this world compared to before data was at the center of what they were doing? Yeah, absolutely, three. The power of three, again. I think that the companies that are really doing things well seem to have a handle around their ever changing data protection needs are doing, have three things in common. I think the first thing is pretty evident and you talked to it just now Stu, they value data. They see data as capital. So, the amount of attention they give to data is really significantly different than a lot of the other companies. So, they really ranked when they talked about how they see data as the most important capital, one of the most important capitals in their environment. They looked at productivity apps as a significant area of importance. They looked at AI, machine learning, business intelligence and analytics as some of the most critical applications, including the new cloud native applications. They are gaining significant importance in the eyes of these companies. So, first and foremost, they really value data and they wanna make sure that they are protecting it in a way that really meets what they need to. The second thing that's really interesting that they're doing is they're investing in a single vendor for all of their data protection needs. Again, this is based on the Global Data Protection Index study of the 2,200 IT decision makers. And GDPI found that companies that are using at least two vendors are 35% more likely to experience some sort of disruption. And when they talk about disruption, they talked about downtime, ransomware, and they talked about data loss as the number of most frequently cited disruptions in their environment. And multiple vendor solutions really lead to increased complexity. There's just more touch points, disparate management tools, especially when you're in a recovery type situation, it just adds a lot of complexity to it, including service and support experience that you're gonna get from multiple vendors. So again, investing in a single solution across a very diverse portfolio of applications, deployment choices, physical, virtual, multi-cloud, including extent to cloud use cases, as well as cloud native protection, really makes sense from core to edge to cloud. And I think it will decrease the complexity as well as minimize the downtime associated with any type of disruption. So that's the second trend. So we talked about the value data. The second one was that they really have investing in a single partner in their data protection solutions. The other one is that they prioritize, the third one, they have some fundamental needs that they prioritize for their multi-cloud. So they prioritize scale, efficiency, as well as ease of management for their multi-cloud data protection needs. So while cloud computing gives us a lot of flexibility, agility, it can also bring with it complexity, unknown costs, and increased risk, if not managed appropriately, and if this extends to your data protection environment. So you need data protection solutions that basically can manage, that are easy to scale, easy to deploy, and deliver efficiency and resiliency across this multi-cloud environment. So those are the three things that they're really doing differently still. All right, yes, so many things that customers need to think about now, living in that multi-cloud world, cloud native, infiltrating the application environment. So as we look forward to 2020 here, what are those new requirements? What do customers need to really think about when they're shaping the future of building their environments? Yeah, that's a great question. And all of the new requirements start with the fundamentals. If you don't have the fundamentals, the new requirements will fall short. And if anything, the fundamentals are becoming more and more critical. So we already talked about what those companies that are doing well really do differently. So they value scale, efficiency, performance. And when they look at those environments, they look at it across a distributed deployment model. So you're talking about global scale, performance at a global level, efficiency across the cloud, as well as the cloud resources that you're utilizing. So when you talk about efficiency and performance and scale, it takes on a brand new meaning in the new set of requirements. And then there's some real new new requirements. So for protection, we're seeing protection for cloud native applications. So we were at Kubernetes and we had our Kubernetes, KubeCon, and we were showcasing our container data protection, Kubernetes container data protection. So we were doing a tech preview of that that got really well received because a lot of companies are struggling with how they're going to be protecting containers. And then you have protection for modern apps, SaaS based applications, MongoDB, Cloudera type applications that now need protection. So it used to be a wide range of different applications. Now there's new modern apps that need the same level of protection and they have new requirements. One of the last ones is again, protection of traditional because you're going to still have a big traditional deployment and cloud native applications at what we're calling global scale. So what does global scale mean? It means you have visibility and reporting to ensure protection across health, compliance, efficiency across core edge and multi cloud, right? Those are going to be some of the new requirements. And then data reuse is another one that we see coming up more and more. So there's so much investment in making sure your data is protected and companies want to actually get additional value out of their protection data and they want to drive that value through innovation, through being able to leverage that data for app dev and test, analytics type work. So really they want to be able to do that on their secondary and tertiary copies. So that's another new set of requirements that we're seeing. So it starts with the fundamentals and then you need to be able to scale and drive these new requirements. Yeah, absolutely. In many ways, some of these requirements echo what we had in the past. Go back 20 years ago, it was spreading across mainframe and Unix and Linux and Windows and now it's multi cloud and SaaS and hybrid environments. So Rhea, really exciting stuff. Your team, just give us a look for 2020. Seeing Dell EMC show up not only at, of course, Dell Technologies World but CubeCon and re-invent and some of these cloud shows. It's exciting. Yeah, you're going to see us more and more. We announced Dell Tech Cloud last year. So it's a big focus for the company, what we're doing and partnership with VMware. So there's a lot of exciting things that are happening and data protection is really becoming critical to all of these conversations. So it's going to be a very exciting year. I think it's going to be a defining year for us next year and you're going to see innovation like you've never seen before from Dell EMC. All right, exciting stuff. Definitely so much opportunity and innovation happening in the clouds. Rhea, thank you so much for the updates. Looking forward to seeing the team with lots of over 50,000 of everybody's friends in Las Vegas for AWS. Thank you. Thanks for having us too. All right, be sure to check out the cube.net for all of the AWS re-invent content as well as all the other shows we've done this year. And look forward to 2020 also. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching the cube.