 From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Actifio 2019 Data Driven. Brought to you by Actifio. Hi, we're right outside of the Boston Habba. You're watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is Actifio Data Driven 2019. Two days digging into the role of data inside companies and in an ever-changing world. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Archana Venkantraman, who's a research manager at IDC, coming to us from across the pond in London. Thanks so much for joining us. No problem at all. Pleasure. So tell us a little bit, IDC, we know well, the market landscapes, watching what's happening, the 77 zettabytes that was put up in the keynote came from IDC. Tell us your focus, though. Yeah, so I'm part of the data protection and storage research team, but I have a European focus. I cover the Western European markets where data protection is almost of a neurotic interest to us. So a lot of our IT investment is actually made on the context of data protection and how do I become data-driven without compromising on security and sovereignty and data locality? So that's something that I look at. I'm also part of our broader multi-cloud infrastructure team and also DevOps practice. So I'm looking at all these modern new trends from data perspective as well. So it's kind of nice to bring. It's keeping you busy in your world these days. So about a year ago, every show that I went to, there would be a big clock up on the keynote stage, counting down until GDPR went live. We actually said on theCUBE many times, it's like, we'll know when GDPR starts when the lawsuits start flying. And I feel like it was a couple of days, if not a couple of weeks before some of the big tech firms got sued for this. So here we are in 2019. It's been a while now since this launch. How important is GDPR? How is that impacting customers and kind of the ripple effects? Because here in the States, we're seeing some laws in California and beyond that are following that, but a pushback from the, oh, hey, we're just going to have all the data in the world and we'll store it somewhere. Sure, we'll protect it and keep it secure, but, but, but. Yeah, yeah. So GDPR is a game changer. It's interesting you said this big clock ticking and everybody has been talking about it. So when the European Commission announced GDPR is coming, organizations had about two years to actually prepare for it, but there were a lot of naysayers and they thought this is not going to happen. The regulators don't have enough resources to actually go after all these data breaches and it's just too complicated. Not everyone's going to comply. It's just not going to happen. But then they realized that the regulators were sticking to it and towards the end, towards the last six months in the race to GDPR, there was this helter-skelter running where organizations were trying to just do some DIY and patch-up exercise to have that minimum viable compliance. So they are, they wanted to make sure that they don't go out of business. They don't have any major data breaches when GDPR comes into effect. So that was the story of 2018. Although they had so much time to react, they didn't and towards the end, they started doing a lot of these patch-up work to make sure they had that minimum viable compliance. But over time, what we are seeing is that a lot of astute organizations are actually using GDPR to create that competitive differentiation. So if you look at companies like Barclays, they have been so much on top of that game and they include that in their marketing strategies, in their corporate social responsibility to say that, hey, our business is important to us but your privacy and your data is much more valuable to us and that kind of instantly helps them build that trust. So they have big GDPR compliance into their operations so much and so well that they can actually sell those kind of GDPR consultancy services because they are so good at it. And that's what we are seeing is happening. So 2019 and probably the next 12 to 18 months will be about scaling and operationalizing GDPR and moving from that minimum viable compliance. Yeah, it's interesting. We had a conversation with Holly St. Clair who's been in the state of Massachusetts and in her keynote this morning she talked about that data minimalist. I only want as much data as I know what I'm going to do, how I'm going to leverage it, kind of that pendulum swing back from the, I'm going to hoard all the data and think about it later. Is that, do you see that as a trend with, is that just governments? Is that, are you seeing that throughout industries in Europe? Interesting, so when GDPR came into existence there were a lot of these workshops that were happening for organizations on how to become GDPR and there was this Danish public sector organization where one of the employees went to do that workshop and he was all charged up and he came back to his employer and said, hey, can you forget me? And it took that organization about 14 employees and three months to forget one person. So that's the amount of data they were hoarding in and they were not deleting and all their processes were manual which took them so long to actually forget one person. And so if you don't cleanse up your data act now meeting with all these, right, to be forgotten and all these specific clauses within GDPR is going to be too difficult and it's going to just eat up your business time. Well, I'm trying to, connecting the dots here. One of the big stumbling blocks is if you look at data protection if I've got backup, if I've got archive, I mean if I've taken a snapshot of something and stuck that under a mountain in a button giant tape and they say, forget about me. Oh my gosh, do I have to go retrieve that? Do I need to manage that? The cost could be quite onerous. Help us connect the dots as to what that means to actually, what are the ramifications of this regulation? Yeah, so I think GDPR is a beast. It's a dragon of regulation. So it's important to dice it to understand what the initial requirements are. And almost the first step is to get visibility and classify the data as to what is personal data. You don't want to apply policies to all the data because there might be some garbage in there. So you need to get visibility and assess and classify your data on what is personal data. And once you know what data is personal, what you want to retain, that's when you start applying policies to ensure that they are safe and they are anonymized or pseudonymized if you want to do analytics at a later stage. And then you think about how you meet individual clauses. So there is a GDPR framework. You start by classifying data, then you apply specific policies to ensure you protect and back up the personal data, and then you go about meeting the specific requirements. Okay, what else can you tell us about kind of European markets? You know, I know when I look at the cloud space, governance is something very specific to, you know, I need to make sure my data doesn't leave the borders kind of like what other trends and, you know, issues you hear from your constituencies. So GDPR posed a lot of existential threat to a lot of companies like, say, hyperscalers or SaaS vendors. So they were the first ones to actually become completely compliant to understand their regulations, have European data hubs and to have those data centers. Like I think at that time, Microsoft had this good collaboration with T-Systems to have a local data center, not controlled by Microsoft, but by somebody who is, which is a German organization. So you cannot have data locality more than that, right? So they were trying different innovative ways to build confidence among enterprises to make sure that cloud adoption continues. And what was interesting that came out from our research was that we thought GDPR means people's confidence in cloud is going to plunge, people's confidence in public cloud is going to plunge. That didn't happen. 42% of organizations were still going ahead with their cloud strategies as is, but it's just that they were going to be a lot more cautious and they want to make sure that the applications and data that they were putting in the cloud was something that they had complete visibility into and that didn't have too much of personal data. And even if it had, they had complete control over it. So they had a different strategy of approaching public cloud, but it didn't slow them down. But over time, they realized that to get that control of IT and to get that control of data, they need to have that multiple, multi-cloud strategy because cloud had to become a two-way street. They need to have an exit strategy as well. So they tried to make sure that they adopted multiple cloud technologies and have that data interoperability as well because data management was one of their key, key top-of-mind priorities at that time. Okay, last question I had for you. We're here at the Actifio event. What do you hear from your customers about Actifio? Any research that you have relevant to what they're doing? It's quite interesting. So copy data management, that's how Actifio started, right? They created a market for themselves in this copy data management and we classify copy data management within replication market. And replication is quite a slow market, but this copy data management is a big issue and it's one of the fastest growing markets. So they started off from a good base where they created a market for themselves and people started noticing them and now they've kind of grown further and grown beyond and tried to cover the entire data management space. And I think what's interesting and what's going to be interesting is how they keep up the momentum in building that infrastructure ecosystem and platform ecosystem because companies are moving from protecting data centers to protecting centers of data. And if they can help organizations protect multiple centers of data through a unified pane of glass and have that platform approach to data management, then they can help organizations become data drivers which gives them the competitive advantage. So if they can keep up that momentum they're going to go great guns. All right, well thank you so much for joining us and sharing the data that you have in the customer viewpoints from Europe. So we'll be back with more coverage here from Actifio Data Driven 2019 in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. Thank you.