 Welcome back to Los Angeles. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here on day three of theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 21. Dave, we've had a lot of great conversations the last three days. It's been jam-packed. Yes, it has been and yes, it has been fantastic and it's been live. Did we mention that? It's been live. You're live in Los Angeles and we're very pleased to welcome one of our alumni back to the program. David Cefie is here, the CEO of Trilio. David, welcome back. It's good to see you. You're having me. It's good to be here. Isn't it great to be in person? Oh man, it's been a reunion. It has been a reunion and we've been talking about these great little, have you seen these wristbands that they have? I actually asked for two because I'm a big hugger, so. Me too, excellent. So here we are, day three of KubeCon, that's actually probably day five, our third day of coverage. You're losing track now. I'm losing track too, it's Friday. I know that, that I can tell you. You guys announced 2.5 a couple of weeks ago. Tell us what's exciting before we crack open Trilio. Sure, sure, sure. Well, it's been exciting to be here. Look, the theme of resiliency realized has been, it's right up our wheelhouse. Just signal that more people are getting into production type of environments. More people require data protection for cloud native applications, right? And this 2.5 release is an answer to what we're seeing in the market. It really is centered predominantly around ransomware protection. And for us, when we look at this, I've done a lot of work in cybersecurity, my career. And we took a hard look about a year ago around this. How do we do this, how do we participate, how do we protect and help people recover? Because recovery, that's part of the security conversation. We talk about all the other things, but recovery is just as important. And we look at everything from zero trust architecture that we provide now to adhering to NIST standards and framework. That's everything from immutability. So you can't touch the backups now, right? That's fine. To encryption, right? We'll encrypt from the application all the way to that, to the storage repository and we'll leverage key management system. So it's kind of like, you know, Bitcoin, right? You need a key to get your coin. You as an end user only have your key to your data alone and that's it. So all these things become more and more important as we adopt more cloud-native technology. And as the threat landscape changes dramatically. Oh, man, I gotta tell you, right? Every time you publish an application into another cloud, it's a new vector, right? So now I'm living in a multi-cloud world where multiple applications and my data now lives, right? So people are trying to attack backups through consoles and administrative consoles to the actual back-ups themselves. So new vectors, new problems, need new solutions. And you mentioned something. You asked the question, how do we participate? And we are here at KubeCon, a cloud-native foundation. So what about, what's your connection to the open-source community and efforts there? How do you participate in that space? Yeah, so it's a really great question because we are a closed-source solution that focuses all of our efforts on the open-source community and protecting cloud-native applications. Our roots have been protecting cloud-native applications since 2013, 2014, and with a lot of very large logos. And through time, there are open-source projects that do emerge. In this community, for example, Valero is an open-source data protection platform. For all of its goodness as a community-based project, there are also deficiencies, right? So Valero in itself focuses only on label-based applications. It doesn't really scale. It doesn't have a UI, it's really CLI-driven, which is good for some people and it's free. But if you need to really talk about an enterprise-grade platform, this is where we pick up. In our last release, we gave you the ability to capture your Valero-based backups. And now, you wanna be an adult with an enterprise-caliber backup solution and continue to protect your environment and have compliance and governance needs all satisfied. That's where we really stand out. But when you're talking to customers in any industry, what are the things that you talk about in terms of really categorizing the key differentiators that really make Trilio stand out above the competition? Yeah, because there are a bunch of great competitors out there. There's no doubt about it. A lot of the legacy folks that you do see, perhaps on the show floor, they do tuck in Valero under the covers. They can check a box or can satisfy some customer needs. Some of the pure play people that we do see out there, great solutions too. But really where we shine is, we are the most flexible, agnostic solution that there is in this market. And we've had people like Red Hat and Sousa and Verrantis, Digital Ocean and HPS Morel, and the list goes on. Certify, say Trilio is the solution of choice. And now, no matter where you are in this journey or who you're using, we have your back. So there's a lot of flexibility there. We are completely storage agnostic. We are cloud agnostic. In going back to how you wanna build or architect your application, people are in various phases in their journey. A lot of times, many moons ago, you may have started with just a label-based application. Then you have another department that has a new technique and they wanna use Helm. Or you may be adopting OpenShift and you're using Operators. To us, it doesn't matter. You have peace of mind. So whether you have to protect multiple departments or use an end user as one single tenant or using various techniques, we'll discover or protect and we can move forward together. So if you looked at, if you look at it from a workload basis and you look at your customers, are the workloads that you're protecting, what's the mix of what you think of as legacy, virtualized things versus containerized things? And then the other kind of follow-on to that is, are you seeing a lot of modernization and migration? Or are you seeing people leave the legacy things alone and then develop net new in sort of separate silos? Yeah, so that's a great question. And I gotta tell you, the answer varies. That's the honest answer, right? You may have a group or a CIO that says, look, our CTO says, we're moving to this new architecture. The water is great, bring your applications in. And so either it's, we're gonna lift and shift an application and then start to break it apart over time and develop microservices. Or we're gonna start net new. And it really does run the gambit. And so, as we look at for some of those people, they have peace of mind that they can bring their tier one applications in and we can recover. And for some people that say, look, I'm gonna start brand new and these are gonna be stateless applications. We've seen this story before, right? I joke around, it's kind of like the movie Groundhog's Day. You know, we started many moons ago within the open stack world and it was started with stateless too. Stateful always, always, always finds a way. But for the stateless people, we start thinking about security. I've had conversations with CISOs around the world who say, I'm going to publish a stateless application. What I'm concerned about, things like drift. You know, what's happening in runtime may be completely different than what I intended. So now we give you the ability to capture that runtime state, compare the two things, identify what's changed. If you don't like what you've seen, you can take that point in time, recover it into a sandbox and forensically take it apart. You know, one of our superpowers, if you will, is our point in time backups that are all in an open format. Everyone else has proprietary schemas. So the benefit of an open format is you have the ability to leverage a lot of third-party tooling. So take a point in time, run scanners across it, re-orchestrate it. God forbid Trilio goes away. You still have access and you can recreate a point in time. So when you start thinking about compliance-heavy environments, think about telcos, right? Or financial institutions. They have to keep things for 15 years, right? Technologies change, architectures change. You can't have that lock-in until you continue to thrive. And on that front, one of the marketing terms that we hear a lot, and I want to get your opinion on this, is feature-proofing. How do you, what does it mean to you and Trilio and how do you enable that for organizations? Like you said, for the FSIs, they have to keep data for 15 years and other industries that have to keep it for maybe even longer. I mean, right, the feature-proof terminology, that's part of our mantra, actually. When I talked about a superpower being as agnostic and flexible as can be, right? As long as you adhere to standards, right? The standards that are out here, we have that agnostic play. And then, again, not just capturing an application's metadata data, but that open format, right? Giving you that open capability to unpack something so you're not, there is no vendor lock-in with us at all. So all these things play a part into future-proofing yourself. And because we live and breathe cloud-native applications, you know, it's not just Kubernetes, right? Over the course of time, it'll be other things, right? You're going to see mixed workloads too. They're going to be VM-based in the cloud and container-based in the cloud and server lists as well. But as long as you have that framework to continuously build off of, that's where we go. You know, it shouldn't matter where your application lives, right? At the end of the day, we will protect the application and its data. It can live anywhere. So conversations around multi-cloud change, we start to think and talk across cloud, right? The ability to move your application and data wherever it needs to be, too. Well, you talked about recoverability and that is the whole point of backing up Biddy. You have to be able to recover. It's something that we've seen in the last 18, 19 months. Anyone can back up data. That's right. That's right. If you can't recover it or if you can't recover it in time, we're talking like going on a business potentially. We've seen massive changes in the security landscape in the last 18, 19 months. We're in somewhere. I was looking at some cybersecurity data that showed that just in the first half of this calendar year, from January 1 to June 30, 2021, ransomware was up nearly 11X. DDoS attacks are up. We've got this remote workforce that's going to probably persist for a while. So the ability to recover data from not if we get hit by ransomware, but when we get hit by ransomware is critical. When? You're absolutely right. And to your point, anyone can back up anything. If you look at it at its highest form, we talk about point-in-time re-orchestration, right? Back up is a use case. DR is a use case, right? How do you re-orchestrate something that's complex, right? The containers, these applications in the cloud native space, they're amorphous. They're living things, right? The metadata is different from one day to the next. The data itself is different from one day to the next. So that's what's so great about Trilio. It's such an elegant solution that allows you to re-orchestrate a point in time when and where you need it. So yes, you have to be able to recover. Yes, it's not a matter of if, but when, right? And that's why recovery is part of that security conversation. You know, I've seen insurance companies, right? They want to provide insurance for ransomware. Well, you're going to have enough attacks where they don't want to provide that insurance anymore. It costs too much. The investment that you make with Trilio will save you so much more money down the road, right? Prashanta Kochavara, who's our product manager, actually gave a talk about that yesterday. And the economics are really interesting. So how has the recovery methodology who participates in that changed over time? Yeah. As we are in this world of developer operators who take on greater responsibility for infrastructure things. Yeah. Who's responsible for backup and recovery today? And how has that changed? Everyone. Everyone's responsible. So, you know, we rewind however many years, right? And it used predominantly, it's this admin that was in charge of- Backup administrator. Right. Put a ticket in, you're a backup administrator, right? Cloud native space in application lifecycle management is a team sport. Security is a team sport. It's a holistic approach, right? So when you think about the team that you put out on the field, whether you're DevOps, you're SRE, DevSecOps, ITOps, you're all going to have a need for point-in-time re-orchestration for various things. And the term may not be backup. Right. Something else. It may be for test dev purposes. Maybe for forensic purposes. It may be for DR, right? So I say it's a team sport and security is a holistic thing that everyone has to get on board with. Yeah, re-orchestration is exactly the right way to talk about these processes. It's not just recovery. You're rebuilding. You're rebuilding. A complex environment that's always changing. That's one of the guarantees. It's always going to be changing. Right. I can promise you that much. Can you give us, leave us with a customer example that you think really articulates the value of what Trilio delivers? Yeah, so it's interesting. I won't say who the customer is, but I'll tell you it's in the defense agency. It's a defense agency. They have developers all over the place. They need self-service capabilities for the tenants to mine their own backups. So you don't need to contact someone, right? They can build. They have one dashboard, single pane of glass or truth to manage all their Kubernetes applications and gives them that infrastructure to progress, whether you're DevOps or now you're IT ops. This group has rolled it out across the nation and they're using and they're working with very sensitive environments. So now we have their back. And what are some of the big business outcomes that they're achieving already? The big business outcomes? Well, so operational efficiencies definitely first and foremost, right? Empowering the end user with more tools, right? Because we've seen this shift left when people are talking about DevOps, right? So how do I empower them to do more? So I see that operational efficiency. The recoverability aspect, God forbid something goes wrong. How do you do that and the cost of that? And then also being native to the environment. The Trilio solution is built for Kubernetes. It is built on go. It is a stateless Kubernetes application. So you have to have seamless integration into these environments. And then going back to what I was saying before, knowing peace of mind, the credibility aspect that it is blessed by Red Hat and Sousa and Morantis and all these other folks in the field. That you can guarantee it's gonna work. Well, that helps to give your customers the confidence that they're, and that confidence might sound trivial. It's not. No. Especially when we're talking about security. It's not at all. That's a big business outcome for you guys when a customer says, I'm confident. I have the right solution. We're gonna be able to recover when things happen. We fully trust in the solution that we're using. And we'll bring more into production faster. That helps everyone out here, too, right? It feels good, you have that credibility. You have that assurance that I can move faster and I can move into different clouds faster. And that's where we're gonna continue to put, we're gonna continue to push the envelope there. You know, coming, as we look into going forward, we're gonna come out with other capabilities that's gonna continue to differentiate ourselves from folks. We'll talk about in time the ability to propagate data across multiple clouds simultaneously. So making RTOs, look at the split, seconds and minutes. And so I hope that we can have that conversation next time we're together. Look forward to it. Because it's really exciting. Any CTA that you want to give to the audience? Any upcoming or recent webinars that you think they would be really benefit from? So I guess one thing I'd put out there is that I understand that people need to continuously learn. There is a skillset hole in this market. We understand that. And people look to us as not just a vendor, but a partner. And a lot of the questions that we do get are how do I do this or how do I do that? Engage us, ask us to consume our products is really, really easy. You can download us from the website or go to Red Hat's operator hub or go to the marketplace over at SUSE. And let's begin to begin. And we're here to help and so reach out. We want everyone to be successful. Awesome, Trilio.io. David, thank you for joining us. It's been an exciting conversation. Thanks for having me. Good to see you all. Likewise, good to see you in person. Take care. We look forward to the next time we see you and unpacking what other great things are going on on Trilio. We appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Good to be here. For David's FIE and David Nicholson, the two Davids, I'm in a sandwich. I'm Lisa Martin. You were coming to you live from Los Angeles. This is KubeCon, cloud native con North America 2021. Stick around. Our next guest joins us momentarily.