 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering ZertoCon 2018, brought to you by Zerto. This is theCUBE, I'm Paul Gillan. We're on the ground here in Boston for ZertoCon 2018. And joining me is Bill Manning, who's in infrastructure operations at Wood Forest National Bank. Now I was not familiar with Wood Forest National Bank, but I understand that regular visitors to Walmart in the South probably are. You're the Walmart bank, I understand. That's what a lot of people like to call us. Your many branches are located in Walmarts, in other words. And based in Houston, which has been no stranger to disasters lately, the topic of IT resilience very much fresh on your mind. What does IT resilience mean in terms of your operations at Wood Forest? We need to be very resilient in terms of natural disasters, hurricanes, mostly. So in order to prepare ourselves for that, we migrate our, we migrate 70% of our infrastructure between data centers every six months. When hurricane season starts, we migrate away from Houston. When it's done, we migrate back. Now why the migration strategy? Why move between data centers? Why not just settle on one data center that's out of harm's way, if you will? Well, there's no one data center that's out of 100% harm's way. So you need to make sure that if one data center goes down, you can always come up at your backup or your primary data center. Now how did you become a Zerto customer? I understand you were one of their first or their first customer? We were their first customer. We had Kasha before them, and then her cover point, Kasha was the precursor to Zerto. And whenever we were having issues with our replication appliance, we decided to look in a Zerto and we bought, implemented, and turned on Zerto fairly quickly. So we were the first customer. And then we were the first customer that was using it. We actively utilized it to run a migration. And so far, everything's going great. We love the product and it works very well for us. Being the first customer of a product is typically thought of as a risky proposition. What pushed you over the tipping point? We had an appliance that kept failing on us and the last failure was this draw that broke the back. So we already had Zerto in a, I believe it was an alpha, possibly a beta test implementation. And when that straw finally broke, we turned off the appliance and we turned on Zerto and it was very seamless. And yes, there were headaches. We had issues with it, but a lot of the support tickets, all of the enhancement requests, a lot of those have our name on it because we utilized it. So you're doing the cloud migration every six months. What are some of the operational issues that you have to take into account when you're moving that size of a processing load a couple of hundred miles away? Or maybe Austin, maybe a hundred miles away? We do it so often, it's kind of second nature to us now. But we know the pain points of if you do it regularly, you'll know what happened last time, hopefully you documented it and you know what can happen this time. And a lot of times it's firewall rules. It's what did we do at our current data center that we forgot to do at our other data center in preparation for migration. So our biggest pain point is making sure we don't forget, oh, hey, we did something here. Let's make sure to replicate it over and do the same thing over at our other data center. How has the role of backup changed over the time you've been using Zerto? It's not really, you don't have the luxury of point in time backups anymore. It's a continuous process, isn't it? Well, we don't utilize Zerto for backups. We utilize another product for our primary backup system and we are a bank. We have seven year retention policies. So there are certain things that we have to keep on tape or on disk for a certain number of years and Zerto doesn't immediately offer that to us. However, we do utilize Zerto in a kind of pseudo backup process. If we need to recover a file that got deleted accidentally, I can either spend an hour using our other process or 10 minutes using Zerto. So we just pop into Zerto, use the journal file level recovery and there you go. You've had, being in Houston, you've had a number of major storms in recent years. Are there any stories you can share with us? About how you have managed to stay up and running during those storms? Our first storm, our first big storm, right after Katrina was Rita. And when Rita came through, we didn't have what we have today. We ended up powering down non-critical items and making sure our critical applications were up and running. And luckily we didn't lose much power. We didn't lose any networking. Whereas during Harvey, we lost some networking for a week or two. The difference was we already moved everything to our secondary data center well away from the hurricane. And sure, one of our redundant paths was down. Our other one was up. We still had connectivity and we were doing great. So in terms of where we've progressed, hurricane season is what we are mainly concerned with. So we utilize Zerto, we move everything over. So if our data center, our primary data center, Houston goes down, we're mildly affected and customers shouldn't even notice. How does this make your business more resilient? I mean, is this actually, is there a business benefit for your customers? Of course. Of the business being this resilient? If we're a bank and our ATMs go down and we can't get them back up for a few days, our customers notice. If we're a bank and our primary systems go down and you can't take money out of your account for, I believe the timeframe is 72 hours, the federal government comes in and they own us now. We are no longer a bank. Because we failed at providing services for our customers for an extended period of time. And that's unacceptable. So to mitigate that, we use a DR strategy, we use a business continuity plan. And we make sure that if something were to happen, even if it were outside of hurricane season, or if we were during hurricane season, and we had an issue at our other data center, Zerto allows us to bring everything back up within minutes. And because we do it regularly, we're not gonna have as many headaches as someone that just says, oh, well, we've implemented Zerto, but we don't utilize it. We run a few test failovers, and make sure that we can actually migrate, but we don't bring anything up and run production load. We run production load every six months using Zerto. So that's how we get around, making sure that we're highly available and we don't get taken over by the government. You're a lot of talk, Bill, these days about digital transformation. How real is that to what Wood Forest is doing? How are you changing the way you do business? I think it's already occurred for us. I mean, we've already gone digital. When I first started, we had couriers picking up paperwork from the branches and taking them to centralized processing locations and running everything manually. Now it's all digital. And that was partially thanks to 9-11. There was proof work that couldn't run for weeks because airports were down. And because of that, banks started already going digital. So we already have digital transactions. Now, if you write a check at Walmart, instead of taking a few days or a week or two to clear, it clears that day or the next day because it's all digital. Walmart went digital, we went digital. Most banks are already going digital or have already gone digital. So we just kind of, people ask, we're mostly already there. We're already digital. How about cloud? What's your roadmap when it comes to using multiple cloud providers? We're definitely looking into it. They give us a lot of benefit. They give us a lot of service that we can, you know, oh, what's the word? You got a lot of flexibility. Flexibility, sure. Flexibility in doing things that we can't necessarily do ourselves. Right now, we're taking baby steps. We're not throwing full production load into the cloud. We're looking at let's put our development environment up there and see what it can provide for our developers. And so far, they're enjoying what the opportunities or the possibilities can be. So we're looking forward to hopefully this year, getting them up and running and in the cloud and enjoying all of the benefits from there. And after that, once we get some development done in there, then we'll probably start seeing some production applications being put into the cloud and some sort of probably SaaS sort of offer. Well, hurricane season is coming up in just a couple of months. I wish you the best this season. Bill Manning, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you very much, I appreciate it. We'll be right back from Zerdecon. I'm Paul Gillan, this is theCUBE.