 Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. We're back at VeeamON 2017 in New Orleans. Andrew Christensen is here as a senior systems engineer with the Global Data Center Study Group, a higher ed organization. Andrew, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Thank you very much for having me. You're welcome, so interesting name. Tell us about the organization. Study Group, Study Group began life as a small education college in the UK about 15 years ago. Over the time, we've grown to a global organization. We take on about 85,000 students a year from close on 160 countries. We have 85 sites around the world, very much a global footprint, both in corporate terms and in IT terms. Okay, is this your first VeeamON? No, it's not. I came to the previous one in Las Vegas and that experience meant that I had to come back to this one in New Orleans. Really, why? Tell us about that. It's a great experience. They know how to do their events very well. The information is first class and as a Veeam product user, the information and the experience in the room available to you is wonderful. How long have you been a Veeam customer? How did you, tell us about your journey. Well, our journey. We were very much in the Legacy Ballpark of Backups. We had some unnamed products that we were using which were very old school in their thinking and how they did things. We realized quickly that the amount of data that we took on was growing and was going to outpace our capacity for backup and simplicity and complexity was growing too fast for us. Couldn't manage it. It wasn't going to be feasible. Went to market to start looking for a better solution and Veeam was top the list. So you mentioned data growth as one of the catalysts which created more problems obviously for your backup. Made it harder to meet. Maybe it was backup windows at the time or RPO and RTO. Did your decision to change your backup also coincide with an increase in virtualization and did that have a ripple effect? Can you explain it? We've been talking about that all week but I'd like to validate it with a practitioner. No spot on there. We virtualized quite early on in the grand scheme of things. We went to Veeamware very quickly. We're now running a hypervisor with a VCR 5.5 environment. Now that was all well and good. I don't think the practices that we took in and a lot of the infrastructure alongside that kept up with that. Backups is one of those things. And when we started looking at what we needed to really work with our environment, get the most out of our virtualization project, we needed to do something very quickly and backups was a key feature. Andrew, as a global organization, how does cloud fit into your architecture, what you're doing? What can you sketch out a little bit for if you know where cloud fits? Our solution, although quite simple in principle, it's never simple, let's face it. Anything in IT, especially on the engineering scope, never simple. Just keeps getting more complicated. Exactly right. And for better or worse, that's how we do these things, especially when it comes to a cloud scenario, you add a little bit of complexity but often it pans out to be worthwhile, especially in dollar value. Our solution takes local backups in a hub and spoke concept. So our data center is being the hub and our branch site's being the spoke. Consolidate the data from all sites, hold a decent amount of data as backup onsite, then everything else will actually ship out to the cloud and that's being AWS in Glacier Storage. Now that came about mostly because our core data center is in Las Vegas that we have no hands on site. So we didn't really have the option of a manual tape service, a paid for service, very expensive. So we needed to shift away from the your old school typical tape service environment. Having good bandwidth in Las Vegas and availability to get to the AWS regions, made it a good solution for us. A tool to do that, already in place with being made it very simple. So your target, sorry, still your target is Glacier? Correct, yes. So long-term retention and legal retention, especially, we push everything out to Glacier to fill that need for us. Okay, so that's the last, but maybe I missed that there's something in between, obviously, if you need to do a recovery, right? Correct, so we keep some local storage as well. Depending on the environment and the data itself, we'll keep it locally onsite in our racks for a certain amount of time. Maybe a year, maybe two years, depending on some of the data. Everything else as a duplicate and long-term goes out to AWS. All right, there were a couple of announcements this week about AWS and also about Glacier. What did you hear? What interests you? Well, I mean, the V10 announcement and its interaction with AWS, hooking in your AWS accounts for S3, Glacier and whatnot, very promising, very promising, very excited. I'm going to hit up my account manager for a trial on that very soon, because that could simplify our process. And I imagine a lot of other people with hybrid cloud scenarios will leverage it as well. For those people that have workloads in AWS, the agentless backup function, very promising. I mean, it's a logical step, I think, and the partnership that's built that is very logical as well. It's going to help a lot of people. What is driving in your industry the availability needs? And how has that evolved over the last couple of years? Well, it's a catch-treaty too. For us, data security is pan-amant. A student comes to us, they sign up for a course, in a lot of cases, they'll be an international student. Now, that's all well and good, but when we look at the data that we take from that student to get them into a course, it's essentially a how-to kit for data theft and identity theft. So we need to protect that data very well. You know, we've got a lot of personal information, we've got passport photos, we've got visa applications, the whole shebang. So being able to make sure that, A, it's available for the people that need it so that they can get them into their courses, get them learning stuff, which is what our ideal is, and making sure it's secure, no matter where we put it, backups, availability, all that sort of stuff, needs to be secure. So a solution and a tool has to incorporate that as easily as possible. Bill Philbin was asking the audience this morning, did we ever had to do a recovery? He said about a third of the audience's hands went up. Presuming your hand was up. Yes, yes we have. I mean, we've both tested and we've actually had incidents where we've had malware come into the business in certain aspects and having a good recovery point on site and a quick, easy interface. The single pane of glass to coin a pro at the moment was very useful. You know, stops the heart a little bit when it does happen, but after you go through the hoops and you understand what you're doing with the product, it really does give you a sense of security. You know, large organizations, big banks in the money business, for example, they have very explicit disaster recovery plans. They might have three site data centers. They get gobs of money. They can throw at this stuff. Higher education tends to be a little tighter with the budget, fair to say. But also a lot of smaller and mid-sized organizations, I think it's fair to put you in that category, oftentimes had very little, if any, sometimes data disaster recovery. And what they've done is when they re-architected the backup, they said, you know, we can kill two birds with one stone and sort of bring those two worlds together. Is that what you did and how would you describe it? I'd call our solution a bit of a hybrid. In line with a backup scenario that we do have, both off-site and a hybrid cloud scenario, we also do a DR solution internally. So we have a data center in Las Vegas. We also have one in Sydney. So we do take some DR concepts down to Sydney to hold onto that. Very limited. You bang for buck with DR. It's very hard to justify when you go to your manager and say, look, you know, the cost of failure needs to be calculated here. It's very difficult to make that argument successfully. So having a tool that we already used that could also do that, very helpful in the first place. You're right in that we are an SMB in the traditional sense. And the feature set that does come with Veeam, it's quite good for that, I think. We're quite OPEC-shy as a tradition. So being able to put a little bit of infrastructure in place and sort of pre-purchase these things, get the cost out of the way with CapEx helped us a lot. So no more licensing involved, mental care of it in-house already. And a little bit of expenditure took that solution very well for us. Andrew, one of the interesting discussions we've seen in the last few years when we talk in the education realm is the importance of data and how can you leverage that data? Of course, you talked about some of the security aspects. How has the role of data changed in your world? It's a bit of a catch-22. It's recognized that we do take on a lot of data. How we use that, it's an ongoing question. I mean, people have put a lot of BA type roles in place to try and leverage that a bit further, get some use out of it. We have this data, it should be an asset to us. It's very difficult to do successfully, I think. People don't really know the questions to ask of their data. Maybe there's a bit of thought leadership or some extra disruptive technology that should come along and help that out a little bit. I think in the near future, it will be a very big question that needs to be answered. And a lot of demands can be met by that. Okay, how about your students? There's got to be from all the devices, what kind of pressures does that put on the IT role? Well, it's substantial. I mean, in our particular role, especially in the UK and Europe, we actually house our students. So everything from living aspects to education and whatnot, everything is handled by us. So they're safekeeping or their lifestyle, their quality of life and such. Now, today's one age, you have two iPads, you have a Chromebook, you have an iPhone and whatnot. All that needs to be handled by us in a secure fashion. The data that comes from that, the content that gets delivered to the students, both privately and during their education, it needs to be both readily available and useful. Making it available to the students as well as protecting them, I suppose, in a secure fashion, making sure that the data they hand out over these networks and use is safe, that's a big concern to us. So a lot of talk this week about ransomware, of course, kind of your position, talk about making the heart stop a little bit. How do you look at that problem? What solutions do you have and what would you like to see the industry do? It's a difficult question. There's no easy answer to that at all. Recently, we've heard a lot about machine learning and predictive analytics and whatnot. We use some products that do a real-time assessment of file stores, file usage and whatnot and predict excess usage, I suppose. All of a sudden, you can start seeing if there are extra files being encrypted very quickly. You can take action based on that because it is a clear sign of ransomware. That said, we educate a lot of young people. We educate a lot of young people in IT as well. We have identified that a key threat is often going to be from internal. How we protect against that has really shifted our mindset a fair bit. A lot more legislation's coming in, in the UK especially, starting to come in the US and Australasia and the requirement for that is only going to grow. It's a challenge that I can't really say in the future how we're going to predict it and act on it but it is always going to be in front of mind. Do you think you could use your backup data because essentially you're pushing change data over the network constantly or at least multiple times per day, I presume? Yes. Do you have the tooling to monitor that activity and identify anomalous behavior where maybe you're pushing more data or you're seeing more encrypted data going at a particular time? Does the tools exist to do that today? To an extent, yes. Getting them all together to be viewable and usable data for your technician, your engineers and whatnot is a bit of a challenge, I think. Antivirus and security software is out there that can do this for you. Also, the data analytics tools that are out there at the moment, Veeam One is actually a useful tool on that front, can help us out a lot there. Making sure that the person responsible or looking for that trend knows where to go and has a good single pane of glass per se to actually identify issues. I think that's the key. Could you, I've been thinking about sort of how to solve this problem. Could you put like phantom files out there on the network? Like phantom high value files, like student credit card list. I mean, the Honeypot scenario? Yeah, use it as a Honeypot, yeah. Absolutely, I mean, a lot of the more enterprise-sized corporations are doing this and you can actually leverage that, take them on as a service if you need to. There are companies out there that will offer this service to you. It is quite expensive, what it is. And yet, when we calculate the cost of failure, I think the expense might be justified. Well, like you said, it's hard. CapEx, CapExphobic, I forget what you said, but I'll say CapExphobic, challenged. Okay, we're out of time, but sort of last question. Takeaways from Veeamon 2017, things that you're excited about? Once again, the AWS announcements in V10 and the partnerships coming from that, very exciting, very exciting. Looking forward to that, being able to test it a little bit. The feature set that keeps growing. I mean, we started out in 8.5, being 8.5, we're now into 9.5 and the growth from 8.5 to 9.5 and now 10 on the horizon, it's massive. If they continue this growth, it's going to be one of the best products out there. I'm very happy about that. All right, Andrew, thanks very much. Appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Veeamon in New Orleans.