 So joining us today is Doug Hazelman with CloudBerry. We're here to talk about CloudBerry, their backup tools, the MSP tools, and all the fun stuff you guys got going over there. Yeah, thank you. Happy to be here. So looking forward to a good discussion. Yeah, so you've been around for a little while in this world, so you've got some backup experience. You've got plenty of virtualization experience I've seen. I clicked on LinkedIn. So I've seen all the stuff. So you've been playing in this stuff. You didn't start out yesterday. So you got a little, a few great hairs like I do. Yeah, just a few. And most recently, before CloudBerry, I was at Veeam Software, which a lot of people, especially if you do anything in virtualization, you've probably at least heard of Veeam. So that was a great nine and a half years with Veeam, and I actually took some time off. After that, you know, to kind of decompress that work-life balance kind of thing. Yeah. And, you know, got a call about CloudBerry and decided, you know, hey, this looks like an exciting opportunity. It's still in the backup space, but it's in a different market. And, you know, it's a different, different kind of process that the CloudBerry is trying to do. You know, not focusing on virtualizations. We're not competing with Veeam. So it's pretty interesting. So I always like new challenges. I think what fascinates me about CloudBerry is the variety of backends that you support. Like, there's just engineers that are like, hey, a cloud company came up and has storage, let's add it to our product. I mean, is it like 25 or 30 backends that there's options for now? Yeah, there's if you look on the interface, it's that, you know, it's about it's about that. If you consider all the S3 compatible storage, then it goes up to 50. And, you know, to be truthful, that's what makes it easy is because so many of these new cloud storage companies, they are S3 compatible. So it doesn't make it as difficult to add a new storage as if, you know, they have their own protocols and everything else. If they're S3 compatible, it's relatively easy for us to add them. And I think that's a great concept from your standpoint, because you have IT guys who I hate this company. So I use this company where all of its IT people are full of opinions. And some are fact based, some aren't, but either way, now I can simply use your software as a solution and the back end of my choice. And then back end can be in my internal stack as well. So if I'm running something on premise, I have my own storage solution on premise or we're actually, we use your product for some of our cloud averse clients. If it's in the cloud, it scares them. And some of them are some large companies that have multiple offices. So we've actually built with CloudBerry backup solutions that crisscross their offices. Each office backs up to the other office over a VPN in all encrypts. And it's kind of a nice option. And that's actually what led me a while back to discovering like just how like I heard of you guys, but I hadn't used your product. And I'm like, wow, this is a really good solution for this. And I was playing around with your MSP solution too. That's it's kind of the same thing. But here's a control panel so you can manage it for businesses. Yeah, exactly. What are some of the new exciting things coming out related to that? So we just we actually just rolled out a four dot one version of our managed backup portal. So we added a number of new things in there, kind of too many to list. The one that I'm most excited about is you can now actually generate and create backup plans within the portal without having to go into the client and do that. So if you have a company and you want them all to have the same type of backup plan, you can go and configure all the options and then you can set a rule to then deploy that backup plan on to all the clients for that company. And previously you had to kind of do some, you know, import, export type of things. And it was a little less intuitive. Now it's all right there within the to manage backup interface makes it very easy to do. I like to how it will spin the files up and you have support for, you know, like Linux. So it'll create a spin up an installer for your clients as well. It was different because I'm not used to how it worked when I started testing it. And I'm going to be doing a review of that particular item, but it's it's a really clever way it works. I like to it was smart enough because I run Linux on my desktop and it says, hey, you're a Linux user. Let's automatically spin one up for you. And I can just say continue and yes. I'm like, well, that's cool. Because it's not just the back end that you have a lot of front end support for actually quite a few Linux distributions. Yeah, so we support, you know, all the obviously all the major Linux distributions. We support Mac, of course, we support Windows. So we're trying to trying to cover, you know, all the bases. Windows was obviously first. So there's a few more features in the Windows version than there are in the Mac and Linux. But we're working on getting those up to feature parity. So you'll see image based backup for Linux and Mac coming probably within the next couple of months. Oh, that's really cool. And I think that's the market, as you know, with virtualization and everything, it's changed. We years ago when I was an IT director, it was a big deal that we had a mixed environment. Now, any enterprise company has a big mixed environment. So you guys have kind of a solution. It's going to be able to back up that mixed environment. Yeah, and that's, you know, that's really the goal. And the other thing we look at is, you know, we try to understand and know our who our target customers are, who we're going after. You know, we're not trying to go after the multinational MSPs. We really, you know, we really want to talk to and help support the smaller local MSPs. You know, maybe, you know, three to four customers, you know, something that you do on the weekend. But we want to make it easy and cost effective for those smaller MSPs to have a solution without breaking the bank. Yeah, and I think it is a good fit. Like I said, some especially if you have people like some of my clients that are cloud averse, you have this nice solution where you can manage it, but it keeps all the data local. And that's actually their problems are like in all these regulations and things like that. They're just worried because we've heard of Equifax. Yeah, we've heard of all that. And, you know, I agree that it's nice to have the local option. But as you mentioned, it's good to have an offsite option too. And if, you know, you can do that through VPN or even if you had your own colo, you could set up S3 compatible storage at the colo and and, you know, have it sent there. It's not, you know, some big company cloud. It's it's your cloud as long as they trust you, then they trust they trust that those types of things. Yeah, and you guys do a nice job because you offer pre encryption before it leaves. Therefore, if they get it, they just have an encrypted blob. And once you get people past the concept of that, I think it's a it's a great thing because then you kind of have that trust no one encryption. As long as you have the keys, if they ever did get into the bucket in the sky that you put it into, they don't have anything. I think that's a really important thing. Probably an requirement for HIPAA and everything. So yeah. And the other thing is too, is encrypting the file names. So before, you know, if you file of a backup, you know, it'll actually encrypt the file name. So even if they break the first encryption, you know, all the file names and everything, you know, that that's that's encrypted. Then it's another kind of layer. So it helps add into that security. Yeah, that's been a lot of the things we do is we're seeing more attacks because because, okay, we can encrypt it, but then you get the metadata. They're like, okay, I know the file names. This gives me some hint as structures I'm looking for on the company. So it gives them that edge case when they're looking for a tax. So that's definitely a really great feature to pre encrypt everything. Make sure you keep a copy of the keys. But at least you don't have to worry about it. So wherever your storage ends up, it's it doesn't give any anyone an edge to getting in. True. So tell me about the ransomware protection. That's that's a big problem right now. Well, still it has been. Yeah, it's it's it's not going away anytime soon. It doesn't look like, and, you know, that's something we introduced last year. So it's where we're work, we're continually improving it. But essentially what we're doing now is, you know, because we're backing up the data on a scheduled basis, we can tell if that data has changed. So we're not sitting there watching for it to change. But if we've noticed in, you know, the next backup run that all of a sudden, you know, 90% of your files have changed versus normally it's about 20%, then that's a definite possibility for ransomware. So then we we set up an alert. We say you might you may have been, you know, a victim of ransomware, and then you can go in and do some investigation. Maybe somebody just ran defrag it wasn't their ransomware, you know, but it gives you but it gives you that, you know, kind of gives you that early warning thing in regards to, hey, you might be you might be under attack. And, you know, the other thing too, in that kind of cloud adverse scenario is what's nice about using the cloud is it's essentially kind of it's it's off network with no necessarily direct connection, other than through through the backup software. So, you know, if you're backing up locally and you have map drives all over the place and someone gets it with ransomware, then guess what? It's going to attack those map drives and everything else and it's going to spread throughout the company. But if you if you're air gapped your backups, whether it's, you know, cloud or tape or whatever, then that also gives you an extra level of protection because it's not going to be able to necessarily reach out and spread like it will spread through your local network. And I think that's the that's something important because when we've had we've dealt and done some cleanups, obviously with client breaches, it's immediately we unconnect them from the internet. So whatever's going on, everything comes to a halt. You're not online anymore. We physically have removed the cable that gets you out there so we can start doing analysis and we don't want any further damage done. And the same thing with the backups, I think it's probably smart, you know, that's a very heuristic approach because this is with securities getting tougher and tougher. We locked everything down so they have to find new exit strategies to try and get the data. So looking at it from heuristics when we just seen a bunch of files change, hold on, is a really great approach. Yeah, it's it's no, you know, you definitely still need antivirus and all those types of things. Yeah, not a replacement for that. So, you know, we don't want to we don't want customers thinking, oh, well, I've got cloud, berries, ransomware protection. I don't need anything else. Right. You know, we don't advocate for that. It's just an extra layer. Yeah. So you're right. That's one more layer. That's an important part of this. Like an onion, like an onion. Yeah, and that's how it is for security. I mean, we do this with our being an MSP. It's like the full stack, but there's not it's everything to protect you and still there's a chance something could get through. That's why we have backups of it. So it probably can alert. We've run into this with some law firms. We had a disgruntled employee who had a lot of access and before he left, decided that deleting things was the ideal way to exit. And it would have been the same thing. It wasn't a ransomware attack, but that software would have alerted us that someone's making a lot of changes. Yeah, you know, it's kind of funny because we talk about ransomware a lot, but disgruntled employee is another attack vector that you really need to be concerned about. Yeah. And we've seen someone just did this. It was a, I think it was in Canada. The IT guy messed up the railways. He went and attacked the systems before he left. Yeah. Was it? I just love the title. It says IT guys off goes off the rails and Canadian Railway, but it's what internal threats are very real and it's something you constantly got to be thinking about with some before they change job. If they do something or copy a bunch of files or touch a bunch of files, that same alert is just as important. Yep. So that's really cool. Um, what else you guys got going on over there? What's, uh, what's been related to some of the virtualization? I know there's like some support to do full image restoring. So we have, we have virtualization support for Hyper-V and VMware. Um, it's, um, you know, it's, it's image, you know, it's image based, like all the standard virtualization, you know, type things are, um, but then also from a recovery perspective, if you're doing image level, if you're doing image based backup, um, then you can restore that image, you know, to Hyper-V or to VMware. Um, so, you know, from a restore perspective, you know, maybe you've got some client computers. Um, you've got image based backup to them. You want to spin them up in a virtual environment just to check them out. Um, or you've got a physical server. You want to, you know, back that up and you can spin it up in a virtual environment as well. Um, and then, you know, kind of along that same line, but a bit different is from an Amazon perspective, if you're sending your image based backups to S3, you also have the option of spinning those up as an S2, um, as an EC2 instance, um, up in Amazon. So, from a recovery perspective, you know, you can have, you know, you can do recovery actually in the cloud, uh, to Amazon EC2 and get things back up and running that way too. I think that's a, uh, an amazing feature. So, my long time in IT, that was like so future thinking 20 years ago. Now it's like, yeah, I click a button, I can take the virtual image of a server and spin it up in a cloud instance and reconnect to it. That's just like, I love how far, so people who start on IT like, yeah, you can just do that. I'm like, you know how hard this was years ago when I had to restore something off of one of those crazy tape drives using tar commands? We have really come a long way in, um, being able to just, it's, I really like the interface, uh, I've been, like I said, I've been playing around with it, uh, for the MSP interface. People, I know it's just got that EC2 option, so it's like grab it, grab the file and say, okay, spin up an EC2 instance and tie it to your account. Um, you guys also have plugins for the major, uh, MSP softwares. I think, uh, you got auto task, you've got ConnectWise. Um, any, uh, tell me a little bit about how those work and how the integrations are with those. Well, we, you know, we, we understand that, you know, a lot of the MSPs are using, you know, the, you know, either RMM or PSA software. So we want to be, you know, we want to allow a connection, um, into those. So, you know, from a billing perspective and those types of things, uh, we create that link. So if you are using one of those, then hey, there, there's some integration there, uh, to make life easier, because without that integration, now you've got all these disconnected systems. You got to try to try to time together somehow. Um, so, so that's, that's really the goal there. Um, another integration, um, we've been working on quite a bit is with Ninja RMM. Um, so there's, there's going to be some, some new stuff coming up with that, um, you know, through support of their APIs. Um, and they're actually, um, we're, we're pretty integrated with Ninja, um, already in, in terms of they can resell cloud barriers as part of their solution. That's really cool. Um, is I know what, like with ConnectWise, they, they have this goal, we don't use ConnectWise, but I'm favorite, like the system and they want to use their single pane of glass that they call it. So it's great that you have that full integration, because it still fits with theirs. Um, and I was, I was gonna say, I didn't see Ninja there, but I'm glad that you guys are working on it, because I know Ninja has become really popular, especially among the smaller MSP market. So, uh, that, that's great that we know it's on a roadmap now. So, oh, it definitely is. So that's, that's really cool. Uh, anything else, uh, up and coming that's kind of in the pipeworks? Yeah. So, uh, one of the things that's actually been in beta now for a while is our remote assistant. Uh, so, you know, when you think about, you know, from an MSP perspective, you know, one of the first things you want to do is back up your customers. But then, you know, if you need to connect into their environment, how do you, how do you do that? Uh, so, um, we started working, um, over a year ago on some remote assistant software. Um, and right now it's in the basic stage, it's in, it's in beta. Um, and we've gathered a lot of feedback. Um, and we'll eventually have that tied into our managed backup as well. So from the remote assistant standpoint, you'll be able to double click, um, launch it and then connect directly to the, to the computer that's having issues. Uh, so, you know, but I highly recommend people to check out our remote assistant. It's free. Um, give us some feedback, um, either in the forums or, you know, via email or however, um, but, you know, that, that's another exciting area that, uh, that we're working on. Um, question about it, is it on-prem option or is it only hosted through CloudBerry? How's, how's the deployment on that? Um, it's, it's, it's basically client to client. Okay. So it's, um, so when we have, well, it is and it isn't. So there's, there's a connector typically that goes through, that goes through a, a help appliance on S3 or on, on Amazon, um, that, that kind of facilitates that connection, you know, to make, make things work. But, um, it, it actually, you know, if you, if you set it up, um, between two computers, you know, they can be anywhere in the world. Um, and right now, if you, if you go in, you know, you kind of have to, you know, one, the client has to open it up, get the key, send that over to, you know, whoever's going to control it, give them the key, then, you know, accept control. Um, we're looking on, we're going to make that a little bit more silent in the future. Um, you know, based on credentials and whether or not you have permission to do that. That's pretty cool. So they essentially, your, your piece just proxies it. So it's tool, like you said, computer to peer, you're just proxying it to facilitate, no one's got time to map ports and everything anymore. Yeah. And that, you know, that's the same way that, that, um, our managed backup software works, right? It's, it's a, it's a SAAS application. You're running it through a web where that's being hosted by us. Um, but once the connection, you know, once you've created the storage accounts for the target cloud and the client accounts, you know, the communication happens directly between them. The data, the backup data, that type of stuff does not go through, uh, cloud very servers goes directly to the cloud that you've chosen. So, and it's cool. So you're applying that just the same concept and that's how you're going to apply to it. So it's really cool. I like that. It makes sense, makes it easy to do. So I, I will admit, I have not done testing with it, but I will. I've seen it on the list. So I figured it's on my to-do list. I love playing with all of these new products and things like that. That's, uh, you know, and I'm really been impressed with the cloudberry, uh, solution with their MSP one. Like I said, I'll be doing a review of that soon. I always, the hardest part is I have my own virtual lab and then I build out the lab because I can't always show customer stuff and, uh, that's what I've been in the process of we've been busy with projects. So I haven't had a chance to do it yet, but I got to sign up. I got it done. Yeah, one of the, you know, I think one of the other things too in managed backup is, is the white labeling options. Uh, so from, you know, from the MSP perspective, we give the option. You can completely custom brand it. Um, so you can kind of take cloudberry out of the picture and make it, make it appear as, as, if it's your own. Um, so, so that, and I know that that's popular with, with a lot of our MSPs that want to just say, Hey, this is my backup service that I'm providing to you, Mr. Customer. Um, and it, it makes it look like that, you know, throughout the entire process. You know, I noticed that and I, that's, um, I, I got a, I had my logo was too many pixels because I started playing with that this morning. I was like, I'm going to finish this this morning and I got busy. Um, but I, I really like that as a feature because I like when you can get those holistic solutions and everything with your name on it, that way the client doesn't go, what's this, what's this thing installed on my computer. Um, if it says our name on it, that's easy. It's, it's stuff that belongs to us. And they aren't going to ask us about it. So that's a great, uh, that's a great option. Yeah. Cause if they see a clobbery logo pop up or clobbery name, they're like, who do I call? But if they see your logo and your name pop up, then they know to give you a call. Yeah. Cause you always have those curious clients. We have a couple of them that are, what's this people? And so they always, if they see anything installed, they just look and we're like, this is our stuff. This is our, yeah, we know it has a name. So, no, that, that's really cool. So, uh, I'll look forward to that. So I may do some testing with your remote tool as well pretty soon. That's, uh, I, I like it. I definitely am a forum junkie. So I'll definitely be providing feedback of what I like and don't like it. Oh yeah. And that, that's something new too. So, uh, it was two weeks ago, we launched our, our forum. So forum.clobberylab.com. It's, it's just getting started. Um, you know, it's kind of a forums or chicken and egg kind of thing. But, um, you know, we, we definitely, you know, recommend users, you know, go head, head to the forums, you know, post your feedback. But we also do monitor. We monitor stack exchange. We monitor Reddit. We monitor, um, spice works and other, other areas so that, you know, we try to cover all the bases in terms of whether someone has a question or someone has feedback or someone's having a technical issue to try to resolve as soon as possible. You know, I, uh, you guys are very active everywhere. And I think that's an important part of, uh, being a good company in, in, in modern age is actually not being where they are, you know, some of these companies have this whole old school idea and even Microsoft is realizing that they have to, they've had to change things. Interacting with the community is a good thing. You aren't, you aren't, uh, just telling them what to do and you'll like my product whether you like how I implement it or not. Uh, that community feedback is actually just, it's great seeing it. It's great interacting with, uh, the engineers and you got, uh, we did, we did the interviews at Microsoft. They were, they were shocked when they were allowed to interact on GitHub. And now Microsoft has one of the most popular Githubs. I'm like, yeah, if you talk to your customers, they'll actually like you and may have ideas. And that's, you know, that, you know, that's part of my, my responsibility and why I was brought on board is to, you know, is to engage with the community and to, you know, to work with our, not only just our customers, but also, you know, the MSP community at large and understand, you know, what it is that they want. But, but also just, you know, kind of build relationships and, and, and, you know, meet in person, all those different types of things. Cause that's very important. You need to put, you need to put a personality and a face to, to the company. Yeah. You know, it can't just be some, some logo. So that's part of my charge. Yeah. And you guys, like I said, you, you are definitely engaging in the community. I didn't realize you're watching all the other areas. I've seen, I think I've seen you guys posting on Reddit, but I spent probably more time on Reddit and things like that. But no, that's definitely, that's definitely awesome. All right. We don't, we don't post a lot on Reddit just because we don't want to get voted down and flagged. Oh, I know. Self posting on Reddit. I, it's funny. It's, it's, it's a tragic thing. And all of us have learned it at one time. You can't just post and promote yourself. Someone has to show you Reddit love and it can't be you. Exactly. It's, it's a strange world over there in Reddit. I, as much as I love it, it's also confusing. I'm also a big fan of Alexis Ahini and I follow him, but it is such a, a unique community that he's. Yeah. All right. I actually saw Alexis speak at a conference a couple of years ago. He's a great presenter. A lot of fun. Oh yeah. Yeah. When he, when he first released his book, it was hysterical. I tweeted after I, as soon as he released it on audio, I tweeted about it. And he narrated himself. And I'm like, hey, I just finished your audio book. I loved it. Almost five minutes later, he replies, how was my voice? I was nervous recording. And I'm like, you're like, how are you nervous? You spoke in front of Congress. And we, it was funny because I was just like so happy that he tweeted back. I'm just like, that's great because he's very interactive, cares about the community. And yeah, he's, he's a great, great person. All right. Well, anything else? Should we wrap up here? No, I don't think so. Other than go to cloudberrylab.com. Check things out. Yeah, check it out. And for anyone that doesn't know, you can set up free trials of all this stuff. You guys offer like a free trial for all the different versions. I think right up to the enterprise version, right? You can get, is it how many days? Yep. 15, 15 day trial on everything. And as an MSP, you can sign up for MSP, you have to sign up for access. Yeah. And then once you do that, we'll kind of shoot an email, double check. And then you get to log in to work to the manage backup portal. Yep. And then from there, you've got 15 days to try that out. Yeah. So it's like I said, it's play around with it. I, it's no problem. I spun it up real quick. It's the signups easy. You can then select all your licenses. It's a very nice portal to where you just see everything. So I like said, I'll be doing a review of it soon. But yeah, you play with it. Yeah. It's it's a it's a pretty neat system. I always encourage people who are testing these products. You might like them. So yeah. And like I said, from the time we tested, we right away bought the product. Well, this is great. We've deployed it at clients. So all right. Well, thanks, thanks. This was great. I learned a lot about this. I'm going to definitely check out the new remote tool. And all the other fun stuff. All right. Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.