 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. The imperative to protect data has never been more pressing. As companies transform themselves from businesses into digital businesses, the intrinsic value of their data rises exponentially. The problem for infrastructure pros is that everything in IT is additive. It seems like nothing ever dies, which means more things to manage. Now think about that. When you're protecting data, you have bare metal, VMs, now containers, you've got cloud, you got to worry about the edge. All this data needs to be protected. Not only does this increase complexity, it expands the attack surface for adversaries wanting to steal or ransom your data. Now at the heart of all this is a buildout of a massively global distributed cloud. We saw Wave 1 of the cloud, which was public. Wave 2 was really hybrid, and that's evolving. Now in parallel, you're seeing the emergence of multi-cloud. And as I said, these earlier trends are additive, they're not replacements. And with me to discuss these important issues and how Dell's EMC specifically is pivoting toward cloud data protection is Beth Phalen, who's the president of Dell EMC's Data Protection Division. Beth, great to see you, welcome. Good to be here again. So we know the world is hybrid. It's a fundamental, the on-prem stuff is part of the fundamental digital transformations of these companies. And now you've got data protection for the cloud. So what do you see happening in that world? Yeah, let's start with what we're seeing in the market. We recently re-ran our global data protection index. We've been doing it for many years and we've been really using that to help us understand the landscape and what our customers need. And first, not surprisingly, it shows that continued trend of movement and reliance towards cloud environments for business applications, continuing to increase. On top of that, the customers, despite that, are continuing to struggle with ensuring they have the right data protection for their cloud environments. Right, so they're struggling. You see that, we see that as well. What's going on there? What does the data tell you? Yeah, first of all, more than half of the customers don't have a comprehensive data protection solution for their SaaS, cloud-native, and multi-cloud environments. More than two-thirds of the customers who may be relying on their cloud service providers for data protection say that they do not have a solution that covers all of their workloads. So whether they're working with a cloud service provider or some other vendor, they're being really clear that they do not have a comprehensive approach to cloud data protection. Yeah, so I mean, you see the cloud adoption is going like crazy, but it seems like the data protection component is lagging. How is that affecting the traction in your business? Yeah, you know, it's the double-edged sword, right? On one level, customers see the advantages of moving to a cloud, but on the other hand, you know, they're really looking for vendors that they can partner with to still have the same confidence that the data is protected that they have on-prem. And what we're seeing now is that customers are turning to us to help solve that problem. We have over 1,000 customers using Dell EMC for their cloud data protection, and we're narrowing in on three exabytes of data that we're currently protecting in the cloud. So it's happening. Yeah, that's a pretty good traction. So I want to talk about VMware. Obviously, VMware is the linchpin of many customers' hybrid strategy, and it's clearly an important component of Dell technologies. Talk a little bit about the relationship between Dell EMC data protection specifically and VMware. I'm interested in, you know, they've announced Project Tanzu and there's Kubernetes. How are you guys working together to really deliver value for customers? So we are super excited about the opportunity to work so closely with VMware, because as they're cutting edge in their domain, we're working directly with them. And that's an advantage that comes with being part of the Dell technologies family. And so we were the first company to bring data protection for Kubernetes environments out to market. It's available now. So you'll see us bring that into the Tanzu and Missing Critical as we move forward, partnering closely with VMware. And of course, we're already fully certified for VMware cloud. It's really an ongoing, regular conversation about how we can work together to bring the best to our customers. So Beth, I got to ask you, so part of your role as the leader of the division is obviously you got a lot of miles to feed, big division, you got to make your plan, you got to deliver for customers. But strategy is another key component of this. How do all these cloud trends shape your strategy? So core to our strategy is to be the essential provider of data protection for multi-cloud environments. So no matter where customers are choosing to deploy their applications, they can have the same confidence that they always did, that that data is protected and that they can get it back. So that's core. And if you want three words to remember for our strategy, think VMware, cloud and cyber. Cloud is central to it and you're going to be hearing a lot more about it in the weeks and months ahead. Okay, so I got to ask you, break out your binoculars, maybe even the telescope. What are the futures look like when you think about the division and the market? So we've been talking about cloud for a long time, but we are still in the middle of this journey. Customers are going to rely on the cloud even more for additional use cases and especially in the data protection space. Right now we're seeing backup to the cloud, DR to the cloud, but the future will include cyber resiliency that's leveraging cloud deployments. You're also going to see more and more of an emphasis on people leveraging SaaS for their software consumption. And for us, that means not only protecting SaaS applications, but it also means giving customers the option to consume data protection in a SaaS model. We already do that today with things like Cloud Snapshot Manager, with things like the PowerProtect Management and Orchestration, but you're going to see us do even more of that because they're just such incredible benefits of people leveraging SaaS to consume their software. Data, constantly evolving landscape, data protection has to evolve with it. Beth, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It's great to be here. And thank you, keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break.