 We've often said that the next 10 years in cloud computing won't be like the last 10. Cloud is firmly planted, it's operating model in the minds of technology pros and organizations of all sizes are thinking cloud first. But the definition of cloud is evolving to include on-prem experiences, workloads across clouds and even out to the edge. As the cloud universe expands, how can organizations best manage workloads across clouds? How can they ensure the best performance and security and the most efficient use of resources all while maintaining the agility that the cloud promises for developers and project teams? And with me to discuss these issues is Colm Keegan who's a senior consultant at Dell Technologies. Colm, good to see you again, how you been? Hey, Dave, great to be back on theCUBE with you. So Colm, you heard my little open here. How do you see the landscape of on-prem, public cloud, multi-cloud and all these workload migrations that are going on? I think you hit it well. I mean, what we're seeing is I think the last research chart I saw was that 95% of organizations are using public cloud and 78% of those respondents are doing it in a multi-cloud fashion. So it's not just a single public cloud, it's multiple public clouds. And to your point, organizations are trying to do it as efficiently as possible. They're trying to enable their developers to leverage those resources in the cloud because oftentimes developers want to build in the cloud and deploy on-prem and have that agility. And it's great because it does help with innovation but it can create blind spots for IT organizations. And so as part of the data protection marketing team, one of the things that we're trying to emphasize with our customers is that there's ways that we can help you get those efficiencies, we can help you maintain that agility, but importantly ensure that the critical data and workloads you depend on are protected and secure wherever they result. Yeah, and so exactly you want to do that across clouds. We've kind of tongue in cheek here, but we kind of coined a term called super cloud, which is, hey, I don't really care about the underlying infrastructure, I care about the value and the services on top of that. And to that end, there's a lot of concern about cyber resiliency obviously, we've been covering the increased threats in our reporting. You know, the solar winds hack in particular was like a watershed moment in cyber, highly sophisticated and the ripple effects, as we know, are going to be felt for years to come. Then you got remote and hybrid work, that creates new challenges for organizations. So, Colm, how are you thinking about enhancing data protection in this new era of risk? What's Dale's point of view there? Well, I mean, everything you said, right, is that workloads are ubiquitous, they're everywhere, it's multiple workload types, right? So when you think about traditional workloads, people often think of things like physical machines and virtual machines, but now there are things like containerized workloads, there's cloud data vaps and they're SaaS. And, you know, we have an annual survey called the Global Data Protection Index. And what we've seen consistently is that organizations really still struggle with trying to find solutions for those newer workload types. And I think part of it is that they're trying to retrofit existing application infrastructure to manage those workloads with varying degrees of success, right? So, you know, what we can do is we can work with the customer and say, look, you know, let's help you simplify how you protect those workloads so that you can ensure that it has the right service level agreement. You can ensure that if you're having a lot of portability, because again, you know, developers are gonna port workloads based on where the business needs them to be, that you have the right protection policies assigned to those workloads regardless of the workload type. And I think a critical part here, Dave, is automation, right, because another challenge we see is a lot of organizations are struggling with getting the skill sets for people to not only manage day protection, but also from a cybersecurity and cyber resiliency standpoint. You know, those folks are in super high demand, right? So unique ways to automate protection and resiliency wherever the workload lives. And we feel very strongly about what we can do for our portfolio. I mean, I think it's pretty safe to say that the cloud operating model has changed all of our thinking. And I think I've seen a shift over the years, you know, going back a decade plus in companies like Dell and how they think about the cloud, really leaning in now and saying, hey, there's a lot of really good ideas here. You mentioned automation, the whole DevOps trend, which I hope we have time to talk about. But how should we be thinking about Dell's momentum in cloud, like what can you tell us about your cloud business specifically? Are there any metrics that you can share, use cases that are really driving your cloud business? But I know you're a metrics-driven guide, Dave. So I want to point you in. So we're currently today. So, you know, let me just practice this with, you know, a lot of folks often think of us as well. Dell, yeah, that's my father's cloud data or my father's data protection solution, right? And sometimes we get knocked on innovation, but we came to market two and a half years ago with Power Protect Data Manager as our go-forward data protection platform for protecting workloads on-premise as well as in the cloud. And we're really executing on that. And one of these signs of that is how much data is actually protected in the cloud. So as we stand today, we're protecting over 10 exabytes of data in the public cloud. That's a big number. And just to let some context to that, that is 134% year-over-year growth compared to last year. So last year we were somewhere around four and a half exabytes protected in the cloud. So that's showing some really significant growth and adoption. And so, you know, that's an area we point back to as where we're having success. But let me give you sort of something a little more anecdotal. It's a bit anonymized, so I can't mention the customer. And again, I think this goes back to my point about what we're doing from an innovation standpoint. There was a global company, you know, the brand, everybody's familiar with it. You probably have their app on your phone. And they issued an RFP. We responded to the RFP and they said, look, you know, we're really not interested unless your solution is programmable. It needs to work in our microservices architecture environment. It's got to snap in. We got to be able to automate those processes. And so we said, sure, no problem. In fact, you know what? Let us help you spin up an environment right now. We can show you how it works with your workloads and with your data. And we did it very quickly. And this RFP was responded by all the, you know, the big players, as well as some of the newer entrants to the market. And there was a big incumbent in that account and we got the business, you know? And it was a significant deal. And I think it goes to show that, you know, even in environments where, in this particular company, they're hugely digital driven. They do a lot of business through that app I just mentioned. So that, I think a good proof point that we're getting the adoption and we're getting customers that we didn't have before coming to us to help them solution for some of these challenges with protecting the cross cloud. Yeah, that's great. It sounds like a big win for you guys. Another thing I wanted to ask you about, Colm, is, you know, you think about the cloud developers and cloud go hand in hand. And, you know, thinking about Dell's play in cloud, your as a service strategy with Apex. The big question people have is, what about developers? So what are you doing in the world of DevOps? How are you supporting developers? What's happening with automation? You mentioned that before. If you could add some color to your strategy, that would be great. Yeah, no, absolutely. So, you know, we're really driven, you know, across Dell from a DevOps perspective, and the same holds true from a data protection, from a data protection standpoint. And so one of the things that we want to do is we want to give DevOps teams the tools. And so these are things like APIs, Scripps, you know, Ansible libraries and things like that, that allow them to plug these things into their environment. So they don't have to do all that work, right? And so we give them the tools. And that is importantly, because I mentioned that, you know, there are shortfall skill sets, you know, across the industry, is that we have an extensive professional services arm. We also work with a large ecosystem of partners. So we can fill the gaps where the customer may have gaps, get the solution deployed in their environment, get those automation tools in there so that, you know, for day two experience, you know, they got the keys to the kingdom and they can go, they're off and running. But we're there to backstop them too, right? So we're, in addition to the solutions, we have a big services arm to complement that. And then, you know, you mentioned APEC, so, you know, to talk about the breadth of the portfolio, and this isn't so much related to developers, although maybe some developers interested in this is that, you know, if you want to deploy a solution, you're in the market for a solution and you don't want to deploy infrastructure because let's face it, a lot of organizations want to get out of the business of running data center infrastructure. So you can spin up as a service a solution that will protect not only your containerized or the newer workload types, but it'll also protect hybrid workloads. So that things like endpoints and desktops, as well as, you know, if you have virtual machines in your data center. And so there's just more choice there and, you know, there may be developers that would decide to leverage that service to align with what they're doing and say AWS, for example. So lots of choice there and flexibility. All right, Colm, what about like SaaS applications, Office 365, Salesforce, et cetera? Do you accommodate that today? Yeah, absolutely. In fact, Apex backup services will protect SaaS workloads. Like you said, whether it's Office 365 or Google Workspaces or Salesforce, we can protect those workloads very seamlessly and the customer just launches the service in the cloud and it will discover those workloads and protect them. And, you know, that's a great point Dave, because, you know, we still find that there's a lot of customers that are under this misperception that once their data is in the cloud, they're good. They can walk away and wash their hands. And obviously that's not the case because, you know, there are instances where a customer had made that mistake and then lost data and went to get it and either weren't able to get it or was very expensive, right? So they can protect themselves from that by, you know, using a solution to protect those SaaS workloads and Apex backup services provides that level of protection. Yeah, great. And I wanted to come back, if I could, to kind of ransomware the whole, you know, people talk about air gaps. So, you know, what are you guys seeing there? What are you recommending for customers? I mean, I saw a stat the other day, ransomware is like the second most common, you know, reason for the hacks and you're seeing these big ransoms get paid. What are you recommending to customers there? Yes, what we've been talking about for the last couple of years, Dave and championing is that, you know, customers really need to have an isolated digital vault in an isolated recovery environment that's separate from production, right? So we've had a solution in market now for almost five years and that's available that they can deploy into a secondary data center or to a co-location facility. And now they can even deploy it into AWS. And in the very near future, we're going to make it available in Azure, right? So now you can leverage the public cloud as that secondary environment. But the idea here is to make that environment insulated so that if something happens in your production infrastructure, it doesn't seep into your isolated recovery environment. And then even if it does, because as we all know, you know, ransomware usually kind of sits there on your network watching things and then executes at some point in the future, right? So we even have analytics in our solution that can go out and look for anomalies. And when it detects those anomalies, then you can remediate it and that'll protect you in case you need to do a recovery, you won't be recovering from a copy that has ransomware on it, but you'll be recovering from a clean copy. But, you know, that's what we're recommending to customers is that you need to have an isolated environment that's separate from production and that it has hardened capabilities, namely that dual factor authentication. You know, there's all sorts of stringency in terms of, you know, who can access that vault and, you know, things like data immutability. We often find that there's, you know, that immutability is looked at as the be all end all by others out there. And we say immutability is important, but you also need these other capabilities and they're like having the analytics, for example, and having that secure isolation, because if that's your copy of last resort, you want to make sure you'll be able to recover from it. Yeah, I mean, you said you've been in the market almost five years now. Are there examples, have there been battle tested? Are there examples that you know of where, you know, somebody was getting attacked and they had to recover from this air gap solution? Yeah, actually I do. In fact, I was just looking at this recently, there's an aviation company over in AsiaPak and what they have, they had a ransomware attack and fortunately they had our solution in place and they were able to recover over 100 production servers without any data loss. And so, you know, that's, I think, testament to the power of the solution. And, you know, we have many, many more customers that have deployed it in production. And as you know, Dave, it's such a sensitive topic that many organizations aren't there willing to raise their hand and say, hey, we were attacked, right? So, we know that there's plenty more out there and, you know, as customers become ready, willing and able, we'll certainly share that. Yeah, I mean, I hear you, that's a great reference but they don't want to be a reference. I don't blame them. All right, we got a wrap but I'll give you the last word, Colm, give us your takeaways. Yeah, you know, one of the things I mentioned, Dave, is that we continue to hear that, you know, organizations want to get out of the business of IT. They want to get out of the data center infrastructure business. They want to spend more time innovating because frankly, that's how they're gonna differentiate themselves. And so, when we look at how IT is changing, it's moving into more of this DevOps paradigm, they want to spend more time enabling their developers, right? And they want to spend more time actually driving an innovation but the only way you can really do that is to simplify and to automate. And that's an area that we're spending a lot of time in, right? We're investing a lot of money in things like AI and ML, you know, obviously we're building more capabilities from an automation toolset perspective so that we can give these DevOps teams, you know, tested scripts and other automation tools that are actually running in many, many other production environments today that allows them to get that automation into their environment. You know, and that's something that is not only true for data protection, but it's also true for pandel, you know, across the entire Dell portfolio. And I think that's a big differentiator for us, right? Because customers want to have the ability to do this across the entire stack. So oftentimes you'll see customers say coming to us for maybe a cyber resiliency solution or for a data protection solution. And then they say, wow, you guys can do this, all these other same automation capabilities across your stack, we need help here too. Right, so we're excited about the future days. Yeah, so Colm, it's been a couple of years since I've seen your face to face. Hopefully we will see you in May at Dell Tech World. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Thanks Dave. Okay, thanks to Colm Keegan for coming back in theCUBE. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time.