 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in the Sunshine State. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We are joined by Theresa Miller. She is the principal technologist technology advocacy group at Cohesity. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure. So you are an IT veteran and a Microsoft MVP. You're here to talk about some of the integrated solutions with Microsoft at Cohesity, but this conference is really all about community. And I'd love to have you riff a little bit on what it means to be part of this community, to be such a key player and to be partnered with Microsoft and how you all come together here. Right, so outside of Cohesity, being part of the MVP program is really a pretty spectacular thing. It does take a lot of work and commitment to it. I always tell people to pace themselves if they're going to try to work toward a Microsoft MVP, but it really is about helping others, teaching others and being involved. Now from the Cohesity side, I do see a lot of benefits to both. One kind of supports the other and vice versa. Cohesity is doing a lot of really spectacular things in the Microsoft space as a partner. Specifically, it really is a nice relationship. We have a lot of products that support Azure staff. We just announced this week, for example, we're in the Office 365 space protecting data there and traditional Azure backups as well. Yeah, so Teresa, I'd love if you could bring us inside the community a bit more. So this show has been around for decades. It wasn't called, night back in the day, it was TechEd. But one of the things that was highlighted in the keynote is community and the future of jobs and the citizen developer and moving people from they might've before been configuring their server to run email in their office. And today, Office 365 takes care of a lot of that. So bring us through as to how the community is helping introducing new people as well as the people that have been here for a while, helping them learn new skills and be ready for the cloud AI world that we live in today. Yeah, the community around Office 365 is pretty amazing. I get to network and be involved with some pretty spectacular people in that space. There are some podcasts that people can definitely check out. There's always new writing that happens that covers the various angles of what people need to learn to make sure they're successful. And it really is pretty tight knit group to be a part of. There've been so many new product announcements and new developments that they're being announced here. What are you most interested, what are you most excited about in terms of getting it in front of your customers? So from the Cohesity side, there's two different angles that I'm really interested in getting in front of the customers. One being the Office 365 piece, Exchange Online and OneDrive specifically, and how data protection can get them to that next level. I'm also very excited to talk to companies about a tool we have called Cloud Spin that will help them take advantage of 2008 servers end of life. They can, Microsoft has a nice program that will allow customers to stick with their 2008 servers if they go to the cloud and we can help them get there as well as protecting their Azure workloads. Yeah, Teresa, bring us inside the customers today. We all talk about cloud journeys and what they're doing, what's going well? What are some of the challenges that they have day to day and the type of activities that they do at a show like here to help further their businesses? Yeah, enterprises, I think the longterm is going to be hybrid. Everybody's going to be maintaining some level of on-prem as well as cloud. And so with that in mind, you really need, I'm going to put my Cohesity hat back on here. You really do need a solution that can support you in both areas from a single location. If you try to piece it together, you're not going to have a single solution to manage everything. You're going to have kind of a confusing mess at the end of the day. So having a single solution to help support that hybrid journey is a big deal. Yeah, no, I think you bring up a great point. Customers, when they move to SaaS, when they move to public cloud, data protection, security are even more important than they were when I had it in the four walls of my data center. So having a solution that can span those environments and companies like Cohesity are doing that. We're actually, in our analysis this morning, we talked about Microsoft in many ways in the announcements that they're making this week is putting out their vision for how they think it should be and while Microsoft has positions in all of the environments that we know that there's work that we all need to do to make that hybrid environment of today and tomorrow even better. One other thing I'd like to add to that is I think a lot of enterprises assume when they go to the cloud that their data is just protected. And so I like to really call out the differentiation between what a cloud provider like Microsoft offers and your corporate data. At the end of the day, your corporate data is your corporate data if you're attacked by ransomware. If there's not a backup of some form or a copy of that data, then you may not ever be able to recover it. And so cloud companies like Microsoft are really great at making sure you have disaster recovery and high availability. Companies like Cohesity help with the backup, the point in time backup that protects your data for the long run. I mean, what you just described with companies not even realizing, just assuming that once they're in the cloud everything is safe and secure, is would you describe companies as naive to what the cloud can offer? I mean, how would you, how are companies thinking about this and approaching this? Particularly when it comes to those disasters. Right, I certainly don't think companies are naive. I think we don't know what we don't know, right? And I think sometimes too, like I've talked to even enterprise peers, people that I've worked with in the past that you think you have the most secure system ever and stuff just happens, things happen. And so backup and recovery in a way becomes an insurance policy even. You may not ever need it, but if you do you'll be glad you had it. No. Teresa, one of the things that Satya Nadella spent a lot of time this morning talking about was trust. To talk a little bit about the relationship customers have with Microsoft, Microsoft is in a great resurgence under Satya Nadella, went from a company that most of us didn't spend much time talking to, to now Microsoft is once again front and center. For the people that have been in the trenches working with it, do they have a different relationship with Microsoft today? Does the word trust resonate with you and your peers when they think about Microsoft? It absolutely does resonate. Things have changed a lot since Satya has stepped in. I absolutely do trust what they're doing and I think a lot of companies do. Were there growing pains as part of that process? Absolutely. Did it take time? Absolutely. But yes, I do see a lot of enterprise customers trusting what Microsoft is doing. And what does that mean? I mean, so how does that manifest itself at a time where there is deep distrust and skepticism toward a lot of big technology companies? How do you think that that trust is enabling Microsoft to go from strength to strength? I find them to be a very transparent company. I think when there have been issues in the past they've always been very forthcoming about it and transparency does go a long way for the customer. Plus, I've seen a lot of stability out of the products and a lot of enhancements and improvements across the board that also create that trust that companies want. Theresa, you're going to be doing some speaking this week for people that don't have the chance to see it in person. Gives a little taste of what you'll be sharing with everyone at the show here. Yeah, absolutely. So I have three theater sessions this week, one of which will cover IT burnout. I brought in a panel of some Microsoft MVPs from around the world. I wanted that global perspective and we're going to really hammer through what people are facing but also how they can avoid burnout. So that's one of them. The second one that I'm doing is a Cohesity Sponsored session but I actually take on a subject matter expert approach in that session where I talk about backup and recovery from an Office 365 and Azure perspective, what Microsoft offers and some of the challenges that I see companies needing to consider if they move forward with those native options. And then I'll talk a little bit about Cohesity in that session where I'll cover where we may be able to help if some of those challenges are concerning to customers. And then the third session that I'm doing is my MVP session on Exchange Online Security where I'll dive into Exchange Online Protection and Advanced Threat Protection. So I'd love to talk about the first session because it just sounds so interesting. I mean, this is a time and it's an extremely tight job market. Everyone's being asked to do more with less. There's a lot of industries that face burnout and stress. What are the special challenges that IT industry workers face, would you say? So I'm going to step back a few years in my career. I did go through burnout. And I think that for me, and I think this will correlate and translate to probably what others feeling burnout are going through is one, I didn't even realize I was burned out when I was burned out. That's one issue. But stepping back when I finally realized it because I knew I needed a change. I took the leap, I made a change. Looking back, I didn't take lunch breaks. I didn't take long enough vacations and how I start my day makes a big difference. I work out every morning, even if it's just a light jog. Taking time for me every day has really gone a long way to how I feel, which not only benefits me and my quality of life, it benefits my employer as well. That's kind of my nutshell version of what I think some of will talk about. One of the tools that Microsoft is introducing or reintroducing is Microsoft Teams. And it has a lot of those time management attributes and characteristics to it. Some of the email reminders, and there's one element that will not, if you want to write an email to a colleague, it will say, wait, let's make sure this person's actually not working right now. It's 10 o'clock at night. Why don't we send it the next morning at 7.30? So it's waiting for them when they get in. How much do you think Microsoft is thinking about these things, tech burnout, stress, employee satisfaction, in terms of the way they're bringing this humanity to the tools that they're putting out there? So I think the tools say a lot for that already, but you bring up a good point. And actually, one of the things I've noticed from some of the Microsoft employees, and I haven't quite done it yet, but I'm very tempted to, you'll see in a lot of their email signatures that even though they have sent that email, maybe they didn't wait till the person's working at 7.30 in the morning, but they understand that everybody has different working hours. It's okay to wait, because you're right, that can be a stressor too. If you don't know when to disconnect and you're checking email all night long, an email could drag you right into work when you're not expecting. So it's a great point. Great. Well, Teresa, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite.