 Welcome everyone to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are excited to be running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two live sets, two remote studios. We've got over a hundred guests on the program and we're going to be talking about the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the program, Rob Lee, the CTO of Pure Storage. Rob, thank you so much for joining us today. Good to see you again, Lisa and thanks for having me. Likewise, and I was talking to you on LinkedIn. Look, so you've got a promotion since I last saw you. Congratulations on your appointment as CTO. Yeah, thank you very much. Very excited to be taking the reins and for all the great stuff that's ahead of us. A lot of great stuff, I'm sure. I also saw that once again, Pure has been named a leader in several Gartner Magic Quadrants for primary storage, for distributed file storage and object storage. Lots of great things continuing to go on from the orange side. Let's talk about hybrid, seeing so much transformation and acceleration in the last 20 plus months. But I'd love to see what you guys are seeing with respect to your customers and their hybrid cloud strategies. What problems are they in this dynamic day and age? Are they looking to solve? Yeah, absolutely. I think all in all, I think customers are definitely maturing in their understanding and approach to all things around cloud. And I think when it comes to their approach towards hybrid cloud, one of the things that we're seeing is that customers are really focusing extra hard on just trying to make sure that they're making the best use of all their IT tools. And what that means is, not just looking at hybrid cloud as a way to connect from on-prem to the cloud, but really being able to make use of and make the most use out of each of the services and capabilities of the environments that they're operating. And so a lot of times that means, commonality in how they're operating, whether it's on-premise or in cloud, it means the flexibility that that commonality allows them in terms of planning and optionality to move, parts of their application or environments between premise and cloud. And I think overall, we look at this as really a couple specific forces that customers are looking for. One is, I think they're looking for ways to bring a lot more of the operating model and what they're used to in the cloud into their own data center. And at the same time, they're looking to be able to bridge more of how they operate the applications that they're powering and running in their own data centers today and be able to bridge and bring those into the cloud environments. And then lastly, I'd say that as customers, I think today are kind of one foot in their more traditional application environments and the other foot largely planted in developing and building some of their newer applications built on cloud-native technologies and architectures driven by containers and Kubernetes. A big focus area for customers, whether it's on-prem or in cloud or increasingly hybrid is supporting and enabling those cloud-native application development projects. And that's certainly an area that you've seen pure focus in as well. So I think it's really those three things. One is customers looking for ways to bring more of the cloud model into their data center. Two is being able to bring more of what they're running in their data center into the cloud today. And then three is building their new stuff and increasingly planning to run that across multiple environments, prem, cloud and across clouds. So Rob, talk to me about where pure fits in the hybrid cloud landscape that your customers are facing in this interesting time we're living in. Yeah, absolutely. We're really focused on meeting customers' needs in all three of the areas that I just articulated. And so this starts with bringing more of the cloud operating model into customers' data centers. And we start by focusing on automation, simplicity of management, delivering infrastructure as code. A lot of the attributes that customers are used to in a cloud environment. In many ways, as you know, this is a natural evolution of where pure has been along. We started by bringing a lot of the consumer-like simplicity into our products and enterprise data centers. And now we're just kind of expanding that to bring more of the cloud simplicity in. We're also, this is an area where we're working with our public cloud partners such as AWS in embracing their management models. And so you saw us do this as a storage launch partner for AWS Outposts. And that activity is certainly continuing on. So customers that are looking for cloud-like management, whether they wanna build that themselves and customize it to their needs or whether they want to simply use cloud providers, management planes and extend those onto their premise, have both options to do that. We're also, as you know, very committed to helping customers be able to move or bridge their traditional applications from other data center into the public cloud environments through products like Cloud Block Store. This is an area where we've helped numerous customers take the existing applications. And more importantly, the processes and how the environments are set up and run that they're used to running in their data center production environments, bridge those now into public cloud environments and whether that's in AWS or in Microsoft Azure as well. And then thirdly, with Portworx, right? This is where we're really focused on helping customers not just by providing them with the infrastructure they need to build their containerized cloud-native applications on, but then also marrying with that infrastructure, that storage infrastructure, the data flow operations such as backup, DR migration that go along with that storage infrastructure as well as now application management capabilities, which we recently announced during our launch event in September with Portworx Data Services. So really a lot of activities going on across the board, but I would say definitely focused on those three key areas that we see customers really looking to crack as they, I would say balance the cloud environments and their data center environments in this hybrid world. And I'm curious what you're seeing, the focus being on data. Customers definitely recognize that data is their lifeblood is kind of, contains a lot of the value that they're looking to extract, whether it's in competitive advantage, whether it's in better understanding of their customers, or whether it's in product development, faster time to market. I think that we're definitely seeing more of an elevated realization and appreciation for not just how valuable the data is, but how much gravity it holds, right? Customers that are realizing, hey, if I'm collecting all this data in my on-prem location, maybe it's not quite that feasible or sensible to ship all that data into a public cloud environment to process. Maybe I need to kind of look at how I build my hybrid strategy around data being generated here, services living over here, and how do I bridge those two locations? I think you add on top of that newer, I would say realization of security and data governance, data privacy concerns. And that certainly has customers, I think, thinking a lot more, thinking a lot more intently about their data management, not just their data collection and data processing and analysis strategy, but their overall data management, governance, and security strategies. Yeah, we've talked a lot about security in this interesting time that we're living and the threat landscape has changed massively. Ransomware is a household word and it's a matter of when versus if. As customers are looking at these challenges that they're combating, how are you helping them address those data security concerns as they know that we've got this work from anywhere, this hybrid work environment that's going to persist for probably quite some time, but that security and ensuring that the data that's driving the revenue chain is secure and accessible, but protected no matter where it is. Yeah, absolutely. And I think you said it best when you said it's a matter of when, not if, right? And I think we're really focused on helping customers plan for and have, plan for and have a very quick reaction remediation strategy, right? So customers that I would say historically have focused on perimeter security and have focused on preventing an attack and that's great and you need to do that, but you also need to plan for, hey, if something happens, as we just said, when something happens, what is your strategy for remediating that? What is your strategy for getting back online very quickly? And so this is an area where we've helped countless customers form robust strategies for true disaster recovery from a security or ransomware sense. We do this by through our Safe Mode features which are available across all of our products. And quite simply, this is our capability to take read-only snapshots and then couple them with a heightened level of security that effectively locks these snapshots down and takes the control of these snapshots away from not just customer admins, but potential ransomware or malware, right? If you look at the most recent ransomware attacks that have hit the industry, they've gotten more and more sophisticated where the first action, a lot of these ransomware pieces of software taking are going after the backups. They go after the backups first and then they take down the production environment. Well, we stopped that chain or in the security world, what's called a kill chain, we stopped that chain right at the first step by protecting those backups in a way that, no customer admin, whether it's a true admin, a malicious admin, or a piece of software malware that's acting as an admin has the ability to remove that backup. And that's a capability that's actually become one of our most popular and most quickly adopted features across the portfolio. That's key. I saw that some was reading some reports recently about the focus of ransomware on backups and the fact that you talked about it to becoming more sophisticated. It's also becoming more personal. So as data volumes continue to grow and companies continue to depend on data as competitive advantage differentiators and of course a source of driving revenue, ensuring that the data, the backups are protected and the ability to recover quickly is there, that is table stakes, I can imagine, for any organization, regardless of industry. Absolutely. And I think, overall, if we look at just the state of data protection, whether it's protecting against security threats or whether it's protecting against infrastructure failures or whatnot, I would say that the state of data protection has evolved considerably over the last five years. You go back five, 10 years and people are really fixated on, hey, how quickly can I back this environment up and how can I do it in the most cost effective manner? Now people are much more focused on, hey, when something goes wrong, whether it's a ransomware attack, whether it's a hurricane that takes out a data center, I don't really care what it is. When something goes wrong, how quickly can I get back online? Because chances are, every customer now is running an online service, right? Chances are you've got customers waiting for you, you've got SLAs, you've got transactions that can't complete if you don't get this environment back up. And we've seen this throughout the industry over the last couple of years. And so, I think that maturing understanding of what true data protection is, is something that has, A, driven a new approach from customers to a new focus on this area of their infrastructure. And B, I think is also, I found a new place for performance and reliability and really all of the properties of pure products in the space. Last question about for you, give me an example. You can just mention it by industry or even by use case of a joint AWS pure customer where you're really helping them create a very successful enterprise grade hyper cloud environment. Yeah, no, absolutely. So we've got countless customers that I could point to. I think one that I would, or one space that we're particularly successful in that I would highlight are SaaS companies, right? So companies that are building modern SaaS applications. And in one particular example, I can think of as a gaming platform, right? So this is a company that is building out a scale out environment, is a very rapidly growing startup and certainly is looking to AWS, looking to the public cloud environments as a great place to scale, but at the same time, needs more capabilities than are available in the container storage, infrastructure that was available in the public cloud environment. They need more capabilities to be able to offer this global service. They need more capabilities to really provide the 24 by seven by 365 around the world service that they have, especially dealing with high load bursts and different geos and just a very, very dynamic global environment. And so this is an area where we've been able to help the customer with Portworx be able to provide these capabilities by augmenting the compute that AWS or the cloud environment is able to offer with the storage level replication and high availability and all of the enterprise capabilities, auto scaling, performance management, all the capabilities that they need to be able to bridge the service across multiple regions, multiple environments and potentially over time, on-premise data center locations as well. So that's just one of many examples, but I think that's a great example where as customers are starting out, the public cloud is a great place to kind of get started, but then as you scale, whether it's because of bursty load, whether it's because of data volume, whether it's because of compute volume and capacity, customers are looking for either more capabilities, more connectivity to other sites, other potentially other cloud environments or data center environments. And that's where a more environment or cloud agnostic infrastructure layer such as Portworx is able to provide comes in very handy. Got it. Rob, thanks so much for joining me on the program today. I'm going to go ahead and re-invent talking about the pure AWS relationship, what's going on there and how you're helping customers navigate in a very fast paced accelerating hybrid world. We appreciate you coming back on the program. Great, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. Likewise, good to see you too. For Rob Lee, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-invent 2021.