 Live, from New Orleans, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. We're back, Makmoud Yassine is here. He's a data center manager of the National Bank of Abu Dhabi. Good to see you. Nice to meet you. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. So welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Tell us about VeeamON, what's your experience been like so far? Actually, it's not the first time for me. I was here in the last year. It is a very nice experience, mixed it up with all IT companies, listening to people, leaders like Cisco, VMware, Amazon, understanding what is the technology, how the market is moving. This is great experience, great experience. Tell us about what's going on in the banking industry in your world in terms of the challenges and in particular, what's happening with the need for availability and uptime? I think you heard about what's happening last two days about Cryon. All the mobiles of all IT people that never stopped about the people and the need for restoring and restoring the machine because of the people had by Cryon virus and or malware that encrypt the whole machine and you need to restore the data. This isn't happening all the time. There's not only banks across different section, I think it's three, four days back, UK is the whole healthcare sector was stopped due cyber attack. So it become availability and the security has become so tight and the so, and of course banking is meaning money. Money is a big target for security, for cyber criminals. So we are caring about availability much, much, much more than them before. It's not a matter of just fulfilling the checkbox and like what we have done, like done in many years in IT. Backup was a checkbox, just a checkbox. It's not anymore. It's no luxury to have the backup as a checkbox anymore. Checkbox meaning, okay, I have- I'm compliant, I have backup. We did it, we don't know if it failed or not. We did the backup. We did the backup, we take it, we have the backup, we have the backup process. Everything is okay. But have you never restored, restored in time to ensure the data availability is okay? Your data, how much data for how longer? Regulation became as well very tough with the financial sector. So you will look at countries now that asking for 15 to 20 years of data retention. So imagine your backups you need to maintain, not on media, media is not sufficient anymore. Which tape drives that you will be sufficient for 15 to 20 years? After 10 years, the tape will not work, it will not be readable in the machine. And the data size as well is becoming a challenge. So you need to offload the data to the desk. You need to offload the data to somewhere else that you ensure your availability. And you need to ensure always that you can restore this data back. Yeah, it's interesting. In IT, we've known ransomware as something that's been discussed for a while, but now all of your customers know what it is. All of the customers, everyone in the- So does that change the role? It hits in as a school, it's hitting everyone. Dave's been talking for the last year that security's been like a board level discussion. Now it's your users. How much do your end users start coming and wanting to understand how secure money is? And how does that impact your role in IT today? Actually National Bank of Zobi Security is one of our label. We are one of the safest bank, one of the 50 safest banks. This is one of our label. And we take care, we take security. We are the first customer in the Middle East to implement the RSA token for login, for online banking. This was eight years back. What about, I got to ask you, I follow a little bit of the banking executives to see what they're talking about. And blockchain comes up a lot. This whole notion of trust and trust between two parties and so forth. Do you see that as a mega trend? Is it something that's sort of an interesting trend? I mean, what do you- This is the future. This is the future of the money. This is the future of the money. Money will be part to part with encryption and with the mechanism to get keys. And this is people who want or who don't want. This is where the money's moving in. So what happens to- Actually, what block this have from happening on wider scale is the regulatory is not enough around this area. There is no enough regulation. So it's a good money can mix with bad money and to be intressable. This is one of the things. So people are starting, put a certain regulation across to start, start to regularizing. It will take time, but it will be there. So blockchain is interesting, a banking executive saying it's the future because everybody says, oh, blockchain is going to disrupt the banks. But what I'm hearing from you is it's both, maybe it's a threat, but it's also an opportunity because right now it's all done in secret, right? And so there needs to be- It's not in secret. It's done in Swift. It's the only platform for changing money worldwide is Swift. And sooner or later, this will be changing. Although some people are blockers, some people are, but it will be changing. And the banks who realize this adopt blockchain technology. There's some legal services for blockchain. And sooner you will find central banks across the world wide starting realizing the blockchain. Yeah, okay. It's very interesting, right? Because everybody says it's such a disruptive force, which it is. It is disruptive force. But it's also, as you say, an opportunity. Where does Veeam fit with your availability strategy? It's in the center of our availability strategy. Veeam is, I'm running my data centers. 90% of my data center is virtualized. So Veeam is running the whole virtual world in my data center. The 10% is running a traditional backup solution, which is still we can't get right out of it. Because in banking you have a critical system that measures 20 to 80. So you have running 80% of your system in virtual, but actually the core system is the 20%. So this is still not virtualized. Your core banking legacy application and some other stuff. So you have still to take it, take the backup in traditional way. And we mix both together. We mix back up the data, back up the, back up the information, back up the virtual environment. This is very important for me. And you have a service catalog, essentially? We have service catalog for your store. For your data protection. For data protection, of course. And what, like bronze, silver, gold levels? Or is it more granular than that? Or less granular? We have more, actually in discussion with business, we're always trying to meet the business requirements. So the most important for business in the banking section is the availability of the communication mailboxes, availability of the critical data in the databases. This is the things that we are taking care of. And Veeam done a lot of development over the time. I'm first customer for Veeam Middle East, by the way. Really? Yes. The pioneer. We are a pioneer. And we done it after tried them extensively in our environment. And we decided that this is the best solution this time to go for virtual environment. It was extensive evaluation done across multiple vendor and we select them. And did that give you a competitive advantage? Of course. Of course. How so? The ability to restore faster, the ability to do uptime faster, the ability to recover and ensure your backups are secure. This is something very valuable. Some of the other customers we've spoken to today have said that the announcements were meeting some of the wish list that they have. Anything jump out at you, the announcements made so far, things on your list that they've... Actually the continuous replication is very good feature. It is one of the most important feature. We used as a traditional replication of Veeam backup last year to move my data center from place to place. We were hosted somewhere and we moved the data center, the whole data center. It is good, but it was taking time. So continuous replication will give you the availability of always just divert your backup somewhere and you will be up and running. This is very important feature. Anything that is on your wish list that they haven't gotten to yet or things that you're looking for? I see. Veeam should have done more in the personal devices. We are talking about IoT, internet of the things, bring your own devices to work. So we should go more backing up the user data on mobiles on at least the corporate one on the corporate bubbles like Citrix, like whatever good solution, whatever solution is used, you can backing up, design a backup solution for this, for end users, this will be a huge thing. This will be part of the security of the organization because you need all those to ensure if you add the device of one MBLUE, you can restore this data back and ensure that it is restored. This is a pain point for you today. It is. And it's going to get worse. It is, it is. I'll give you the last word of things that have been exciting you at the show or conversations that you've had. Actually, the keynote speech today was amazing, especially when you understand the direction of big companies like Cisco, VMware, this was very valuable, very, very good. Excellent. Well, listen, thanks very much for coming in. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Thank you. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back. Rapid fire from Veeamon 2017. Right back.