 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Storage Day. We're here with a couple of AWS product experts covering AWS's migration and transfer services. Randy Bhutan is the general manager of AWS DataSync and Matt Matthews, GM of AWS Transfer Family. Guys, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Thanks. So, look, we saw during the pandemic the acceleration to cloud migration. We've tracked that. We've quantified that. What's driving that today? Yeah, so Dave, great to be back here last year on Storage Day. Nice to be in the studio, too. Isn't it? We're back together. We're coming in. We're talking COVID. So, yeah, I mean, this is a great question. I think digital transformation is really what's driving a lot of the focus right now from companies. And it's really not about just driving down costs. It's also about what are the opportunities available once you get into the cloud in terms of what does that unlock in terms of innovation? So companies are focused on the usual things, optimizing costs, but ensuring they have the right security and agility. A lot has happened over the last year and companies need to be able to react. They need to be able to react quickly. So cloud gives them a lot of these capabilities. But the real benefit that we see is that once your data is in the cloud, it opens up the power of the cloud for analytics, for new application development, and things of that sort. So what we're seeing is that companies are really just focused on understanding a cloud migration strategy and how they can get their data there and then use that to unlock that data for the value. Yeah, I mean, if I've said it once, I've said it 100 times. If you weren't a digital business during the pandemic, you were out of business. Migration, historically, is a bad word in IT. You see Ios here and go, ugh. So what's the playbook for taking years of data on-prem and moving it into the cloud? What are you seeing as best practice data? Yeah, so as you said, migration historically, it's been painful, right? And it's a daunting task for any business or any IT executive. But fortunately, AWS has a broad suite of capabilities to help enable these migrations. And by that, I mean, we have tools to help you understand your existing on-prem workloads, understand what services in the AWS offering align to those needs, but also help you estimate the cost. Cost is a big part of this move. We can help you estimate that cost and predict that cost and then use tools like DataSync to help you move that data when that time comes. So you're saying you help predict the cost of the migration or the cost of running in the cloud? Running in the cloud, right? Yeah, we can help estimate the runtime based on the performance that we assess on-prem. We can then project that into a cloud service and estimate that cost. So can you guys explain DataSync? Sometimes I get confused. DataSync, what's the difference between DataSync and Storage Gateway? And I want to get into when we should use each, but let's start there if we could. Yeah, sure, I'll take that. So Storage Gateway is primarily a means for a customer to access their data in the cloud from on-prem, right? So if you have an application that you want to keep on-prem, you're not ready yet to migrate that application to the cloud. Gateway is a strong solution because you can move a lot of your cold or long tail data into something like S3 or EFS, but still access it from your on-prem location. DataSync's all about data movement, right? So if you need to move your data from A to B, DataSync is your optimized solution to do that. Are you finding that that's ideally a one-time move, or is it actually, sometimes you're seeing customers do it more than, again, moving data if I don't move as much data as you need to, but no more to paraphrase Einstein. What we're seeing in DataSync is that customers do use DataSync for their initial migration. They'll also, as Matt was mentioning earlier, once you get your data into the cloud, that flywheel of potential starts to take hold. And customers want to ultimately move that data within the cloud to optimize its value. So you might move from service to service. You might move from EFS to S3, et cetera, to enable the cloud flywheel to benefit you. DataSync does that as well. So customers use us to initially migrate. They use us to move within the cloud. And we also, we just recently announced service for other clouds. So you can actually bring data in now from Google and Azure as well. Oh, how convenient. So OK, but so that's cool. So you helped us understand the use cases. But can we dig one more layer? Like what protocols are supported? I'm trying to understand really the right fit for the right job. Yeah, so that's really important. So for transfer, specifically, one of the things that we see with customers is you've got obviously a lot of internal data within your company. But today, it's a very highly interconnected world. So companies deal with lots of business partners. And historically, they've used a big prevalence of using file transfer to exchange data with business partners. And as you can imagine, there's a lot of value in that data. Sometimes it's purchase orders, inventory data from suppliers, or things like that. So historically, customers have had protocols like SFTP or FTP to help them interface with exchange data or files with external partners. So for transfer, that's what we focus on is helping customers exchange data over those existing protocols that they've used for many years. And the real focus is it's one thing to migrate your own data into the cloud. But you can't force thousands or tens of thousands, sometimes of partners, to also work in a different way to get you their data. So we want to make that very seamless for customers using the same exact protocols like SFTP that they've used for years. We just announced AS2 protocol, which is very heavily used in supply chains to exchange inventory and information across multi tiers of partners and things of that nature. So we're really focused on letting customers not have to impact their partners and how they work and how they exchange, but also take advantage of the data. So get that data into the cloud so they can immediately unlock the value with analytics. So AS2 is specifically in the context of supply chain. I'm presuming it's secure and kind of governed and safe. Can you explain that a little bit? Yeah. So AS2 has a lot of really interesting features for transactional type of exchanges. So it has signing and encryption built in. It also has notification. So you can basically say, hey, I sent you this purchase order and prove that you received it. It has capability called non-repudiation, which means it's actually a legal transaction. So those things are very important in transactional type of exchanges and allows customers in supply chains, whether it's vendors dealing with their suppliers or transportation partners or things like that to leverage file transfer for those types of exchanges. So encryption, provenance of transactions, am I correct, without having to use the blockchain and all the overhead associated with that? Yeah, it's got some built-in capabilities. I mean, I love blockchain, but there's drawbacks? Yeah, exactly. And that's why it's been popular. That's really interesting, because Andy Jassy one day, I was on the phone call with him and John Furrier, and we were talking up crypto and blockchain. He said, well, why do explain to me, you know, Jassy, right? He always wants to go deeper. Explain why I can't do this with some other approach. And so I think he was recognizing some of the drawbacks. So that's kind of a cool thing. And it leaves me, we're running this, obviously, today, August 10th. Yesterday, we had our super cloud event in Palo Alto on August 9th, and it's all about the ecosystem. One of the observations we made about the 2020s is the cloud is totally different now. People are building value on top of the infrastructure that you guys have built out over the last 15 years. And so once an organization's data gets into the cloud, how does it affect, and it relates to AS2 somewhat, how does it affect the workflows in terms of interacting with external partners and other ecosystem players that are also in the cloud? Yeah, great, yeah, it's, again, we wanna try and not have to affect those workflows, right? Take them as they are as much as possible. Get them, get the data exchange working. One of the things that we focus on a lot is, you know, how do you process this data once it comes in? Like every company has, you know, governance requirements, security requirements, and things like that. So they usually have a set of things that they need to automate and orchestrate for the data as it's coming in. And a lot of these companies use something called managed file transfer solutions that allow them to automate and orchestrate those things. We also see that many times this is very customer specific. So, you know, a bank might have a certain set of processes they have to follow and needs to be customized, as you know AWS is a great solution for building custom solutions. And we have, actually today we're just announcing a new set of partners in a program called the service delivery program AWS Transfer Family that allows customers to work with partners that are very well versed in transfer family and related services to help build a very specific solution that allows them to build that automation orchestration and keep their partners kind of unaware that they're interfacing in a different way. And once the state is in the cloud, or actually maybe stays on-prem in some cases, but it basically plugs in to the AWS services portfolio, the whole security model, the governance model, shared responsibility comes in. Is that right? It's all sort of all in there? Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. And we're working with, it's all about the customer's needs and making sure that their investment in AWS doesn't disrupt their existing workflows and their relationships with their customers and their partners. And that's exactly what Matt's been describing is we're taking a close look at how we can extend the value of AWS, integrate into our customer's workflows and bring that value to them with minimal investment or disruption. So follow up on that. So I love that because less disruption means it's easier, less friction. And I think of, trying to think of examples, like think about data deduplication, like purpose-built backup appliances, right? Like data domain won that battle because they could just plug right in, you know? Avamar, they were trying to get you to redo everything. Okay, and so we saw that movie play out. At the same time, I've talked to Seattle's to say, I love that, but the cloud opens up all these cool new opportunities for me to change my operating model. So are you seeing that as well? We're okay. We make it easy to get in. We're not disrupting workflows. And then once they get in, they say, well, if we did it this way, we'd take out a bunch of costs, we'd accelerate our business. What's that dynamic like? Exactly that, right? So that move to the cloud's a continuum, right? We don't think it's going to be binary. There's always going to be something on-prem. We accept that, but there's a continuum there. So day one, they'll migrate a portion of that workload into the cloud, start to extract and see value there. But then they'll continue, as you said, they'll continue to see opportunities, right? With all of the various capabilities that AWS has to offer, all the value that represents, they'll start to see that opportunity and then start to engage and consume more of those features over time. Great, all right, give us the bumper sticker. What's next in transfer services from your perspectives? Yeah, so obviously I was going to listen to our customers, that's our focus. You guys say that a lot. You guys say that a lot. But yeah, so we're focused on helping customers, again, increase that level of automation orchestration. Again, that suite of capabilities generally in our industry, known as managed file transfer, when a file comes in, it needs to get, maybe encrypted or de-encrypted or compressed or decompressed, scan for viruses, those kind of capabilities. Make that easier for customers. If you remember last year at Storage Day, we announced a low-code workflow framework that allows customers to kind of build those steps that we're continuing to add built-in capabilities to that so customers can easily just say, okay, I want these set of activities to happen when files come in and out. So that's really what's next for us. All right, Randy, we'll give you the last word. Bring us home. I'm going to surprise you with the customer theme. Oh, great, love it. Yeah, so we're listening to the customers and what they're asking for are support for more sources. So we'll be adding support for more cloud sources, more on-prem sources, giving the customers more options, also performance and usability, right? So we want to make it easier as the enterprise continues to consume the cloud. We want to make data sink in the movement of their data as easy as possible. And I've always said it starts with the data S3 that was the first service. And the other thing I've said a lot is the cloud is expanding. We're seeing connections to on-prem. We're seeing connections out to the edge. It's just becoming this massive global system as Werner Vogels talks about all the time. Thanks guys, really appreciate it. Dave, thank you very much. Thanks, Dave. All right, keep it right there for more coverage of AWS Storage Day 2022. You're watching theCUBE.