 Hello everyone welcome back to never getting the road to cyber resiliency a summit made possible by Dell Technologies Gil Hectis here remote from Tel Aviv Israel. Gil our first thoughts are with you and all the innocent souls in the region We hope you and your family are doing okay. We pray for your safety. Gil is the co-founder and CEO of Founder and CEO of continuity welcome to the program Gil Thank You Dave. Thank you for welcoming me Hey, why did you I love to ask founders this question? Why did you start continuity? So it was post 9-11 and companies Who hoped that they have a disaster recovery system in place and they're able to recover their data many companies found that they actually cannot because of various complexities related to data recovery and And so we started continuity in order to help them make sure that they can manage the risk related to business continuity resilience and and most importantly the ability to recover Yeah, it's it's obviously very important, right with the things go wrong and things always go wrong with technology You've got to be able to recover, but how has that I mean Post 9-11 I mean that a lot has changed and we learned we learned a lot about recovery, you know post 9-11 How has that sort of whole concept of your founding premise? How has that evolved over the last? Let's see 20 plus years So you really bring me back to the times in which I was young and beautiful You're still beautiful gal. I gotta tell you you look good. Thank you. I'll have it in writing, please So so we started really by helping companies making sure they're able to recover the data and we worked with Literally hundreds of large enterprises to help them make sure that they configure their recoverability correctly and as Things started to pro to progress We started to understand that companies also have issues with their clustering and we hope to manage their clustering issues to make sure They also keep continuity. So, you know resilience is about Recoverability continuity and and we managed that for them for many many years as as as you mentioned And then a few years ago, we started to hear from customers That they are suffering from something new that was called the ransomware and we were not very familiar with ransomware at the time Originally resilience and recoverability was meant to recover from, you know an earthquake a major catastrophe maybe a human error and Then they started telling us those customers about the fact that they they need to prepare for ransomware and some of our customers even suffered ransomware and and when we started to learn Why is that happening? What is ransomware? What's really going on? We learned that the world of cyber security while it's very advanced and has lots of solutions Kind of ignored storage and backup for a very long time And and maybe I'll take it through, you know a few details on that If if you really look at At what people are doing for security of all the layers that they have in IT, you know all the way from firewalls networks Endpoints servers database servers web servers app servers you name it The most important piece is they securely configure this infrastructure In order to make sure that no matter what happens and no matter if a hacker comes or not They're gonna be ready things are gonna be ready Everything is gonna be secured properly and there is a name for that. It's some organizations call it secured configuration some organizations call it Security poster management there are all kinds of various names for it and when you look at what happens in in Backup and what happens in storage and what happens in storage management and backup appliances and storage networking and storage services on the cloud You learn that all those Processes and technologies are not yet implemented really in in Storage and in backup. So security and specifically secured configuration and security poster management Doesn't really exist in a central way in those areas And and when we started to learn more and more about it We understood why it happened. We understood all those things, but what we didn't understand is how come The single most important area of IT really and especially as it comes to cyber security and ransomware the real Where all the data is sitting, you know, if you look at the risk If if a hacker hacks an endpoint, right or a server It's very unpleasant. He can he can steal data. He can erase data. I can corrupt data. He can encrypt data It's it's pretty terrible, but it's really no big deal. I mean the organization has a backup They can recover the server and the server doesn't hold all that much information But if you look at the storage array or a storage management system or or the storage layer or the backup layer God forbid Every storage array will typically hold about a thousand The data of about a thousand servers and every backup Appliance can hold even more than that and in many cases those are managed centrally So if a hacker gets to the storage or backup area, you can literally wipe an organization clean There will be nothing left by the time he's finished so When we learned all that and I'm sorry for the long story, but It was exciting for us when we learned all that it it basically caused us to stop toward to stop what we are doing We didn't really stop. We continue to provide resilience management But it literally caused us to build a new business unit within continuity that will focus solely on the area of cyber resilience and and more specifically on the area of Security post-term management for storage and backup and that's really how storage guard was born so much to unpack there I mean we talked to a lot of CIOs and CISOs During the pandemic who said they basically echoed what you said Gail that they were thought DR Was their sort of business resilience strategy The other thing I'm hearing from you is that that backup and recovery were bolt-on it's sort of an afterthought Which we talk about all the time it can't be it's never effective when it's an afterthought and then of course ransomware Which was this new thing and ransomware itself has evolved and that's what I want to ask you about it Our understanding we talked a lot of organizations to say that it used to be they would you know encrypt And and then you know extort and now They're basically X-fil trading Yeah, and then they extort say hey, we're gonna release all this data So they they sometimes don't even bother encrypting And and then of course if you pay the ransom sometimes you get your data back sometimes you get the keys Sometimes you get you know some of the data back So what has been the progression just in this short period of time of sort of the state of ransomware? So, you know initially when we look a few years back initially ransomware Was really a very simple thing. It was like it was a virus that knew how to have infect systems It didn't really know what it infects and when it infected something it would encrypt the disk and give you this phone number to call or this Skype number to call or whatever this method or this email to email so that you'll be able to get the key to Unencrypt the data and that was you know, it was I would say It had a Significant effect on small and medium businesses, but it wasn't really a big deal for the enterprise because in the enterprise you can recover Everything has a backup no big deal Then hackers started to also leak the information sometimes as a way to pressure the organization and sometimes As a strategy to kind of get you know a bit more few more bitcoins out of this event It started to affect the enterprise in a significant way I think there were a few a few interesting events Maybe Sony was one of the most interesting ones But it really started to affect the enterprise in a significant way When hackers started to make those ransomware attacks much more sophisticated and Started to delete the backups as the first step before they go after production And suddenly from a nonsense that goes after SMB You have this major threat that can literally wipe an organization clean and this is dangerous and Hackers really learned that the data is in the storage and in the backup and you and you cannot even start from primary storage You literally have as a hacker if you want to get some money out of this and by the way, this is no advice for hackers So don't please me. It's I hope hackers don't watch this show So but but anyway if they understood that they want to get a few dollars out of it They really need to erase the backups before they erase primary storage or before they encrypt Their primary storage and when they started to do it, it became a major catastrophe And by the way, that was around the time in which we started to develop storage guard which is the product that we have to Help enterprises Guarantee secure configuration across everything that participates in storage and backup so that hackers a will not be able to get in and B will not be able to do much damage even if they manage to get in So we haven't actually talked much about product at the summit and in the series We're kind of little we're kind of jonesen for a little discussion on product. So what is storage guard? You've got very specialized expertise at continuity. What exactly is storage guide guard? Can you unpack it for a skill? Sure. So storage guard basically brings three key capabilities to the enterprise that that today are not really Widely spread. So if if you go and ask your typical You know chief information security officer, let's say if they currently do Whatever let's call it vulnerability assessment for for their it They'll ask the answer will be oh, yes, absolutely. Of course we do a vulnerability assessment for it We do it on an annual basis and we have a system to make sure that we are always securely configured And that's awesome. And then if you ask him, okay, that's great Are you currently doing vulnerability assessment for storage and backup? I mean, you have lots of components all the data is there It's very important that you're doing it and the answer is in 90 or let's say in 80% of cases the answer would be election in no and And in 20% of cases, it will be yeah, we do we have this in-house team that's working very very hard And and they're doing the research and they're writing signatures and they have DevSecOps people and they have Scrips and they're doing all kinds of stuff and and Yes, they make sure our storage and backup is secure and then if you ask all of them, but that's great But wouldn't you want the product to test your storage and backup and and and do all that automatically and enjoy the economies of scale Of a company that's doing it for all customers and not just for for you I mean, you don't need to have a team for that You don't have a team doing antivirus for you, right the answer in 100% of cases Of course, you are absolutely of course We want to have an external vulnerability assessment as opposed to an internal one and of course We want to have something that will keep our configuration secured at all time and that is that is exactly what storage guard does So it really has three key capabilities one it knows how to automatically detect CV ease in storage and backup and Provider mediation advice so CV common vulnerabilities. So to say or bugs in code that you may receive from various vendors or components number two we Automatically with storage guard detect security misconfigure misconfiguration and deviation from vendor best practice industry best practice security best practice security standard It's nice easy on what not and again provide remediation advice as well as automatic auto-fixing so to say or automatic remediation and number three we provide with all the compliance capabilities required by the enterprise to be able to exhibit to their internal auditors external auditors, etc that They are protected and the way they do it is by literally printing out All the checks they need for each system and subsystem With a check when it was checked all the details that we collected Which is basically the proof required to be able to prove you you are actually well protected And we put those product and we put this all this into a product. It knows how to scan every event every vendor In storage backup storage management storage networking storage services and this entire area So that's this is storage guard in a nutshell. I can keep on going for like two and a half hours Well, thank you for that detail because as I said before you've got very specialized expertise And I'm hearing you look back up in recovery. It can't just be a afterthought It can't even be an adjacency to cybersecurity. It's got to be a fundamental component and just listening to you describe What your solution does and particularly when you talked about compliance. I'm curious. How does AI? You know generally and specifically generative AI change that whole experience for your customers So generative is AI is an large language models It's an amazing revolution. It really is it's exciting. You know, it's exciting for us personally We all go to chat GPT. We all do crazy stuff with it We all integrate it into our products and this is awesome, but specifically in the security world it's an Unbelievable huge threat because if you look at how hackers operate today They use lots of manpower in order to be creative in how they attack the attacking enterprise and they use two main ways one is They they use social engineering Which is basically someone picks up the phone and and tries to convince someone to give him the password or some more advanced variations of that Sends an SMS with a link or stuff like that and the second piece is they generate code that tries to do either brute force attack Or try all kinds of penetrating Vulnerabilities zero day or non zero day alike the problem with gen AI or or the challenge that we all have with gen AI as security companies Is that it allows you to be to to be creative? At an infinite scale, so basically you can instead of hiring lots of people you can do gen AI and LLM to be infinitely Creative in both human engineering because you can generate any Any new message that you can not really trace or or locate and it can generate any piece of new Creative code that's gonna try to do brute force with a huge brain of having read all the internet so the problem is that suddenly every organization is becoming a Hundred times more exposed to very creative minds, which is not really a mind It's it's LLM and gen AI that's attacking it and I think If we thought that security is important until now security is gonna be ten times or twenty times more important Now the gen AI is in the hands of hackers and not just in the hands of you know My daughter who is being very creative with it, right? So my last question my understanding is you also have an investing background. Yes, right? I was a VC twice. Yes, and so you've got some interesting perspectives. I'm sure Israel startup nation I know you've got other priorities, you know right now as a nation But what are maybe some of the investing themes? Particularly they might be related to threats that people aren't thinking about so much if you had to sort of put on your You know the breakout the binoculars and think ahead think think about you know your investing Expertise what are some of the themes that you think are people should be paying attention to? in the coming years So I would I would say that in general there are two areas in which an investment is worthwhile insecurity and in general one is the forefront of technology Because if you captured the market early You're able to you're able to become number one or number two and grow very fast and become the de facto standard And that's why you see lots of this is chasing the Frontier even though nine out of ten companies will fail will miserably fail and burn a lot of cash. It still makes sense It's still a good investment the other side is you want to go after huge untapped markets Regardless if there are you know Ancient new or what not and take for example Uber right Uber is a great example Hex is not a new technology and even mapping wasn't a new technology at the time when they came up when they came about but the combination of internet and mapping enabled the taxi business which is Quite ancient so to say to become an amazing success and it was an untapped market that just enjoyed this A bit of new technology. So those are the two areas that I try to invest in at least in my spare time When I'm not busy with securing the storage. Yeah, I love that answer. It's not just about a particular technology It's about a framework of and a philosophy investing Gil Hex. Thanks so much for coming on the program really appreciate your time Thank you, Dave Okay, you're watching navigating the road to cyber resiliency, which is the summit made possible by Dell Technologies The analyst panel is next you don't want to miss this keep it right there