 From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. Cover and welcome back to this theCUBE coverage here Miami Beach at the Fontainebleau Hotel for Acronis' Global Cyber Summit 2019. John, for two days of coverage we're on day two, learning a lot about the global security, cybersecurity and protection, marketplace and solutions. Our next guest is Alex Miraschenko, also known as Alex Miro. Great to have you on. Great chatting with you prior to coming on camera. Thanks for coming on. My pleasure, thank you. So Vice President of Cyber Infrastructure at Acronis, essentially looking at your platform, that's essentially the hyper-converged stack underneath the platform software you're enabling, kind of the critical infrastructure for the platform. Yeah, that's one way to describe it. It is infrastructure, we provide the complete stack all the way, whatever you run on top of the standard commodity hardware, including the virtualization layer, capability to run the standard container workloads and essentially optimized for the cyber platform. You know, your interesting background, we were talking before we came on camera about your background, certainly you've seen waves of innovation, you've been a high performance storage enterprise, infrastructure, engineer and developer and executive. Lots changed in the past couple years and certainly the past decade, you run the VSAN wave, you saw that storage wave, now we're in a cloud wave, now we're on premise with hybrid. So hybrid's certainly now a big part of the operating model. So the operating system is not just storage anymore, it's a system view. What's your personal opinion on where storage is now? I've heard software-defined data center from VMware for years. We've been joked about software-defined storage, software-defined compute. I mean everything software-defined, but software is the game, scales a game, high performance is a requirement. What's change in storage right now? Well and like everything and nothing at the same time. As I said, like remember going back to like 30 years ago, I was like, oh gosh, you know, if the storage is exploding, you know, soon we're going to have like two gigabytes. You know, a company server, my God, you know. And there's like, or, you know, where's it going to come in from? Or like imagine when people start recording music or you know, like they've seen this MP3 thing coming up. It's the same game, different year. But it's just like, it's like this exponential curve. It's like the shape of the curve stays the same. And to be honest, like part of me like never believes that I was like, oh come on, how much bigger can it get? And now everybody's like, oh, we got IUT line. We've got like those cameras streaming things, 24 seven in every possible thing you can think of. And of course, we're going to store everything. I'm not sure I know what to do with it, but. So from that point of view, the demand keeps growing and you need to have technologies to handle that appropriately. And again, it's just not a matter of kind of throwing the bits somewhere and forgetting about them. It's just keeping them in the predefined order and actually being able to process that. And Acronis isn't a business of a cyber protection. Some people say, oh, you guys just like a backup company. I mean, yeah, that's the fundamental part of that. But as you pointed out again in our pregame chat as it is, the traditional data protection guys be that backup, you know, you can think about as there is like a raid as a way to protect your data. They are all about defending against like a physical disruption as you call it, right? My disk died, you know, it's like my data center died and like my power went out. So what do I do? I was the data. But it does not protect you what I call a logical destruction. I mean, back in the like the classic example. Logical disruption. What is that? Disruption. Okay, yeah, logical disruption. You didn't say destruction. Disruption, it's the same thing. I mean, ransomware is pretty much destructive. I mean, it's hostage at that point, but. Logical meaning non-physical, not like an event like a hurricane or outage or something like that. I mean, you removed the right file and you didn't notice that. And then you went through several backup cycles and then you realize, oh, I want my file back, but then you like the backup that had that file is gone. I mean, you know, what are you going to do, right? Nothing got disrupted or destroyed, but your file's gone. That's. Logical disruptions or disruptions, that's happening. Certainly security points that out. But the security is the big thing, that's what the people didn't think about it. But definitely not like me, but like 20 years ago, is like the, so what happens if you see some guy hacked or like people, you know, like ransomware, right? It's specifically the product designed to, like, you know, knock with your storage, you know? Encrypted, deleted, whatever they want to do there. And again, next thing you know, you're like backing up junk that will hit by ransomware and then you go to your backups and like, oh my God, where's everything because it's all there. And. So you're saying people have a really strong backup and recovery, but they're recovering malware that they stored. Exactly. Yeah, so it's like, so that seems like an obvious problem, but like nobody, but Acronis actually provides an integrated solutions to build with that. I mean, they're different. I mean, people know what the problem is and their company's out there like, we'll scan your backup archives, we'll find malware, you'll find great. But then anybody who tried to like really deal with the restore in a critical situation knows that even without the malware concerns, it's stressful, shall we say. Yeah. And it's not always predictable. And it's always predictable. And it's post-Ace too, you're doing it after the fact. Right, right. But if the malware is involved, it's, you know, it becomes an extremely expensive and sometimes, you know, impossible operation. Acronix takes care of that because, you know, we can actually monitor your backups. You know, we can find out where was the last time you're, you know, you were clean. It's an post-hoc, you know, we're obviously proactive also to kind of real-time scanning for viruses. So it's a multi-level cyber protection, which is fairly, you know, I think it's unique in industry. Well, I think it's interesting how you guys have brought data protection concepts and paradigm and practice, by the way, into cyber, which is much more holistic view. Right. And I think that's like an operating system kind of thinking. And thinking it holistically is about systems. And systems has consequences. Something goes wrong over here. It's affecting it over the place. Get a race off of it. And, you know, we have a very strong system background for TNA, as they sometimes like to say that. And in fact, they first virtualize or a virtualization solution. And containers, for that matter, were built by the Cronus engineering team more than 15 years ago, way before it, like anybody in the Linux world knew how to store container and what they hope for the main. So that's like our storage layer, software-defined storage. It's fully blown, HCI product, completely our own understanding how to build that. That gives us a unique advantage among the security companies. You know, I got to ask you a question. I'm a, I'm a, I'm fascinated. I'm a student of history and also a student of competitive advantage when it comes to technology platforms. And the one thing I always say and see with entrepreneurs, whether they're young or old, is that there's two types of entrepreneurs. There's a systems thinker and a coder, right? And I think with platforms, you can't shortcut a platform because there's trajectory benefits of economies of scale for putting the work in. You can't just put a platform out there overnight. You got to have a, you got to build it and it takes time. So there's some people trying to accelerate platforms, some have done the work, you guys have done it for a long time. What's your view on that whole, well I'm going to throw a platform out there. What are some of the things that, that get exposed when I try to, you know, push a platform too fast? Well, the platform assumes that you have an ecosystem, people actually using it and building stuff on top of that. I mean, like every, you talked about the coders, right? So every programmer, a software developer, or most of them at least, they dream of two things. They write in your, like create a new programming language, finally the one, you know? Or the other kind guys like, oh, I'm going to write in your operating system. I went through that phase, mostly in the operating system, a long time ago. And it's, you know, it's a process. I mean, whatever you build has to actually serve the purpose. If you, like there are lots of platforms in all areas of technology and people's like, oh, we're going to create a set of APIs and anybody can plug in it to us. It's like, unless you solve a real problem and really simplify life for people, they're not going to do that. I mean, right, they're not going to do, like use a platform for the sake of using the platform. Our cyber platform is different because we're essentially exposed, our APIs to our technology that's out there and people have been using. I mean, I don't know if you saw the keynote yesterday, there was the demo of the way how to write. Let's go to plug in for a second with the term, you know, the person that's interviewed. When people can add, you know, their own policies to cyber protect workflow, which could be specific to what they do, you know? They not rise, things like that. That plan, the platform makes sense because it's already out there and that's respond to customer demands, like, you know, look, we love what you guys do, but we have this specific set of requirements. And if it's general enough, we incorporate it into the product, but there is also a lot of things which could be specific to a vertical or even to a specific company. We just want to enable them to do this stuff. Well, that's what platforms are, they're enabling. They have to enable some capabilities that provides value to that use case. And that could be custom, domain specific. But I'm sorry, that could be domain specific. So a platform has to enable capabilities for someone to do something. Yes, but again, the key point to the platform is it has to kind of solve a real problem, not be there for the sake of elegance or solution or API or things of that nature. Final question for you, Alex. So I'm a CIO or CISO, or I'm out there with decision-making. I'm like, man, you know what? I got to rethink my enterprise architecture. I got to think about, I got IoT coming. I got industrial IoT and just an regular IoT. I want to have a comprehensive platform. Why Cronus? What's the pitch? And how do you, and what's different than the traditional sands and storage and other solutions out there? What's that pitch to that enterprise decision-maker or Cronus? You kind of like, to say as you say, I mean, you have a tremendous growth in your data flows. The number of data sources are exploding. It's actually going back to your previous question. I think that's what one of the differences is that it's not just a volume of data, it's the breadth of the data sources you're getting there. So you got to have to manage that CISO somehow or it's sort of an example. I don't know what the right analysis is like. Who wrote the analogy for that? So you're going to be like, how are you guys going to manage that? You have to protect it. At least you have to know what your exposure is or what the thing's there. And just throwing out a bunch of, you know, like standard network technologies, point products is not going to solve it. I mean, yes, you can hire lots of people. You can build your own thing. You would be effectively reinventing the lots of wheels in the process while we already have that solution for you. I like the platform idea because it makes data more addressable horizontally scalable. It's not just a siloed product out there. You can actually work and enable with data. Data's moving around. You got to be acted on. You need software to do that. Yes, exactly, exactly. So that's another thing. It's not, it keeps like a structured data versus unstructured data. There's discussions been going on for many years. You know, the reality is you will always have both types and you will always have the need to process them in both ways. And that's a good idea. I have one more final question since I just popped in my head. It's a final, final question. What's in the infrastructure platform that you're involved in that people should know about that they might not know about that's important to investigate? What is our killer feature? Is there a killer thing in there that is like notable that they should know about? What's under the hood on the infrastructure side for Cronus? Well, a lot of things. What's your favorite feature? We've been talking about that. What's your favorite feature? What's the one thing? Gosh, you know, it's like, I have lots of babies. I love them all. I mean, that's a really hard kill. You can't take sides. It's not a side. I mean, like I say, like, okay, I've been writing storage all my most of my career. I like storage, but it doesn't mean it's more important or less important than other things, you know, unless you have a comprehensive compute layer on top of that, the storage is just, then it becomes a storage vendor, niche vendor, right? So that's not who we are. I'm really fascinated by actually the integration with the cyber feature and the security because that's, on one hand, it's not something that I've been doing in my previous career for most of the time, but I do have a lot of kind of understanding of the workflow issues and integration points and that excites me something that's one of the reasons I'm here at Cronus. Integrated platforms is I think the key thing. Thanks for coming on, Alex. Thanks for sharing your insight. Appreciate it first thing in the morning here and well, afternoon now. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. You know, man, that's like everybody's so busy. It's a Cronus inaugural global cyber summit 2019 about cyber protection, not data protection, cyber protection, they both work hand in hand. This is theCUBE coverage here in Miami Beach. I'm John Furrier, we'll be back with more after this short break.