 From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. My name is Dave Vellante. We're here at our Marlboro Studios with Beth Phalen, who's the president and GM of the Dell EMC Data Protection Division. Good to see you, Beth. Good to be here, Dave. So the reason why we're here today is this is the third year you've released the Global Data Protection Index. We love data. We love to dig into the data. So tell us about the survey, what it's about, the size of the survey, who your respondents are. Yeah, absolutely. The survey talked to 2200 IT decision makers globally and asked them questions to understand where they are in their data protection, implementations, and strategy, and how much data loss or data disruption impacted their business over the past 12 months. So when you do these surveys over the three years like you have here, you get a time series, things start to, patterns start to emerge, what were the key findings this time around? There were a couple of really interesting findings that stood out. One, as we talked to the customers about where they were on their IT maturity journey, we found that the number of adopters, people who were fully immersed in data protection, went from 9% to 57%. So it was a really big jump. Another thing we saw was the data they were protecting grew by five times over 500%. So even though we know data is growing dramatically, it still is striking just how much it's growing. I've said many times that the industry, our industry, is marks to the cadence of Moore's Law and you could kind of draw that out on a log log graph paper, but the curve is shifting. It's becoming more exponential and certainly non-linear. So that data growth is even surprising to me. And it relates to the cost of downtime and the impact of disruption. There's some data in here. Why don't you share that with us? And it's pretty striking that the number of customers that were not able to recover their data after disruption grew from 14 to 27%. And the level of cost is growing as well. The average impact of a data disruption event is half a million dollars. But if you're not able to recover your data, understandably, it's almost twice that. So, you know, IT complexity is growing. And to me, this really talks to digital transformation, the way in which people are using data and differentiating from what they've done in the past, it dramatically increases their risk because the data value is so high. And the study shows that companies that have gone through a digital transformation and are clearly leveraging their data as an asset are two times more profitable than companies that have not. Data matters, more and more people are realizing that. The flip side of that coin is then the cost and the impact to your business, if you do have a disruption or a data loss, is that much more significant? Historically, we've had these sort of silos of applications that have infrastructure that's hardened and fossilized around them. And increasingly, we're sharing more data across those applications. You know, Cloud, which we'll talk about is really accelerating some of those transformations. And so, you have more and more complexity we live in a multi-vendor world because people want best of breed, they want horses for courses, but it adds a layer of complexity to the process. What did the survey tell you about that? And first off, the average is three data protection vendors per respondent that's consistent with where we were two years ago. But what we see also more dramatically is that the likelihood of not being able to recover your data after a ransomware attack if you're using multiple vendors is two times as high. So as the threats are maturing, the need for us to be able to protect ourselves and our companies from those threats needs to mature as well. And the data seems to show that having three vendors may not be the best way to be responding to this increasingly risky world. So that's interesting. Let's talk about now some of the challenges that were brought forth in the study. I always want to ask that in a study like this. There were three big ones that stood out. Cost is always top of mind. The right technical fit. And then with GDPR, compliance is another factor. What's their data show in terms of those challenges? So the top three, you really hit them. One was the ballooning cost and complexity. Another was the need to adhere to compliance. And then the third was the need to ensure that you have data protection that covers the emerging technologies, the emerging IT strategies. So we talked about multi-vendor, adds complexity, adds cost, adds risk. And just talked about the challenges. What is Dell EMC doing to address these challenges? What gives you confidence that you can earn the right to stay at the table? Yeah. So we're first are very proud of the legacy of data protection experience that we have and what we've learned and what we've helped our customers do as part of that legacy. We've protected tens of thousands of customers around the globe for decades. But what we're doing now is modernizing our capabilities, ensuring that we're protecting the multi-cloud environments, the new types of applications, making new simple products like the IDPA so that customers can take that confidence they have in us and bring it forward with them into the next decade. I'm interested in how people are leveraging the cloud for data protection and also what Dell EMC strategy is there because you don't own a public cloud. You have relationships with public cloud providers. But what is your strategy there and how are people, reverse, how are people using the cloud for data protection and what is your strategy there? Our strategy is to provide the best global, multi-cloud data protection that anybody delivers in the world. And when we do that, we're providing all the use cases that customers are using for their data protection. One interesting fact from the survey was for those customers who have adopted a cloud technology, 98% of them are leveraging that technology for data protection. And those use cases are evolving beyond just backup and beyond, excuse me, beyond just long-term retention and archive to include backup, replication, data protection for the cloud workloads. We're really doing a lot to make sure we keeping up with that very dynamic market. If people want to get more out of their backup and data protection than just insurance, we've talked about this a lot just in terms of leveraging analytics and ransomware, et cetera, the DR, bringing that together and so forth. But I want to continue on that discussion of cloud because I talked about, you have some relationship specifically, I didn't mention it, but VMware and AWS have a tight relationship but you have to have a portfolio. You can't just put all your eggs in one cloud basket. What's your strategy there? And the importance of enabling customers to leverage AWS or Google or IBM or Azure for APJ colleagues, Ali Baba is very essential for us. And we think it's even more important that you have a standard data protection strategy when you're leveraging multiple cloud vendors and distributing your data over more and more locations. It's even more important that you have a vendor you can count on and trust to bring all that together to a single data protection strategy. One of the things I like about servers like this, especially over time, is you can get a sense of the maturity model. You know, however you define it, laggards, evaluators, adopters, and leaders, as long as you're consistent in how you ask that question, you can get a time series and see how things are shifting. So there's a question and a slide in the study that talks about that. What did you find in terms of the adoption rates? And I hinted at this at the beginning, but I find this to be one of the most striking findings from the survey. The number of respondents that fell into the category of laggards, not really putting a lot of thought at all into data protection, shrank from 38% to 2%. So that's massive in two years. And in the flip side of that, the number of vendors who, the number of IT professionals who were now considered adopters had gone from 9% to 57%. So we really are seeing a massive shift in the number of companies that are now focused on data protection as a core part of their IT strategy. And my view, that's because of the digital transformation that's going on. It's more than just the buzzword. Every CEO is trying to get digital right. So just to be summarized here, so data is growing in this non-linear fashion that we talked about. That's driving up costs in terms of cost of disruption. The cost of downtime is growing. Even the best-debred leaders are struggling to keep up. The pace of innovation is so fast. If you're not figuring out how to monetize your data in some way, shape, or form, and I don't mean selling your data. I'm really talking about how data contributes to the monetization of the business. Cutting costs or increasing revenue in some way, shape, or form. If you're not doing that, then you're in trouble. I'm going to come back and ask you again, what gives you confidence that Dell EMC is going to be the preferred supplier? We heard about multiple vendors is problematic. So how are you going to win in this game? One thing is making sure that we're building our business strategy on real data like this survey. So we are staying on top of what's happening in our customers' world and we're modernizing our products and our portfolio to meet those needs. And the second is building on the legacy of the IT infrastructure that we've protected for many, many decades. We have the trust. We have the architecture. We have the performance. We have the best data cost to protect. And now we're bringing in modern, simple, multi-cloud data protection. We are on this and we are going to win. So the surveys like this are big. They're expensive. Can we assume you're going to continue to fund this? Absolutely. So how do we get more information? I say the survey is done by an independent firm. Is it sitting on your website somewhere? Where can I get more information? You can just go out to dellemc.com and you will find the information. Great. Beth, thanks for coming in and sharing the results of the survey. It's always a pleasure. We're going to see you at Dell Technologies World. Just a few weeks. Yeah, end of April, early May. Look forward to that. Yeah, you too, Dave. Thanks for having me in. You're welcome. All right, thanks for watching, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time.