 from New Orleans. It's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to New Orleans, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. It's our first day of coverage at VeeamON 2017. The first time theCUBE has covered VeeamON, and it's quite an event. About 3,000 people here, and as I say, we'll be going two days of coverage, talking to executives and partners, and of course, the customers. We love the customer segments. Marcus Marksteiner is here as the CTO of Balwas Group, insurance company out of Switzerland. Marcus, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Welcome. So tell us a little bit about your company, your role, and what are some of the things driving IT decisions? Okay, so we are a life insurance and non-life insurance company within Switzerland. We also have a bank in Switzerland, which is included. We operate in Europe, in the country of Belgium and Germany and Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. So we're a company with about 7,500 employees. And my role in there is actually I'm a head of infrastructure and support, so I'm responsible for the data center to use the service center and the workplace environment. I also act as a group CTO, because we have centralized all the data centers from the different locations to its parcel to our headquarter. So financial services tends to be in the cutting edge of technology typically, very competitive industry and fast moving, very IT oriented. What are some of the drivers in your business today? I think in the, especially in the insurance companies, we are, within Switzerland, but also in Germany and in Europe itself, it's a highly regulated market. So the possibility to let's go for the public cloud is very limited because of regulation part. So therefore we have to deal with insurance companies within Europe, but also within US and China especially, which are very agile on the market. So therefore our business is now changing completely because from the traditional insurance, which we have sold years ago, we will have to translate this into the digitalization world. So meaning we have to be more flexible on the market to have shorter periods of product line. And for me, as an IT reseller within the company means my organization have to be agile as well. So this is actually the most part we are changing to deal with security, that's the one part, but all the part is the agility. Paint a picture of your environment, what's it look like, applications that you're supporting, what does your infrastructure look like, your storage, obviously your backup, we'll talk about that. So we have, within Basel, we have two data centers nearby and we have now set up a third data center outside of Basel for disaster recovery because Basel is located on an earthquake area with a high risk impact. So therefore our internal auditor said, yeah, it's not that good to have for the complete group data centers located on the earthquake plate. So please set up a data center, which is at least 100 kilometers away from our location now. So within this data center is typically, we have mainframes, we have servers, we have storage, all kinds of flavors. We have some centralization there, we have a one-winder strategy in the infrastructure, which a huge partnership with HPE. In this area, we have from storage part, we're using NetApp and Hitachi storage. And as a backup software, of course, now since nearly a year now, we are using WIM for doing the backup of all the virtual machines in the future also of the physical machines. And also we evaluated WIM because of the data replication into data center three. So this guarantees me to bring up the data at a certain time to data center three to make the restore and the restart there. So you've got two data centers within a synchronous distance and one is an asynchronous distance, is that correct? So you have a three data center set up to as close to zero data loss as you can get. Yeah, exactly. The data center three, we are using not only as a cold backup stand by a data center, we are putting all the non-productive environment to this data center. So we have all three data centers up and running and they have on a certain perspective, productive level, meaning for the developer, of course, data center three is absolutely highly critical because they develop in data center three. All the data is there. For the productive part, we have data center one and two, which is in Basel, which has the availability there. So we're using both sides and they're all connected together. How often do you test recovery in that set up? We're trying now to test it twice a year. But we cannot switch to complete data center because we have productive. It's too risky. It's too risky. So we build up a reference model, a reference service where we have included all the environments we need to make it for the auditors visible that our infrastructure and data center three is working in case of an emergency. Okay, let's talk a little bit more about the data protection strategy. So we have a high level, we understand the data center approach, but what about the protecting the apps? How do you use Veeam? How did you start with Veeam? And where are you now? I mean, we came from an absolutely traditional data center. So we had a legacy backup system running based on file looks. And then we started certain time with NetApp and using snapshot technologies there because we had huge databases which are not able to fulfill the SLA anymore in a recovery mode. So we had to switch them to NetApp. And then we started with data center three and then we had another problem. How can we replicate these data into data center three in a certain time to get the SLA fulfilled in case of an emergency? And there we made an evaluation and Veeam was actually the one who was fulfilling all the requirements and it was easy to deal with them. So we decided, okay, let's try it with Veeam. And at a certain time we saw, well, it's not only about data replication with Veeam, it's also about the complete backup stack we can replace by this software. And so we grow slowly with the possibilities we saw during the implementation phase. We saw, okay, we can use this module and this module and then Veeam on came on. So we could use the report part also for the sizing of the virtual machines. And now on we just backing up almost everything with Veeam, so. Can you speak to organizationally, how many people you have managing kind of backup and DR and what that experience is like? And in the past we had about three people which are responsible for the complete backup process but they're very focused on their tooling. They could not tell me if the backup was correct, if the data was back up. They only say, yeah, my system is running and it's back-upping but is it really also consistent? I don't know, so we had to ask the engineers. With Veeam now, we switched completely. We do not have any responsible anymore for backup purposes itself. We took this because of the ease of use, the tool, we gave them directly to the engineers of Linux, of Citrix or of Windows and they are now responsible for their own data. So they can now do the backup itself and they can also assume to me that this, what they do with the backup is correct and it's restartable because they have to check each time. Yeah, so you're not only operationally more efficient but you actually know that what you have works. Exactly, yeah, yeah. Great, I believe it's your first time at the conference. What's the experience been so far? What value have you been getting? What brought you here? Actually, I came here with the experience, with the goal to learn more about the Veeam company itself and this was actually during the networking areas and the networking part was very helpful for me to meet directly the management of Veeam to see what is their strategy and it was also in the general session, they have a story to tell and that's what I was coming in here to get this information and in the sessions and today also with the talks with Ratmir directly and McKay, that's really, there's a spirit in this company. That's what we are looking for because we have so many big companies vendors in our thing where you do not have the connection to the management directly and for me it's very important because we try really to grow with our business and therefore I need a partner behind where I can rely on and that's Veeam, absolutely the case. You'd mentioned that supporting physical endpoints is something that interests you. Anything else from the announcements that you heard that excites you? Anything not there that you're looking for in the future too? Yeah, for the future for me it's actually the cloud connection. It's very important because we are still in the high regulated market but I think also the insurance and the financial sector in Switzerland they're slightly opening for the cloud services and also for us it's the Office 365 in the Azure and the Amazon web services they're coming slightly into our organization and to know that there is also a possibility with the same backup software using this in a cloud. This gives me the feeling and also the insurance that I can go to my management and tell them, hey guys we're choosing the right vendor because we can also use them for the cloud. I do not have to evaluate another product there for fulfilling these requirements. So that's good to hear. So you sell insurance, your company does. Back up is largely insurance. How do you make the business case? What business benefits have you seen? Can you share with any metrics? Maybe they're largely cost-cutting. Maybe it's enabling DR. What can you share with us? The one thing I can share with you is actually we had a, that's not only based on the Veeam by the product, by the backup itself but it's also based on the Veeam 1, the reporter. We had in a branch office in Belgium we had an issue where we have several Active Directory controllers running there and with Veeam 1 they reported that there's two controllers broken during the weekend and there's only one Active Directory controller available meaning if this will also fail we have to replicate the complete stuff to Basel meaning 1500 users have to wait and they are very aware about these profiles because they are using Citrix in the background. So meaning we would probably have an issue there for about four to five, almost a working, a whole working day where a complete branch could not work. Meaning there we just brought up these two Active Controllers with Veeam in a certain time period and nothing happened. And I mean, counted in money this would cost us at least a half a million Euro this outage, if it occurred. Marcus, in the keynote, one of the terms that gets thrown out is digital transformation. We talked to a lot of financial services companies that that term resonate. What does it mean to your organization? How's it impacting your job? Yeah, it has a huge impact because our business lines they are now looking for other type of insurance meaning in the past we just insured the car for one year. So the experience of the users and also my kids is actually, I don't want to have a car insurance for a whole year because I'm only driving twice a month a car. So they would like to have an insurance like insure what you use. As a service. As a service. And therefore we have to adapt this into completely other models because our legacy systems that's possible. So what is our business doing? They're going out looking for startup companies bringing them in and the startup companies they start typically in a cloud environment at their very age. And then when they bring out the product the first thing is they ask for connection to the legacy systems for customer relationship management systems and stuff like this. So I have to really change my organization completely. And so I have to go away from the silos organization part into DevOps. And I also have to change my data center because I have to provide these services also as a cloud services as it is possible in the public cloud. So meaning the digitalization in the business has absolutely direct impact to my organization. I buy that service. I got four kids, three driving to a college. I really only needed a couple of months out of the year. I'll switch insurance companies. Give me a call. All right, excellent. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Marcus really appreciate it. Thank you. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back. Continuous coverage of continuous data protection continuous content flow. Veeamon 2017, we'll be right back.