 Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. Hello everyone, welcome to the back to The Cube here at IBM Think 2018, we're at the Mandalay Bay at The Cube Studios where IBM Think 20, I'm John Furrier, your host, our next guest, Brian Regan, chief marketing officer, Actifio, and my already VP North America, IBM Resiliency Services guys, welcome to The Cube, Brian, good to see you. Good to see you, John, yes. Great stuff here, obviously, IBM Think, big show, six in one, six shows brought down to one, a lot of customers here, but the message, you're starting to see a clear line of sight for customers seeing the innovation formula. Cloud, multi-cloud services, on-prem, true private cloud, as Wikibon reported, but really AI and blockchain or infrastructure, powering data, data's at the center of the value proposition. You guys are partying with IBM, what's the story here, what's the relationship? Well yeah, I mean you nailed it, John, I mean data is really at the center of everything, right? I mean we're in the midst of a massive digital transformation unlike anything we've seen in IT for 30 years, and every business is a data business, whether they know it or not, and with that comes great rewards, but it also brings a lot of risks as well, and we've been a strong partner of IBMs for as long as Actifio has been in business, we're a data company, we're about managing data, and now I think with this rising tide of data threats, partnering with the world's leader in resiliency just makes all the sense in the world. Being a data geek and betting your business on data was a good call, don't you think? I think so, yes, absolutely. Hey with Watson and AMI, you guys are pioneering, obviously, and we've seen this evolve from the R&D and the modern infrastructure, the systems level, infrastructure as code, but the real applications out there have to drive a lot of money opportunities, success for your clients, security's the biggest risk, there's a lot of industries out there, for profit around security, the threats are endless, there's new threats every day. This is hard business, data's the key, what's your reaction and vision around the current state of security? What have you done? Our decades of experience working with clients has proven that at the start of a resiliency initiative, it starts with the data element. We've had the opportunity to work with thousands of clients. Every day we're helping them test their ability to be able to recover from some unplanned event, something that could cause them damage. And that experience has been evolving over the past, I would say 18 months, we're on warp speed to help the clients achieve literally an always on environment. And it starts with data, the point about data that I think is important is that clients recognize that if there's any damage at all to their data repository, it will cause them severe damage, so protecting it and making sure that it's recoverable to a point in time is what we're working with every day. I'd like you to talk about for a minute, this resiliency service is because security is broad, but everyone thinks command center, killing the bad guys, offense, defense, blue teams, red teams. There's a, the trend of IT is security is kind of moving into the direct line to the C-suite. Because it's so important, the risk management alone on security, she's seeing that trend. What do you guys do? What is resilience service? Take a minute to explain specifically what that is in context to security. That is what's so exciting about being here at Think, because we have a total interconnection between our security assets and our security domain and our resiliency team. So resiliency is about resuming business operations to the point before you had the event, being back to that normal state of affairs. Resiliency for us has been about helping clients create a plan after assessing the risk and designing and implementing that plan to return to a point in time where they know that they're safe, that their applications are back up and running. And what we're finding in the security domain, which is the reason why cyber resiliency includes security, networking, and the resiliency methodologies of getting back to normal, is that you have to combine all three of those categories to create a solution to return to that normal state at a safe point. Talk about the importance of the proactive front end work that's involved. I mean, back up in recovery and the old system, oh yeah, it's at the end of the, probably just throws a backup at it. And then people have been bitten in the butt on that. They've gotten really impacted. How much work is involved? What is the playbook on the front end to prepare? And give me an example where, what's the consequences of not doing it? You use the right term. It is a playbook and it's one that needs to be well scripted and well tested. The work on the upfront is to design the right solution, technologically, to ensure that you have a solution that moves data from a place that could be harmed to a safe point and create that environment, create that solution, and then figure out the right team and the right skill and the right investment to constantly test it. Test it so that you have the ability. And that's the work that we're doing with Actifio. Actifio has the expertise to help us create the right copy data management solution to enable a snap, snap, snap, snap copy to be able to then travel back in time to be able to find that right clean point in the event of a cyber incident that has pervasively impacted a data center environment. What's the role of Actifio as an ingredient in that plan? Are they in the insurance policy? Are they in the front end? When are they invoked? Where are they in the process? Well, they're the, I mean, to use an analogy that I'm comfortable with, we trust Actifio to provide us the brains of the solution to be able to move the data constantly, move it to a point where we can then create a service to be able to, as I said, go back in time. Brian, you might want to comment on that a little more. Brian, talk about the relation with IBM in that context because, you know, covering IBM for so many years, you know, they're the big ship, right? They move at a pace with a huge customer base, you know, how do you guys integrate in? What are you guys providing? And what's the value proposition that you guys are providing IBM? Well, I mean, the, you know, because we've been partnering with IBM for so long, I mean, literally since the inception of the company, we have a very common user base, right? We serve the mid and large enterprise and global enterprises worldwide. We have, you know, 3,000 customers from Actifio and almost all of them are IBM accounts as well. One of the things that, you know, just to kind of piggyback on Mike's discussion, you know, one of the, and to speak specifically to a customer base, you know, global financials right now are not only worried about cyber threats to production, but increasingly they're worried about cyber threats to their backup sets. And in fact, there is regulations, you know, FISMA regulations in North America that talk about you need air gap protection between, you know, one backup set and another because they're under attack now. So literally these threats have started to creep beyond just the normal production data sets. Actifio plus, you know, resiliency services equals, you know, a technology that can provide that air gap, provide the immutability, provide all the, you know, the insurance protection of the data and provide the wherewithal and the knowledge to really get that playbook to resume business operations as fast as possible. You guys are going to stay on top of the big trends too because blockchain's right around the corner. That's immutable, that could be an opportunity. Absolutely. Thoughts on blockchain? Blockchain is, you know, it is a fascinating technology, apart from just crypto, right? And what a better, we talk about, you know, every business is digital. Literally blockchain is turning every business into a digital business. And it is the next generation in terms of securing close contracts and securing really immutability and referenceability of data. I think it has a huge play with IBM, obviously, around GDPR and privacy. So we, you know, we see that as absolutely the next product here. Well there's a lot of these supply chains, I mean, IBM's been in the supply chain business for years, running technology for companies. And that's always been kind of the big monolithic systems, mainframe minis, lands, you know, CRM systems, ERPs, whatever you want to call it. Now you have Agile Cloud coming in. You have the plan of resiliency plan. While there's a lot of business reconstruction going on at the business model level. That's right. So, our clients like banging their head against the wall. What's some of the conversations with the clients? So, I mean, they got to be proactive. At the same time, they got a lot of stuff on their plate. Well they, we're sort of humbled by the role that we're in right now, because for years we've been working with so many clients to help them build programs. We got ourselves into a very, you know, into a comfort zone of helping them recover from the environment you're talking about. Just standard legacy data center recovery. We can accomplish the recovery time in minutes, nearly instantly, with no data loss. But suddenly, the humbling point is our phone's ringing off the hook asking, apply those same methodologies to the risks that I'm seeing as my business is being digitized. And help me evolve. And to us, it's all about orchestrating a recovery, creating a software-defined solution to enable data that's recovered and systems that are automated. From quality partners. And you're happy with Actifio? Oh, absolutely. And it's like changing an airplane engine out of 30,000 feet is what you just talked about. I'm like, that sounds so hard. I got my business moving so fast. I'm modernizing, and I got to do all this work. And the devil's in the details. And whenever we're engaging with Actifio, they have the architects to assist us with those details. What about regulatory concerns? Obviously, that's come up a lot. We have no GDPRs out there. We don't want to beat that dead horse. But when you get into things like crypto, blockchain, regions of data centers where it's cloud is deployed, you got regulatory. It's going to be a constant issue. Absolutely. Your thoughts on that? It is a constant issue. And part of the challenge with regulations is they're very ambiguously worded. So the interpretation of regulations is as challenging as actually delivering solutions to meet them. I think it really does come down to, in most regulations, good hygiene is protect the data, make sure that there's increasingly air gaps around the sensitive data, both production as well as non-production, and make sure that you can resume business operations, where and when you need to. And having the flexibility to do that on-prem in the IBM cloud, that's what IBM does. And if I can just add a point to that, Brian. The driver of the conversations that we're seeing are is predominantly in a compliance area. So businesses are concerned, enterprises are concerned about, am I a compliant? Am I audit-worthy? And can I prove that not so much at time of recovery, but really at time of test, can I go prove to the marketplace that I'm ready? No more lip service. Not at all. You've got to actually have a plan. Not just for your own reasons. There's actually filings. And have documented proof of it. Yeah. IBM Actifio, all about the resiliency in global economy. You got blockchain, you got AI. It's a heart of its data. If you don't have a plan, you better get one. IBM Actifio, congratulations on your relationship. Well, thank you. John Furrier here inside theCUBE. IBM Think 2018, Cube Studios. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.