 Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of HPE's GreenLake announcement. We've been following GreenLake and the cadence of announcement they're making. Now we're going to talk about ransomware. Ransomware, become a household term. But what people really don't understand is that virtually any bad actor can become a ransomware criminal by going on the dark web, hiring a ransomware as a server, putting a stick into a server and taking a piece of the action. And that is a really insidious threat. The adversaries are extremely capable. So we're going to dig into that with Omar Assad, who's the storage platform lead at Cloud Data Services at HPE and Deepak Verma, Vice President of Product at Zerto, which is now an HPE company. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thank you. Thank you, welcome. Pleasure to be here. So Omar, you heard my little narrative upfront. How does the Zerto acquisition fit into that discourse? Thank you, Dave. First of all, we're extremely excited to welcome Zerto into the HPE family. The acquisition of Zerto expands the GreenLake offerings from HPE into the data protection as a service and ransomware protection as a service capabilities. And it, at the same time, accelerates the transformation that the HPE storage business is going through as it transforms itself into more of a cloud native business which sort of follows on from the May 4th announcements that you helped us cover. This enables the HPE sales teams to now expand the data protection perimeter and to start offering data protection as a service and ransomware as a service of the best in class technologies from a protection side, as well as from a ransomware recovery side of the house. And so we're all the way down already trying to integrate the Zerto offerings as part of the GreenLake offerings and extending support through our services organization and more of these announcements are going to roll out later in the month. And I think that's what you want to see from an as a service offering. You want to see a vast cadence of new services that are not a box. Hey, buy a box. No, it's services that you want to access. So Deepak, let's talk about, before we get into the tech, can we talk about how you're helping customers deal with the ransomware or maybe some of the use cases that you're seeing? Sure thing, Dave. First of all, extremely excited to be part of the HPE family now. Quick history and Zerto, we've been around for about 11 years. We've had about 9,000 plus customers and they all benefit from essentially same technology that we invented 11 years ago. First and foremost, one of the use cases has been continuous data protection. So we're built on a CDP platform, which means extremely low RTOs and RPOs for recovery. I'll give you an example there. United Airlines is an application that costs them a million dollars for every hour that they're down. They use traditional approaches that would be a lot of loss. With Zerto, we have that down to seconds of loss in case the application goes down. So that's kind of core and fundamental to our platform. The second critical use case that for us has been simplicity. A lot of customers have said we make the difficult simple. So DR is a complex process. I'll give you an example there. HCA Healthcare consolidated four different disaster recovery platforms into a single platform with Zerto and saved about $10 million a year. So it's making that operations of having disaster recovery process is much simpler. The third kind of critical use case for us as the environment has evolved, as the landscape has evolved, has been around hybrid cloud. So being able to take customers to the platforms that they want to go to, that's critical for us and for our customers. An example there is Kingston Technologies. So Kingston tried some competitive products to move to Azure. It would take them about 24 hours to recover 30 VMs or so. With Zerto Technology, they will get about all their 1000 VMs up in Azure instantaneously. So these are the three use cases that we've foundationally built the company and the technology. Nice, thank you for that. So simple works well these days, especially with all this complexity we have to deal with. Can we get into the secret sauce a little bit? I mean, CDP's been around forever. What do you guys do that's different? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. Sure. It's CDP based, I think we've perfected the technology. It's less about being able to just copy the data. It's more about what you do when things go bump. We've made it simpler. We have driven economies of scale lower and being platform agnostic, we've really brought that up across to whatever platforms. Once upon a time it was moving from physicals to virtuals or even across different virtualization platforms and then being able to move across to whatever cloud platform customer may want to or back. So CDP continuous data protection, by the way, for the audience that may not know that. Go ahead. One of the additional points that I want to add to Deepak's comment over here is the basics of platform independence is what really drew HPE technologists into the technology. Because one of the things, we have many, we have the high end platform with the HPE Eletra 9K, we have the Eletra 6K as the mid-range platform. Then we have a bunch of file and object offerings on the side. What Zerto does it, universally applies to all those technologies and as you pair them up with our compute offerings to offer a full stack, but now the stack is disaster recovery capable natively with the integration of Zerto. One of the things that Deepak talked about about the Azure migration that a lot of the customers are talking about, Cloud is also coming up as a DR use case for a lot of our customers. Customers, as we went through thousands of customers interviews, one of the key things that came back was investing in a DR data center, which is just waiting there for a disaster to happen. It's a very expensive insurance policy. So, what Zerto, through its native capabilities allows customers to do is to just use public cloud as a DR target and as a service it just takes care of all the format conversions and the recoveries and all that, that's completely automated inside the platform and we feel that when you combine this either at the high end of data center storage offering or the mid-range offering with this replication DR and ransomware protection built into the same package working under the same hood, it just simplifies and streamlines the customer's deployment. So, let me hear a couple things. So, first of all, historically if you wanted to recover to a point within let's say, you know, 10 seconds, five seconds, you had to pay up big time. Correct. Number one, number two is you couldn't test your DR. It was too risky. So, people just had it in, they had a check box on compliance, but they actually couldn't really test it because they're afraid they were going to lose data. So, it sounds like you're solving both of those problems. Yeah, or, you know, we remember the DR test where it was a weekend, it was an event, right? It was the event at the end of July that the entire IT organization would go. Honey, I'm not going to be home this weekend. Exactly. And what we've changed that is in a click of a button. You can DR test today if you want to. You can have disaster recovery still running. You can DR test in Azure, bring up your environment in an isolated network bubble, make sure everything's running and bring it down. The interesting thing is the technology was invented back when our fear in the industry was losing a data center, was losing power, was catastrophic natural disasters. But the technology has lent itself very well to the new threats which are very much around ransomware, as you mentioned, because it's a type of disaster. Somebody's going after your data. Physical servers are still around, but you still need to go back to a point in time and you need to do that very quickly. So the technology has really just found itself appealing to newer challenges in the industry. If a customer asks you, can I really eliminate cyber attacks? Where should I put my, if I had 100 bucks to spend, should I spend it on layers and defense? Should I spend it on recovery? Both, what would you tell them? I think it's balance answer. I think prevention is 100% impossible. It's really, I'd say, spend it in thirds. You want to spend a third of it in prevention, a third of it maybe in detection, and then a third of it in recovery. So it's really that balancing act that needs, you can't leave the front door open, but then have a lot of recovery techniques invested in. It has to be a balance. And it's also not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. So if you invest in all three areas, hopefully two of them will work to your advantage. Dave, you should always protect your perimeter. I mean, that goes without saying. But then as you invest in other aspects of the business, as Deepak mentioned, recovery needs to be fast and quick. Recovery, whether you're recovering from a backup disaster, you're covering from a data center disaster or corrupted file, or from ransomware attack. A couple of things that Zerto really stitches together is like journal-based recovery has been allowed for a while. But making journal-based recovery platform independent in a seamless fashion with the click of a button within five seconds, go back to where your situation was, that gives you the peace of mind that even if the perimeter was breached, you're still protected five minutes into the problem. And that's the peace of mind, which along with data protection as a service, disaster recovery as a service, and now integrating this recovery from ransomware along with it in a very simple, easy to consume package is what drew us into the market. You could do this, you said, I could use the cloud as a target. I could use that cloud as an air gap if I wanted to. It sounds like it, and it's cloud-native. Correct, yeah. You didn't just wrap your stack in Kubernetes and shove it in the cloud and have it hosted and say, oh, we're cloud too. No, I- Really, I'm serious. No, absolutely. We looked at that approach and that's where the challenge comes in, right? So to give you the example of Kingston technology, it just doesn't scale, it's not fast enough. What we did was develop the platform for cloud-native. We consume cloud services where necessary in order to provide that scalability. So one example in Azure is being able to use skill sets. So think about a scenario where you just declare a disaster, you've got 1,000 VMs to move over. We can spin up the workers that need to do the work to get 1,000 VMs, spin them down so you're up and running instantaneously. And that involves using cloud-native tools and technologies. Can we stay on that for a minute? So take us through an example of what life was like would be like without Zerto trying to recover and what it's like with Zerto. Resources, complexity, time, maybe you could sort of paint a picture. Sure, I'll actually use an example from a customer, Tancata. They develop defensive fabrics, specially fabrics. So think about firefighters, think about our men and women abroad that need protective clothing. They develop the fibers behind them. They were hit by ransomware, by a crypto locker. This was before Zerto. Unfortunately, they took about a two-week data loss. It took them weeks to recover that environment, bring it back up, and the confidence was pretty low. They looked at our technology, they invested in Zerto technology, and then they were hit with a different variant of crypto locker immediately. The IT administrators and the IT folks there were relieved, right? They had a sense of confidence to say, yes, we can recover. And this second time around, they had data loss of about 10 seconds they could recover within a few minutes. So that's the before and after picture, giving customers that confidence to say, yep, a breach happened, we tried our best, but now it's up to recovery and I can recover without having to dig tapes out from some vault and hopefully have a good copy of data sitting there and then try that over and over again. And there's a tolerance, right? Before, a time before which a business will not be able to sustain itself. So what we want to do is minimize that for businesses so that they can recover as quickly as possible with as little data loss as possible. Thank you for that. So Omar, there's a bigger sort of cyber recovery agenda that you have as part of GreenLake, I'm sure. What should we expect? What's next? Where do you want to take this? So, excellent question point to the future, Dave. So one of the things that you helped us, you know, unveil in May was the Data Services Cloud Console. Data Services Cloud Console was the first sort of delivery as we took the storage business as it is and start to transform into more of a cloud-native business. We introduced Elettra, which is the cloud-native hardware which the customers buy for persistent storage within their data center, but then Data Services Cloud Console truly cemented that cloud operational model. We separated the management from the devices itself and sort of lifted it up as a SaaS service into the public cloud. So now what you're going to see is, you know, more and more data and data management services come up on the Data Services Cloud Console. And Zerto is going to be one of the first ones. Cloud Physics was another one that we talked about, but Zerto is the true data management service that is going to come up on Data Services Cloud Console as part of the GreenLake Services agenda that HPE has in the customer's environment. And then you're going to see compliance as a service, you're going to see data protection as a service, you're going to see disaster recovery as a service. But the beautiful thing about it is choice with simplicity. As these services get loaded up on Data Services Cloud Console, all our customers instantly get it. There's nothing to install, there's nothing to troubleshoot, there's nothing to size. All those capabilities are available on the console, customers go in and just start consuming Zerto capabilities from a management control plane, disaster recovery control plane are going to be available on the Data Services Cloud Console, automatically detecting electro systems, VMware systems, container-based systems, whichever our customers have deployed, and from there is just a flip of a button. Another way to look at it is, it sort of gives you that slider, that you have data protection or backup on one side, you've got disaster recovery on one side, you've got ransomware protection on the extreme right side. You can just move a slider across and choose the service level that you want without worrying about best practices, installation, application integration, all of that just takes control from the Data Services Cloud Console. It's a great summary because historically you would have to build that. Now you can buy it as a service, you can programmatically deploy it, and that's a game changer, you don't have to throw it over the fence to some folks. Okay, now make it work and then they change the code and you come back, a lot of finger pointing, it's now, it's your responsibility. Absolutely, we're excited to provide Zerdo, continue to provide Zerdo to Zerdo customers, but also integrate with a GreenLake platform and let the rest of the GreenLake customers experience some of the Zerdo technology and really make that available as a service. It's great, this is a huge challenge for customers. I mean, do I pay their ransom? Do I not pay their ransom? If I pay their ransom, the FBI is going to come after me, but if I don't pay their ransom, I'm not going to get the crypto key. So solutions like this are critical. You know, you certainly see the president pushing for that. The United States government said, hey, we got to do a better job. So good job guys, thanks for sharing your story in theCUBE and congratulations. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. All right, and thank you for watching everybody. This is the, I want to tell you that everything that you're seeing today as part of the GreenLake announcement, it's going to be available on demand as part of the HPE Discover more. So you got to check that out. Thank you, you're watching theCUBE.