 Joining me now is Drew Schlissel, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Wasabi. Hey Drew, good to see you again. Thanks for coming back on theCUBE. Dave, great to be here. Great to see you. All right, let's get into it. You know, Drew, prior to the pandemic, zero trust, just like kind of like digital transformation was sort of a buzzword. And now it's become a real thing, almost a mandate. What's Wasabi's take on zero trust? So absolutely right, it's been around a while and now people are paying attention. Wasabi's take is zero trust is a good thing. You know, there are too many places where the bad guys are getting in. And you know, I think of zero trust as kind of smashing laziness, right? It takes a little work, takes some planning, but you know, done properly and using the right technologies, using the right vendors, the rewards are of course tremendous, right? You can put to rest the fears of ransomware and having your systems compromised. Well, and we're going to talk about this, but there's a lot of process and thinking involved and you know, design and your zero trust. And you don't want to be wasting time messing with infrastructure. So we're going to talk about that. There's a lot of discussion in the industry, Drew about immutability and air gaps. I'd like you to share Wasabi's point of view on these topics. How do you approach it and what makes Wasabi different? So in terms of air gap and immutability, right? The beautiful thing about object storage, which is what we do all the time is that it makes it that much easier, right? To have a secure immutable copy of your data someplace that's easy to access and doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to get your data back. You know, we're working with some of the best, you know, partners in the industry, you know, we're working with folks like, you know, Veeam, Commvault, Arc, Marquee, MSP360, all folks who understand that you need to have multiple copies of your data. You need to have a copy stored offsite and that copy needs to be immutable. And we can talk a little bit about what immutability is and what it really means. You know, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about Wasabi's solution because sometimes people don't understand. You actually are a cloud. You're not building on other people's public clouds and storage is the one use case where it actually makes sense to do that. Tell us a little bit more about Wasabi's approach and your solution. Yeah, I appreciate that. So there's definitely some misconception. We are our own cloud storage service. We don't run on top of anybody else, right? It's our systems, it's our software deployed globally and we interoperate because we adhere to the S3 standard. We interoperate with practically hundreds of applications. Primarily in this case, right? We're talking about backup and recovery applications and it's such a simple process, right? I mean, just about everybody who's anybody in this business protecting data has the ability now to access cloud storage. And so we've made it really simple. In many cases, you'll see Wasabi as listed in the primary set of available vendors and put in your private keys, make sure that your account is locked down properly using, let's say, multi-factor authentication and you've got a great place to store copies of your data securely. I mean, we just heard from David Friend. They're my math right. He was talking about one-sixth the cost per terabyte per month, maybe even a little better than that. How are you able to achieve such attractive economics? Yeah, so I can't remember how to translate my fractions into percentages, but I think we talk a lot about being 80%, right? Less expensive than the hyperscalers. And we talked about this at Veeamon, right? There's some secret sauce there. And we take a different approach to how we utilize the raw capacity to the effective capacity. And the fact is we're also not having to run a few hundred other services, right? We do storage, plain and simple, all day, all the time. So we don't have to worry about overhead to support up and coming other services that are perhaps gonna be a loss leader, right? Customers love it, right? They see the fact that their data is growing, 40, 80% year over year. They know they need to have some place to keep it secure. And folks are flocking to us in droves. In fact, we're seeing a tremendous amount of migration actually right now, multiple petabytes being brought to Wasabi because folks have figured out that they can't afford to keep going with their current hyperscaler vendor. And immutability is a feature of your product, right? What's the feature called? Can you double click on that a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. So the term in S3 is object lock. And what that means is your application will write an object to cloud storage and it will define a retention period, let's say a week. And for that period, that object is immutable, untouchable, cannot be altered in any way, shape or form. The application can't change it. The system administration can't change it. Wasabi can't change it, okay? It is truly carved in stone. And this is something that it's been around for a while, but you're seeing a huge uptick, right? In adoption and support for that feature by all the major vendors. And I named off a few earlier. And the best part is that with immutability comes some sense of, well, it comes with not just a sense of security, it is security, right? When you have data that cannot be altered by anybody, even if the bad guys compromise your account, they steal your credentials, right? They can't take away the data. And that's a beautiful thing, a beautiful, beautiful thing. And you look like an S3 bucket, is that right? Yeah, yeah, I mean, we're fully compatible with the S3 API. So if you're using S3 API based applications today, it's a very simple matter of just kind of redirecting where you want to store your data. Beautiful thing about backup and recovery, right? That's probably the simplest application, simple being a relative term, as far as lift and shift, right? Because that just means for your next full, right? Point that at Wasabi, retain your other fulls, for whatever, 30, 60, 90 days. And then once you've kind of made that transition from vine to vine, you're off and running with Wasabi. I talked to my open about the allure of object storage, historically, the simplicity of the get put syntax, but what about performance? Are you able to deliver performance that's comparable to other storage formats? Oh yeah, absolutely. And we've got the performance numbers on the site to back that up. I forgot to answer something earlier, right? You said that immutability is a feature and I wanna make it very clear that it is a feature, but it's an API request, okay? So when you're talking about gets and puts and so forth, you know, the comment you made earlier about being 80% more cost effective or 80% less expensive, you know, that API call, right? It's typically something that the other folks charge for, right? And I think we used the metaphor earlier about the refrigerator, but I'll use a different metaphor today, right? You can think of cloud storage as a magical coffee cup, right? It gets as big as you want to store as much coffee as you want and the coffee's always warm, right? And when you wanna take a sip, there's no charge. You wanna, you know, pop the lid and see how much coffee is in there, no charge. And that's an important thing because when you're talking about millions or billions of objects and you want to get a list of those objects or you want to get the status of the immutable settings for those objects, anywhere else it's going to cost you money to look at your data. With Wasabi, no additional charge and that's part of the thing that sets us apart. Excellent, thank you for that. So you mentioned some partners before, how do partners fit into the Wasabi story? Where do you stop? Where do they pick up? And what, you know, what do they bring? Can you give us maybe a paint a picture for us an example or two? Sure. So again, we just do storage, right? That is our sole purpose in life is to, you know, to safely and securely store our customer's data. And so they're working with their application vendors whether it's, you know, Active Archive, backup and recovery, IoT surveillance, media and entertainment workflows, right? Those systems already know how to manage the data, manage the metadata. They just need some place to keep the data that is being worked on, being stored and so forth. Right? So just like, you know, plugging in a flash drive on your laptop, right? You literally can plug in Wasabi as long as your applications support the API. Getting started is incredibly easy, right? We offer a 30-day trial, one terabyte. And most folks find that within, you know, probably a few hours of their POC, right? It's giving them everything they need in terms of performance, in terms of accessibility, in terms of sovereignty. I'm guessing you talked to, you know, Dave Friend earlier about data sovereignty, right? We're a global company, right? So there's got to be probably, you know, wherever you are in the world, some place that will satisfy your sovereignty requirements, as well as your compliance requirements. We did talk about sovereignty, Drew. This is really, what's interesting to me, I'm a bit of an industry historian. When I look back to the early days of cloud, or I remember the large storage companies, you know, their CEOs would say, we're going to have an answer for the cloud. And they would go out and for instance, I know one bought a competitor of Carbonite and couldn't figure out what to do with it. They couldn't figure out how to compete with the cloud. In part, because they were afraid it was going to cannibalize their existing business, I think another part is because they just didn't have that imagination to develop an architecture that in a business model that could scale. To see that you guys have done that is, I love it because it brings competition, it brings innovation and it helps lower client's cost and solve really nagging problems, like ransomware, immutability and recovery. I'll give you the last word, Drew. Yeah, you're absolutely right. The on-prem vendors, they're not going to go away anytime soon, right? There's always going to be a need for incredibly low latency, high bandwidth, but not all data is taught all the time. And by hot, I mean, extremely hot. Let's take real-time analytics for maybe facial recognition. That requires submillisecond type of processing. But once you've done that work, you want to store that data for a long, long time and you're going to want to also tap back into it later. So other folks are telling you that you can go to these cold glacial type of tiered storage. Yeah, don't believe the hype. You're still going to pay way more for that than you would with just a wasabi-like hot cloud storage system. And we don't compete with our partners, right? We compliment what they're bringing to market in terms of the software vendors, in terms of the hardware vendors, right? We're a beautiful component for that hybrid cloud architecture. And I think folks are gravitating towards that. I think the cloud is kind of hitting a new gear, if you will, in terms of adoption and recognition for the security that they can achieve with it. All right, Drew, thank you for that. Definitely, we see the momentum. In a moment, Drew and I will be back to get the customer perspective with Kevin Morenda, who's the Director of Information Technology Services at the Hotchkiss School. Keep it right there.