 Hello everyone, welcome to the special CUBE presentation of the AWS Partner Showcase, season one, episode two. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got two great guests here. Douglas Co, Director of Product Marketing at Cohesity and Sabine and Joseph, General Manager of AWS, Amazon Web Services. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having us. Great to see you, Sabine, Douglas, great to see you. Congratulations, Cohesity. Love the shirt, got the colors wearing there on Cohesity, always good. Can't miss your booth at the shows. Can't wait to get back in person, but thanks for coming in remotely. I got to say it's super exciting to chat with you, appreciate it. Yeah, pleasure to be here. What are the trends you're seeing in the market when it comes to ransomware threats right now? You guys are in the middle of it right now, more than ever, was hearing more and more about security, cloud scale, cloud refactoring. You guys are in the middle of it. What's the latest trends in ransomware? Yeah, I know, I have to say, John, it's a pleasure to be here, but on the other hand, when he asked me about ransomware, the data and the statistics are pretty sobering right now. If we look at what just happened in 2020 to 2021, we saw a 10-fold increase in ransomware attacks. We also saw the prediction of a ransomware attack happening every 11 seconds, meaning by the time I finish the sentence, there's going to be another company falling victim to ransomware. And it's also expected by 2031 that the global impact of ransomware across businesses will be over $260 billion, right? So that's huge. And even at Cohesity, right? What we saw, we did our own survey. This went actually directly to end users and consumers. And what we found was over 70% of them would reconsider doing business, doing business with a company that paid a ransom. So all of these things are pretty alarming and pretty big problems that we face today in our industry. Yeah, there's so many dimensions to it. I mean, you guys have been doing this for a while. It's being baked in from day one, security in the cloud and backup recovery. All that is kind of all in one thing now. So to protect against ransomware and other threats is huge. Savina, I got to ask you, Amazon's view of ransomware is serious. You guys take it very seriously. What's the posture? And specifically, what is AWS doing to protect customers from this threat? Yeah, so as Doug mentioned, right? There's no industry that's immune to ransomware attacks and just so we all level set, right? What it means is somebody taking control over and locking your data as an individual or as a company and then demanding a ransom for it, right? According to the NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework, there are basically five main functions which are needed in order to plan and manage these kinds of cybersecurity ransomware attacks. They go across identifying what do you need to protect, actually implementing the things that you need in order to protect yourself, detecting things if there is an attack that's going on, then also responding, how do you get out of this attack and then bringing things, recovery, right? Bringing things back to where they were before the attack. As we all know, AWS takes security very seriously. We want to make sure that our customer's data is always protected. We have a number of native security solutions but we're also looking to see how we can work with partners. And this is in fact, when in the fall of 2019, the Coe City CEO, Mohit Aran, myself and a couple of us we met and we brainstormed what could we do something that is differentiated in the market and we built this data management as a service native solution on top of AWS. It's a first of a kind solution, John. It doesn't exist anywhere else in the market even today. And we really focused on using the well architected review, the five pillars of security, reliability, operational excellence, performance and cost optimization and we built this differentiated solution together and it was launched in April, 2020. And then of course, from a customer viewpoint, they should use a comprehensive set of solutions and going back to that security, that cybersecurity framework that I mentioned, the Coe City data management as a service solution really falls into that recovery, that last area that I mentioned and solution actually provides, you know, granular management of data, protection of data, customers can spin up things very quickly and really scale their solution across the globe and ensure that there is compliance no matter how many times we do data changes, ads and so on across the world. You know, Sabine, that's a great point about that because a lot of the ransomware has got bad actors but also customers can misconfigure things. They don't follow the best practice. So having that in these native solutions are super important. So that's a great call out. Douglas, I got to go back to you because you're on the Cohesity side and the partner of AWS, they have all these best practices that's for the good actors going to pay attention to the best practices and the bad actors also trying to get in creates a two prong challenge and opportunity. So how do organizations protect their data against these attacks and also how do they maintain their best practices? Because that's half the battle too is the best practices to make sure you're following the guidelines on AWS side as well as protecting the attacks. What's your thoughts? Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, first and foremost, right? As an organization, you need to understand how a ransomware operates and how it's evolved over the years. And when you first look at it, Sabina already mentioned it, they started with consumers, small businesses, attacking their data, right? And some of these consumers or the business didn't have any backup. So the first step is just to make sure your data is backed up. But then the criminals kind of went up market, right? They understood that big organizations had big pocketbooks and purses. So they went after them and the larger organizations do have backup and recovery solutions in place. So the criminals knew that they had to go deeper, right? And what they did was they went after the backup systems themselves and went to attack, delete, tamper with those backup systems and make it difficult or impossible to recover. And that really highlighted some solutions out there that had some vulnerabilities with their data immutability and capabilities around worm. And those are areas we suggest customers look at is to have immutability and worm. And more recently, again, given the way attacks have happened now is really to add another layer of defense and protection. And that includes traditionally what we used to call the three to one rule. And that basically means three copies of data on two different sets of media with one piece of that data offsite, right? And in today's world and the cloud, right? That's a great opportunity to kind of modernize your environment. But I wish that was all that ransomware guys were doing right now and the criminals were doing, but unfortunately, that's not the case. And what we've seen is over the past two years, specifically, we've seen a huge increase in what you would call data theft or data exfiltration. And that essentially is them taking that data, a specific sense of the data and threatening to expose it to the dark web or selling it to the highest bidder. So in this situation, it's honestly very difficult to manage and the biggest thing you could do is obviously harden your security systems, but also you need a good understanding about your data, right? Where all that sensitive information is, who has access to it and what are the potential risks of that data being exposed? So that takes another step in terms of leveraging a bunch of technologies to help with that problem set. What can businesses do from an architectural standpoint and platform standpoint that you guys see? Is there a key guiding principles around how their mindset should be? What's the examples of other approaches in the architectural approach here? No, I think both us at Cohesity and I'll speak for Sabina AWI, so we believe in a platform approach. You know, and the reason for that is this is a very complicated problem. And the more tools and more things you have in there, you add risk of complexity, even potential new attack surfaces that the criminals can go after. So we believe the architectural approach should kind of have some key elements. One is around data resiliency, right? And that again comes from things like data encryption, making your own data is encrypted by your own keys, that the data is immutable and has that right one to read many of worm capabilities. So the bad guys can't tamper with your data, right? That's just step one. Step two is really understanding and having the right access controls within your environment, right? And that means having multi-factor authentication, quorum, meaning having two keys to the closet before you can actually have access to it. But it's got to go beyond there as well too. We got to leverage some newer technologies like AI and machine learning. And that can help you with detection and analysis of both where all your sensitive information is, right? As well as understanding potential anomalies that could signify attack or threat in progress. So those are all key elements. And the last one of course is, I think it takes a village, right? To fight the ransomware war. So we know we can't do it alone. So that's why we partner with people like AWS. That's why we also partner with other people in the security space to ensure you really have a full ecosystem support to manage all those things around that framework. That's awesome. Before I get to Savina, I want to get into the relationship real quick, but I want to come back and highlight what she said about the data management as a service. This is a joint collaboration. This is some of the innovation that Cohesity and AWS are bringing to the market to combat ransomware. Can you elaborate more on that piece? Because this is important, it's a collaboration that we're going to gather. So it's a partner and you guys we're going to get to take us through what that means for the customer and to you guys. I mean, that's a compelling offering. So when we start to work with partners, right? We want to make sure that we are solving a customer problem. That's the whole working backwards from a customer. We are adding something more that the customer could not do. That's why when either my team or me, we start to either work on a new partnership or a new solution. It's always focused on, okay, is this solution enabling our customer to do something that they couldn't do before? And this approach has really helped us, John, in making, you know, enabling majority of the fortune, 500 companies and 90% of the fortune, 100 companies use partner solutions successfully. But it's not just focused on innovation and technology. It's also focused on the business side. How are we helping partners grow their business? And we've been scaling our field teams, our AWS sales teams globally. But what we realized is through partner feedback, in fact, that we were not doing a great job in helping our partners close those opportunities and also bring net new opportunities. So in our field, we actually introduced a new role called the ISV Success Manager, ISMs, that are embedded in our field to help partners, either close existing opportunities, but also bring net new opportunities to them. And then at Reinvent 2020, we also launched the ISV Accelerate Program, which enables our field teams, the AWS field teams, to get incentive to work with our partners. Cohesity, of course, participates in all of these programs and has access to all of these resources. And they've done a great job in leveraging and bringing our field teams together, which has resulted in hundreds of wins for this data management as a service solution that was launched. So you're bringing customers to Cohesity? Absolutely. Okay, I got to get to Cohesity side. So they're helping you. How's this relationship going? Can you talk about the relationship on the customer side? How's that going? Douglas, what's your take on that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's going great. That's why we chose to partner with AWS. And to be quite honest, as Savina mentioned, we really only launched data management and service back in 2020, late 2020. And at that time, we launched with just one service then, when we first launched with backup as a service. Now, about 15 months later, we're on the brink of launching for services that are running on AWS cloud. So without the level of support, both from a go-to-market standpoint that Savina mentioned, as well as the engineering and the available technology services that are on the AWS cloud, right? There's no way we would have been able to spin up new services in such a short period. Is that Fort Knox and data governance? Those are the services you're talking about? Or is that just- Yeah, so let me walk you through it. Yeah, so we have Cohesity Data Protect, which is our backup as a service solution. And that helps customers back up their data to the cloud on-prem SaaS cloud data, like AWS all in a single service, and allows you to recover from ransomware, right? But a couple of months ago, we also announced a couple of new services that you're alluding to, John. And that is around Fort Knox and data governance. And basically, Fort Knox, it is basically our SaaS solution for data isolation to a vaulted copy in the AWS cloud. And the goal of that is to really make it very simple for customers not only to provide data immutability, but also that extra layer of protection by moving that data off-site and keeping it secure and vaulted away from cyber criminals and ransomware. And what we're doing is simplifying the whole process that normally is manual, right? You either do it manually with tapes, or you'll manually replicate data to another data center or even to the cloud, but we're providing it as a service model, basically providing a modern three, two, one approach for the cloud era. So that's what's cool about Fort Knox. Data govern, right? That's also a new service that we announced a few months ago. And that really provides data governance and user behavior analytics services that leverages a lot of that AI machine learning that everybody's so excited about. But really the application of that is to automate the discovery of sensitive data. So that could be your credit card numbers, healthcare records, a personal information of customers. So understanding where all that data is is very important because that's the data that the criminals are going to go after and hold you hostage. So that's kind of step one. And then step two is again, leveraging machine learning, actually looking at how users are accessing and managing that data is also super important because that's going to help you identify potential anomalies such as people sharing that data externally, which could be a threat, it could be improper file permissions or other suspicious behaviors that could potentially signify data exfiltration or a ransomware attack in progress. That's some great innovation. You got the data resiliency, of course the control mechanism, but the AI piece machine learning is awesome. So congratulations on that innovation. You know, Sabina, I'm listening to the conversation and hear you talk and it reminds me of our chat at re-invent and the whole theme of the conference was about the innovation and rapid innovations and how companies are refactoring with the cloud and this next gen kind of journey. This is a fundamental pillar of AWS's rapid innovation concept with your partners. And I won't say it's new, but it's highly accelerated. How are you guys helping partners innovate with this rapid innovation? Because you're seeing benefits can come faster now. Agile is here. What are some of the programs that you're doing? How are you helping customers take advantage of the rapid innovation with the secret sauce of AWS? Yeah, so we have a number of leadership principles, John, and one of them, of course, is customer obsession. We are very focused on making sure we are developing things that our customers need and we look for these very same qualities when we work with partners such as Cohesity. We want to make sure that it's a win-win approach for both sides because that's what will make the partnership durable over time. And you know this, John, our leadership team at AWS, right from our CEO down, believes that partners are critical to our success and as partners lean in, we lean in further and that's why we signed this strategic collaboration agreement with Cohesity in April 2020 where data management as a service solution was launched as part of that agreement. And for us, we've launched the solution now and as Doug said, what are the next things we could be doing, right? And just to go back a little bit, when Cohesity was developing this solution with us, they used a number of our programs, especially on the technical side, they use our SaaS factory program which really helped them build this differentiated solution, especially focused around security, compliance, and cost optimizing the solution. Now that we've launched the solution just like Doug mentioned, we're now focused on leveraging other services like security, AIML, and also our analytic services. And the reason for that is Cohesity, as we all know, protects, manages this data for the customer, but we wanna make sure that the customer is extracting value from this data. That is why we continue to look, what can we do to continue to differentiate this solution in this market? That's awesome. You guys do a great job. I gotta say, as it gets more scale, there's more needs for this rapid, I won't say prototyping, but rapid innovation. And the Cohesity side, Doug, was you guys have been always on point on the back of recovery and now with security and the new modern application development, you guys are in the front row seats of all the action. So I'll give you the final word. What's going on at Cohesity? Give an update on what you guys are doing. What's it like over there these days? How's life? Give a quick plug for Cohesity. Yeah, no, Cohesity is doing great, right? We're always adding folks to the team on our team. We have a few open recs open, both on the marketing side, as well as the technology advocacy side. And of course, some of our other departments, too, in engineering and sales, and also our partner teams as well, working with AWS and partners such as that. So in our mind, the data delusion and growth is not going to slow down, right? So in this case, I think Altide raises all the boats here and we're glad to be an innovative leader in this space. And we're really looking to be really the new wave next-gen data management providers out there that leverages things like AI, that leverages cybersecurity at the core and has an ecosystem of partners that we're working with, like AWS, that we're building out to help customers better manage their data. It's all great data. It's in the mid-center of the value proposition. Sabina, great to see you again. Thanks for sharing, and Douglas, great to see you too. Thanks for sharing this experience here in theCUBE. Thanks, John. Okay, this is theCUBE's AWS partner showcase, special presentation, Speeding Innovation with AWS. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.