 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin here. I'm having the opportunity to speak with one of Dell Technologies customers. Joining me from all the way down under in Melbourne, Australia is Kevin Pritchard, the head of IT and business systems from Jonna Investment Advisors. Hey, Kevin, nice to have you on the program. Thanks, Lisa, pleasure to be here. So tell us about Jonna investments, who you guys are, what you do, all the types of data that you're dealing with. Jonna is an asset consultant. We consult to what we call in Australia the superannuation industry, which is equivalent of your 401K. Our clients are the actual funds themselves, the pension funds. We advise on both the accumulation and then the pension stage to those funds. We have under advice across all our clients, approximately 500 billion AUD. So that's a significant responsibility. Our decisions, our research, our recommendations probably affects between two to three out of five Australians retirement outcomes. All right, so business critical data, Kevin. I imagine there's compliance requirements, not just in Australia, but if you're doing business with any clients in the Americas or in Europe. Primarily our markets Australia, but the regulatory overlays that we and our clients face into are significant and growing. The superannuation sector in Australia is now at around $3 trillion. It's a significant amount of money. I think it's the second or third largest in the world. Don't quote me on that, but it's a significant amount of money. So let's talk about data as a business critical asset and also from a brand reputation perspective. Talk to me about your IT environment, how you were managing data before and what some of the challenges were that you wanted to resolve? I've been with Jana for 14 years and in that time the demands and the complexity of our environment have increased. We have to address a growing accumulation of business critical data. Our data forms our IP. It's the core of our advice and it's not just what we're doing today. It's what we've done five years ago, 10 years ago. It has to be there for ready reference. It's a critical business asset. Like you said, it's really your data is really your IP. So talk to me about your IT environment before on-prem, cloud, virtualize. What does that landscape look like? So we run a data center. We have a more economical footprint, but nevertheless it's the core of what we do as a business on a day to day. Some data we can't put in the cloud. The regulatory overlays really don't permit it and privacy and we can better protect in a data center. We occupy a dedicated space in a tier four data center in Australia. But that said, we are increasingly moving into cloud. Now, the cloud is super important to us, but it's not easy to migrate into. People just say, oh, let's just go to the cloud. You really do have to think about things. You have to think about how it's implemented. You have to think about data security. They're very good, the cloud providers, but it's okay, no responsibility. It ultimately comes back to you. But the nexus between cloud and on-prem is something that you have to think about. And if I'm thinking about backup and DR, and I can think of it from a number of perspectives, it's not just backing up in case we've got failure of hardware, but it's about cybersecurity. It's about protection from things like air gapping, ensuring that your backup's actually aware of the malware. For example, we've had incidents and I'm sure the US had as well in Australia where organizations have found six months down the track that their backups have been compromised. We can't afford to do that. Our regulators, our clients by myself have to give assurances to our clients that we're resilient, that we're meeting the increasingly stringent benchmarks. In your case today, I was reading about really, John, I was on a quest to become more data-driven and also it sounded to me like the board was heavily invested and had a vested interest in data protection. Talk to me about how Dell Technologies is helping you meet some of those goals, becoming more data-driven and enabling you to ensure to your CFO, et cetera, the board that our data is secure. Yeah, as I was saying, at the beginning of this journey, I would have thought back up how hard can it be? Right, you take a backup, it's a tape, it's a disk, you put it into a secure repository, somewhere off-site, you have a problem, your phone someone up, they bring a tape back and you restore, those days have gone. And when you really look into it, it's a very specialist area. How do you backup data, especially the size of the data that we have? How do you restore it in a timely manner? How do you protect it against, as I was saying, malware, compromise, you need to test it, you need easy ways to test it, it's complex. Now, when I looked at this problem three years ago, I thought, well, okay, we're no longer part of a big bank. We've got to stand over our own feet. What's the best solution? You've researched the market. I've worked with Dell for a long time and they were in the mix. In the end, Dell offered the best solution. And they showed that they had the understanding of my environment and more broadly where industry's going. So that data protection mix of products between the visibility, the dashboards and what happens in the cloud in terms of testing your workloads that are up there. Of course, testing is something that my board really, really insists upon. We have an annual testing program. It runs the full 12 months where we're testing various aspects of recovery. So talk to me about, you're talking about the complexity of a person. In the beginning, I thought back up in recovery, how difficult can that be? You talked about the complexity though. And as we talked about with probably, I would say, increasing scrutiny from a regulations perspective, a board, the CFO, how did Dell technologies, how did PowerProtect actually help you simplify? Because I actually saw a quote from you in your case study about it being easy. Help us understand how that was possible. Yeah, you've always got to be careful using the word easy, but let's take that perspective from what it would be if it wasn't easy. So our prior solution was essentially relying on a multi-volume disk backup that was stored by a suitable company. Now, I was looking at the Dell, the PowerProtect, DataProtect dashboard the other day, and I was surprised. We have 27 terabytes of data stored in the cloud which is sent up there daily. I get a report card each day. It's all green, thankfully. I can see that on average, the change, the data we store in particular servers is on average around 70 to 10% a day. Those statistics are really important and the deduplication compression ratios 97, 98% are outstanding. That is really helpful. So the point I was trying to make in my previous comments is that visibility is very important. That's where it gets easy because I don't have to rely on an expert who's sitting over there, he may be in or out telling me what's the status of where we are in day-to-day backup. It's a critical part of BAU, a critical part of data protection and our clients are greatly comforted by it. Absolutely. When you were describing your previous environment, I thought, wow, one of the things you probably, you couldn't have had is complete visibility, let alone maybe even good visibility. So now with the Dell PowerProtect series, can you look through like a single pane of glass management and see all the backups on file servers, virtual machines, all of that IP that you talked about that's core to the business? The short answer is yes. Now, there was another part of our previous setup where we used you, what would be classical, we had a warped site and we would replicate data. One of the problems with that is I didn't know if replication was occurring. I didn't know if, you know, if I had had a, and we haven't, but we'd had a ransomware attack, then it infects the server and it actually, it replicates to your secondary site. There was no air gap. Air gap, your backup, protect it. These old solutions of running a, for an organization outside the expense and the maintenance required to run a secondary site just too much. One of the things that sounds like you now have confidence that what you're protecting with Dell is in fact protected, it's secure. And you talked about ransomware a second ago and now in the age of COVID, I read the other day that there's a ransomware attack happens every 11 seconds. Fishing is getting more personal and more sophisticated. So that's a big challenge now that sounds like you've got a pretty resilient infrastructure that I'm going to speak for you, gives you the confidence that you're in a pretty good situation with respect to ensuring that that data is indeed safe. I have a great deal more confidence and I'm being cautious and cynical. You never want to say a hundred percent, because the backup gods will frown upon you, but I'm now more confident. I can provide my C-suite, I can provide the board with a ready snapshot of the view of where we stand. Are there any issues? Not just cost effectiveness, but the visibility of what's going on. And look, I was absolutely surprised that an organization outside had 27 terabytes of data. That's a lot of data for someone outside. And that's important, because really at the end of the day, this boils down to brand reputation, the ability to guarantee to the regulators, your clients, that all of the data that you talked about, it's a lot for a company of your size, is indeed secure and protected and that you can, as you said, you have pretty strong confidence. I agree with you, saying a hundred percent is always one of those challenging kind of areas to be in, but I think from a business outcomes perspective, this isn't just about protecting the data that's sitting on file servers and virtual machines. This is protecting and helping to reinforce the reputation of the brand of Johnna. Yes, our reputation is so important and we need to ensure to guarantee to our clients that we stand head and shoulders above. I've had funds come to me. We do our audits, they've come in, they've looked at our processes, procedures. You are miles ahead of us. You put us to shame. What's your advice to those folks who are coming and saying what you're doing, Kevin, is putting us to shame. You say, here's how I would advise you to modernize your environment. What's your advice? Well, back up is no longer in DR. Let's just look at the BCP and the DR thing. It's no longer just about anticipating a hardware failure. Hardware is very reliable, but it can still fail, network failure. Nowhere, and malware is increasingly something we have to protect again. Your data is being short. So you've got to think about it. What's the best strategy? And so you start with those primary objectives. Standing VMs up in the cloud is, you've got to understand cloud environments. So seek good advice, really. Research and go for the solution that really hide the complexity, if you can, because you guys are sure you can have someone over there that does all the cloud stuff, someone over there that knows all the hardware, and then they've got to all get into a room and begin. But most companies now are looking for that single pane of glass. And if you plan right and size your requirements, then you'll be okay. In that respect, and it is an endorsement to Dell. Very good implementation phase. Well, they're very good through the investigation phase. Their proposals were very sound. The costings, the financial benefits were all laid out for me. I was able to take a very firm recommendation to my board, and we were able to secure that funding and then the implementation. Kevin, that's great advice. Do your due diligence, and I'm sure now in this very dynamic, different world that you're in, you're in a much better position than you would have been had this not been able to be moved forward under your leadership. We thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today and sharing the successes that you're having at Johnna. Pleasure. For Kevin Pritchard, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.