 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is a special CUBE conversation from our Boston area studio, following up from the Cronus Global Cyber Summit. It happened recently down in Miami Beach, Florida. John Furrier was a host there. You can always go to thecube.net to get all of the content here. Happy to welcome to the program. First I've got Pat Hurley, who's the Vice President and General Manager of America's for a Cronus, and joining him is one of his partners, Jason Nolan, who's the Vice President of Business Development at ESCASL. Both of you locally based. Thank you so much for joining us. Great to be here. Thanks for having us, Stu. All right, so Pat, why don't we start with you? We talked a little bit earlier with William Toll about some of the announcements. Give us some of the things that specifically might be important to the partners like Jason. Well, first off, it was a fantastic event. It was our inaugural Cyber Summit. We had great attendance from our partners. We got a lot of feedback about the content that was there. Actually, Jason was one of our panel speakers. We got a lot of very positive feedback there as well. Fantastic event for us. The food was even great. So we enjoyed that. It was on Miami Beach. Fantastic location. So from our side, we thought it was a very successful event. Now the biggest challenge we will have is making it even that much better next year. Yeah, did you get the stone crab while you were down there, Jason? It was unbelievable. Yeah, so you were at the show. You got to sit on some panels. You were feeling the energy? It was great to interact with the audience and kind of hear the questions that they had and the excitement and the energy around the messaging was really, really powerful. All right, so Pat, bring us a little bit into the solutions. How are they benefiting all of your partners? Absolutely, so for those of you guys who don't know really who Acronis is, a lot of people know us really as a backup company from back in the day. Maybe consumer backup, maybe small medium-sized business, on-premise backup solutions. We've completely transformed the company over the last few years. So now we talk about cyber protection, which is a combination of cyber security and end-to-end data protection. We frame that in some tenets that we call SAPIS. So safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity, and security. We take those solutions, deliver them to partners like ESCAS, so that they can then wrap additional services around their customer base to increase the ARPU that they're getting there, increase the margin that they're collecting from their customers and obviously deliver an end-to-end complete cyber protection solution. All right, so Jason, you're here as the voice of the customer. So as Castle, what are your customers telling you and how does that resonate with them? So for our customers, data protection has always been important. They've had to address the number one rule is never lose a data. And with the cyber threats today always changing, they're not sure what to do. So they turn to us as their service provider to help guide them through, to make sure that they're not one of the next companies on the news. And it's nice as a service provider to be able to combine those services and products with a vendor like Acronis so that we can provide more value, we can strengthen relationships and not have 300 vendors that we have to work with. All right, my understanding, you spend a lot of time with financial institutions. Absolutely, they don't want to be the next one on the front page of the paper, in the news, on the radio and the like. So anything specifically for them that's worth calling out? So I think with the financial services companies, having the ability to protect their data, their portfolio that they hold, so important to their business, they don't want anyone to have access to that. And if any of their, so they have to meet the requirements of the investors, they have to meet the requirements of the financial institutions and make sure that they're following all of the different guidelines and depending on which markets they're in, what countries they're in, they all have different data sovereignty rules, they have to deal with GDPR. And so there's a lot of different areas that they need to navigate. And so they, as CASEL, as a service provider, we help them understand and kind of build that in as a standard. And that's what we've done with the Cronus is we've built in the data protection strategy and now we can look at adding in the cybersecurity components to our portfolio to help give them that comprehensive suite. And then I just get to imagine, obviously it takes a lot of different solutions to pack those together to provide an end-to-end solution for their customers. I think one of the beauties of a Cronus is that we allow you to provide multiple services in a single pane of glass. So you get a lot of very smart people on your team that have to manage multiple solutions. What we try to provide is that single opportunity at single solution. They learn one thing where they can do backup, disaster recovery, secure file signature, all in one platform to allow them to kind of minimize the number of solutions they need to be experts on to provide their customers the highest level of service. All right, so Jason's security is a very much a multifaceted, ever-growing landscape out there. Tell us how is CASL partners with the Cronus and how it fits into your overall services? So our partnership with the Cronus first started with data protection. It was one of the first solutions that we were able to find that was able to fit every use case. So as a platform, as a service provider, we're supporting on-premise legacy equipment, our hosted VMware cloud infrastructure, multi-tenant infrastructure. As every flavor of cloud services you could imagine because we want the customer to have the solution that fits their needs the best. And what we were looking for and a Cronus was able to provide for us was one platform of data protection that was able to be universal across all the different use cases. So that's where it starts as a foundation, always protecting the data, always having a backup in multiple locations in all of our data centers worldwide. And now to be able to layer on top of that some of the cybersecurity components in one single pane of glass is only going to allow us to give a better level of service to our customers. All right. And Pat, I expect that a lot of stuff that we talked about with the financial services translate to many other industries. Yeah, at the end of the day, data is data, right? And you can talk about different verticals, how they use that data. At the end of the day, it's all about protecting the data, making sure your data is secure, making sure you have an authentic copy of your data, making sure that everything is secure. So for us, we are known as a backup company but backup is kind of going away. You need a more complete solution. So one of the things that all these bad doers out there doing is they're really trying to go after your backups and trying to lock them down. Cause they understand that that's a first place you're going to go to try to recover from a ransomware attack. Our solutions are based on artificial intelligence, allowing the machine learning capabilities within our solutions to detect those from the beginning, to prevent our customers from a zero day attack. So that you're not relying on that one backup to make sure your infrastructure can get back up and running. And Jason, maybe just frame for us the relationship between you and your customers and security. You hear everything from certain cloud providers or like, well, we're like your landlord. You made her lock your doors and take care of all that stuff. And others are more, hey, we're going to really go belly to belly with you and make sure that we've done everything bulletproof with you. What do you hear these days? And what we're hearing from the customers is that they're looking to, everyone is looking to migrate, either start their cloud strategy, if they haven't, if they've been behind the curve, if they've had a cloud strategy, they're looking to increase. We've actually had some customers want to maybe come out of the hyperscalers already. So there's a lot of different use cases, a lot of different journeys that the customer's on. And I think helping them navigate. So what we've been able to do is as part of our services is wrap around the different cloud services, a layer of security at each component. So there's that perimeter network, there's all of the firewalls, next-gen firewalls are now a requirement, they're no longer optional. Mobile devices, end point protection, network security, fishing, spare fishing, user education, there's so many different things that their own employees need to be aware of that they never had to worry about before. And it's almost like 20 years ago when disaster recovery emerged on the market, cybersecurity now is front and center. And if you're not paying attention to it at some point, it's going to come up and bite them. So we're working with our customers to make sure they never have to deal with that. Yeah, I think an important part of that is no longer just the data center, right? It's all those edge devices. We live in a very connected world. Data is transferred across multiple devices every day. So there's different points where there's a vulnerability that can be identified and you can't just rely on an end user to make sure that they're protecting things. Well, and especially if I know when I was having the earlier conversation with William, we were talking about the SMVs. You know, at the enterprise, I've got my CISO and I've got my team and I'm going to work on that. And if I'm the SMV, well, it might be a generalist that security is under the bucket of all the other things that they need to do. And therefore they're going to need to turn to their platforms and their partners to help them with a lot of this. Yeah, I mean, you go to the IT guy, right? And you say, well, he resolves everything. At the end of the day, enterprises have big budgets to spend on the stuff. I heard something from one of the analyst reports that they're talking to the high level guy at Bank of America. I said, what's your budget for cybersecurity? I said, I don't have a budget. Because whatever needs to be spent, we're going to spend on that and make sure that our customer's data is secure. What we really try to do is package a lot of that stuff together to make it affordable, complete, secure for end customers. Yeah. Absolutely, I think most of your customers don't have the billions of dollars to be able to say that they've at least done what they needed to do to make sure that they've done all they can. So, Jason, I'll give you the final word first and Pat for things that you took away from the show and bring into your customers. So in the panel discussion we had at the show, we were asked to talk about different experiences as a service provider. And one of the things that was really important for us that came from the audience was, what does it take to switch? How do you select your vendors? And I think what's often overlooked by service providers is the cost of choosing a vendor. And what we mean by that is if we were to choose the wrong vendor, there is a huge cost of operations to switch from one vendor to the other where you're taking a very limited resource pool of the people on the operations team that are usually focused on onboarding new customers, servicing the existing customer base, generating revenue, who now have to go to non-revenue operations just to make that heavy lift of the transition. So picking the partnership with the Cronus was really important to us. We made that change and it's been the best decision we've ever made. Yeah, just to piggyback off of that, we're nothing without our channel partners, right? So we consider, as cats will be very strong channel partner of ours, they give us reach into that end customer community. Day to day, they're really the experts. We're providing some technology they can rely upon to provide a secure, complete solution for their customers. But that was really the key takeaway for me is you're able to interact face to face with your partners directly. You're able to hear some of the pain points that they deal with on a daily basis. It's not over email. It's not on a phone call, you're not on Zoom or WebEx. You know, you're talking face to face. These guys understand those real time problems and working towards solutions together at one big event. So that's been fantastic. We hope to double attendance for the next event and bring even more partners into the fold. Pat and Jason, thank you so much for sharing your takeaways from the Acronis Global Cyber Security Summit. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCUBE.