 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering ZertoCon 2018, brought to you by Zerto. This is theCUBE, I'm Paul Gillan here on the ground in Boston at ZertoCon 2018, the final day of Zerto's user conference here in Boston. And joining me now is Abhi Raikal. I hope I didn't butcher that too badly. Abhi Raikal, who is Chief Information Officer at Zerto and welcome, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Paul. CIO at a software company is a bit of an unusual position, right, because you're a user of the product, so you have to give unvarnished feedback to your developers, but you also have input into how the product is built. How does a CIO interact with the product side of the business? Yeah, you're spot on, Paul. As a CIO, I've got a unique point of view within the management team of the company because I have the same role as the customers we're trying to sell to. So, yeah, the product team, the marketing team, and the sales team can use me as a sounding board to see that we're taking the product to the right direction. And of course, we use it, so we can give honest feedback on how it is working. Do you see CIOs becoming increasingly involved in the resilience issue? Is this becoming a C-level issue? Yeah, I believe it is, and this is because of the digital transformation. Because almost any organization in the world is going through a digital transformation one way or another, IT is becoming more and more critical part of the business. So once so much relies on IT, IT resilience becomes a significant issue because, let's say, you're a healthcare provider and now a lot of your operations are digitalized. Can you really afford a downtime? What does it mean? So this has become a strategic risk for the organization. You can talk about significant revenue leakage about huge brand reputation if you have problems. So IT resiliency has become a massive, every organization needs to have. A lot of it's fake. Talk about your own internal IT infrastructure, your use of clouds, and where are your data centers located? Yeah, so like most organizations, we are in this landscape of a hybrid multi-cloud IT infrastructure. We have a few data centers. We have a small data center that is on-prem. We have a co-load data center and of course we use the public clouds and more than one of them. And I think this will be the reality going forward. I think once the hype of the cloud settles down, everybody understands that you don't put everything in one single cloud. And IT needs to handle this hybrid reality. And part of IT resiliency is this workload mobility and having the option to move workloads between the data centers. So what is the business case that you would make for going multi-cloud? I think there are a couple of reasons. One is one of the barriers to going into the clouds, the public clouds, and one of the concerns is the locking. I think organization needs to need to worry that they're putting all the eggs in one basket. And when you craft a cloud strategy, one of the first things you need to pay attention to is do you have an exit strategy? And what happens if tomorrow prices are not to your liking or you don't feel you're getting the right operational level so you need to be able to move and make sure this is not a one-way journey that leaves you without options. That is one aspect. The second aspect is in the end, you will find that many workloads are optimized for a specific cloud. Some things can run better on Azure, some things can run better on AWS or in Google. So by natural involvement, you will find yourself with several clouds. And of course there are workloads that in the end shouldn't go to the cloud. That's part of the hype is over and not everything is cloud ready. Sometimes you should leave some workloads on-prem or in a co-load data center. That creates this hybrid reality. Are you able to dynamically shift workloads between cloud providers or do you pretty much assign a workload to a specific provider and leave it there? You can, you can move them and that's one of the, and I think the desert or product that's not between all the providers in the world, but with the desert or product you can actually mobilize from your data center to Azure or AWS and between them. So this is something that you definitely can do. And I believe that in the next few years we will see more and more of that as you will start to have smart placement of workloads depending on commercials, quotas, and optimizations. Of course you're a user of your company's products. What features do you find most useful in running the IT operations in certain? So I think that the product started of course from a DR with continuous data protection and that is the basic usage and for that this is a great product that can give you the peace of mind that your infrastructure is resilient and in case something happens you can recover with an RPO of seconds and within a few minutes which is great. But I also find this workload mobility feature very, very useful. And just last month we've mobilized about 50 workloads from our on-premise data center to the COLO data center and it was just a few hours of work with the desert or product and without any downtime which is fantastic. We're just two days out as we record this, two days out from the implementation of the general data protection regulation in Europe. Of course you do a lot of business in Europe. How has that impacted your role as a CIO? I think as a CIO all these regulations are something that you must address and you must have an honest look at all the data flows within the organization and make sure that you're complying with this regulation. So this is an initiative we took on in the last few months together with our legal department to map everything and make sure that once the regulations go live we are ready with the right processes. You're one of that tiny percentage who expects to be ready in time? I think at this stage nobody can really say exactly what ready means because this is new but we're making an honest effort to complete the mapping and to make sure that the way we understand what our consultants tell us that regulations mean is we are complying with or we feel relatively in a good place. This is not something organizations should ignore. Right, so as you talk to your peers to other CIOs and other organizations what do you see as being the principal priorities that they have over the next 12 months or so? So I think that the CIOs deal like we said with the digital transformation where technology is the engine driving for superior customer experience, employee experience. I think everybody is still early on with the journey to the cloud and this is something that will still take few years until everybody completes the journey. Cyber is of course a strategic risk for a company so almost all CIOs deal with developing and building a security program that tackles not only predict and protect but also the detect and response capabilities that the organization require. I think finding ways to leverage the data assets within the organization is a great opportunity for ITs. And I think there's a number of technologies that are reaching the maturity stage. Things like artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, IoT. So CIOs should find the right use case to implement those technologies for the organization. Not for the sake of implementing cool technologies but because they really bring disruptive innovation that can generate significant business value. Very exciting time and also a risky time. Yeah, of course. Avi Ricoltz, thank you for joining us on theCUBE. Thank you very much. We'll be right back from Zerdochon in Boston. I'm Paul Gellin, this is theCUBE.