>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts,
it's theCUBE, covering ZertoCON 2018.
Brought to you by Zerto.
>> This is theCUBE, I'm Paul Gillin.
We're here at ZertoCON 2018,
Hynes Convention Center in Boston.
The final day of ZertoCON,
and a lot of talk about partnership at this conference,
and one of Zerto's key partners is IBM.
Daniel Witteveen is a vice president
of resiliency services portfolio at IBM,
and I guess the manager of the Zerto relationship
from IBM's perspective, is that so?
>> Yeah, so I have responsibility
for IBM's Resiliency Portfolio.
Which includes disaster recovery as a service,
backup as a service, data migration services.
As well as we do a lot around site and facilities
design, construction, and build.
So specifically around DRaaS
and what you heard today going into the backup world,
our backup-as-a-service offering,
Zerto's been a partner of ours since 2016.
>> Now DRaaS, I think of, is certainly, has been around,
disaster recovery has been around for a long time.
How much of that business has moved
into the cloud now and become a service?
>> There's still a very large segment of the population
that's doing traditionally DR,
but that is moving rapidly to a more automated function.
Now, the challenge our customers are faced with
is not all workload is cloud ready.
So we have a partnership with Zerto
for all that cloud-ready workload, using them,
but we also combine the Zerto technology
into our orchestration software,
which handles the full recovery of non-cloud workload IT.
So, think about multiple platforms,
think about multiple clouds,
think about multiple data movers and replicators.
We can orchestrate that entire recovery process
using Zerto for the virtual environment.
>> Talking to executives here today,
we don't hear a lot about recovery,
we hear a lot about resilience.
How ready, how many of your customers
are really in that position
where they're thinking resilience is never going down
as opposed to recovery from a failure?
>> So, the goal is to be as close to no outage as possible.
But in lieu of recent cyber incidents
in cyber-related attacks,
the conversation for our clients
has shifted to true business resilience.
Right, so we have a business resilience conversation
verse an IT resilience conversation.
Business resilience clearly includes IT,
but when you talk about a malicious cyber-related attack,
which will cause disruption which'll cause outage,
which'll cause data corruption,
you're always-on-never-be-out-age viewpoint changes a bit.
So, our clients are having a lot of discussions with us
around changing the way we think about IT resilience
in light of a cyber-related incident.
>> Well security,
the fastest growing business at IBM is security,
how closely do you work with these people in that group?
>> Very closely, we've combined,
if you're familiar with the NIST Framework
around cyber resiliency, you know that there's
a lot of effort from our security services
around identification and prevention.
But what happens when it gets through all that
and actually causes and outage, right?
So we've partnered very close together on
how do you recover and restore, right,
using technologies from resiliency services
while you try to prevent and detect for true resiliency.
>> Talk about the history of the relationship.
It's only been a couple years,
but how did you first become aware of Zerto
and why were they chosen as part of the portfolio?
>> Yeah, that's a very good question.
So, Zerto started relationship with IBM Cloud.
I think at the time it was probably called
SoftLayer or Bluemix, right?
>> Paul: Yes, it Was probably.
>> And that started right as a mechanism to provide DRaaS
in a very simple version on IBM Cloud.
And the benefits IBM Cloud provided at that time,
and still do today, is true hypervisor access to Zerto.
And that's been very attractive to Zerto clients
because a version of Zerto on-prem
is the same as in the cloud,
and that's a unique capability for us.
But also, another value point was that the data replication
between our data centers is free to the customer,
so think about the cost structure
when it comes to bandwidth.
If the customer's moving production in one cloud,
in one data center of IBM Cloud,
and wants to do recovery out of region,
another IBM data center,
all that data transfer is included.
Right, that's an amazing value prop.
But when we're having those discussions with our clients,
it expanded to, well, that's nice,
that answers this section of my workload.
What about all this?
And that's really where the relationship blossomed
with our integration of orchestration to handle
the full IT estate really focusing on hybrid IT.
>> Of course, hybrid IT is really the sweet spot for IBM--
>> Daniel: It is.
>> How does resilience fit into.
The sweetest services that you're offering customers now,
is this sort of a core service?
Resilience, is a core service of the IBM Hybrid Solution?
>> Yeah, absolutely, so within global technology services,
it's one of three key plays, resiliency.
And if you think of us as a very large outsourcing firm,
clients are dependent on us
providing these services to them,
so it is very significant,
as the nature of all of our conversations,
any kind of managed service,
the default expectation of our client
is that it's resilient.
>> And, would you say that the clients have understand
and really internalized this idea of resilience?
Or are they still not quite sure what it all means?
>> I would say there's, clients vary brainly.
The regulatory clients
and the clients that are most potentially exposed
to negative publicity as a result of a cyber attack
are much more aware and in tune.
I will tell you also in lieu of cyber,
and it was part of the conversation on that panel yesterday,
you're talking about a very different way
to respond to an outage.
Which is creating a lot of dialogue within our clients
of what does it truly mean to be resilient.
So it's driving a conversation.
They used to be siloed:
maybe in IT, maybe in the risk officer or maybe in the CISO.
It is bringing them now altogether, and say,
we've got to work much stronger together to be resilient.
>> We hear a lot of talk about multi-cloud.
Is it mostly talk or are you seeing customers really adopt?
Are they excited about adopting multiple public clouds?
>> I would probably draw a parallel to,
did a client ever use one platform, right?
And they do.
And so clients are very in tune
to want to have multiple options.
It is very rare today that I go into a client
that's single cloud oriented.
They'll start single cloud,
but they're going to want the flexibility to be multi-cloud.
And we want to make sure
when we orchestrate their disaster recovery,
or even their backup or any of our other offerings,
that that can be seamless,
that they can move from one cloud to another cloud
for whatever reason, maybe it's financial,
maybe it's location, maybe it's capability.
We want to be able to seamlessly provide that interaction.
>> Now AWS and Azure are never going to play nicely together,
Where does IBM fit into that matrix?
Are you a Switzerland between all these public clouds?
>> Well, so we have our own. >> Yes, of course.
>> Within IBM Cloud, we'll talk about our strength
and our size in the enterprise relative to those providers.
But as a services entity,
we will continue to be (mumbles).
Our shareholders great to be using IBM Cloud.
But certainly if a solution or a customer
dictates another solution, we would be fine with that.
>> Paul: What do your customers ask you
about backup these days?
Where is backup going?
>> How can you do it for me, so I don't have to do it?
>> Because it's so painful. (laughing)
>> That's our probably biggest use case
is customers recognize it's not a core competency.
The data explosion has just, they can't handle it anymore.
They're buying storage everyday.
And they're going there's got to be a better way.
And our conversation with customers around backup
is let us be your better way.
We will provide the infrastructure.
We'll provide the label.
We'll provide the software.
We'll provide the architectural positioning.
And we'll focus on providing you the business outcome
that you need relative to that offer.
>> Would you say the backup
is rapidly going to move to the cloud
or do you think on-prem backup
is going to be around for a long time?
>> It's a good question.
Unfortunately, as it depends the answer is.
For the smaller companies and the remote offices,
going directly to cloud makes complete sense.
When you have a high-change rate
and you have a lot of storage volume,
your decision will become where do I need to recover
or how do I need to access that data?
And maybe that's best suited on-prem.
Once (mumbles) in the cloud, maybe that's suited in cloud.
I think long term, they'll ultimately sit in the cloud,
but there's still a massive amount of storage
and customers prefer a massive amount of that to be on-prem.
>> In a multi-cloud world,
is resilience more difficult to ensure?
Or is it easier?
>> Way more complex.
Way more complex, because if you think about,
what 10 years ago, you had site A and site B,
site A went down, you're worried about site B.
Very easy.
One failure case.
Now our clients have not only multi-cloud,
they have multiple locations, remote offices, back offices.
They have multiple software-as-a-service providers.
And so our view is, you have to look at
the business process resiliency.
If you have one system that goes down
in a software-as-a-service provider,
how does that impact you business process?
Can it still work?
And how do you make it work in the event
that one of those components fail?
So it's a lot more complex
because you're not just thinking about A and B,
you're thinking about 10 different failure scenarios,
20 different scenarios,
and making sure that doesn't interrupt the business process.
>> The quest for simplicity,
IT always seems to become more complex.
>> What's interesting is every evolution of technology,
which increases redundancy, reliability,
the first sense is, well,
then I don't need as much resiliency,
and every change of technology consolidates that risk,
and therefore resiliency becomes that much more important.
>> Good job security.
Daniel Witteveen, thanks very much for joining us from IBM.
>> Excellent, as always, I appreciate being here.
Thank you.
>> I'm Paul Gillin.
That's it for us here at ZertoCON 2018.
This is theCUBE.
Thanks for watching.
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