Hi everyone. I am Mohan, I am the Vice President and
General Manager of HPE's Ezmeral Software Business Unit.
I am here today to talk about how data and analytics is basically
transforming the way we interact in a hybrid multi-cloud world.
With me today is the CEO of one of our partner companies BigID.
And I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce Dimitri.
Thank you Mohan. Thank you, everybody. Hello, my name is Dmitri,
the CEO of BigID.
We are a seven-year-old company focused on providing operational control
and governance around data in a hybridized, regulated world.
So, to kick off the conversation,
what I'd like to begin with is that, at HPE, we've been on a journey
and as we think through what is the value we can provide to our customers,
we realized that many of our customers are opting for hybrid cloud or multi-cloud
as their preferred deployment and operationalization paradigm in the future.
However, building and developing to hybrid cloud multi-cloud is actually very,
very difficult, right?
So from an HPE Ezmeral software point of view, our focus is becoming more and more around
how do you provide the key software foundations that help our customers
develop and deploy applications to manage data as well as build out workloads in the data engineering,
data science, AI/ML. We are reporting type
of use cases right in their production-grade environments
for a hybrid cloud multi-cloud future world.
Right, so Dimitri, to begin with, what I'd love to get a sense of is like,
what does hybrid cloud mean to you and what are you hearing from customers when you talk to them about,
the kinds of requirements they have?
Yeah, sure.
So we historically have dealt largely with large organizations
that have mixed environments for a variety of reasons.
Datacenter, smaller edge clouds, various public clouds, even SaaS applications.
And the reality is that very few companies are ever returning
to stage a place where they have everything in one place,
where we go back to this kind of world where everything was in one mainframe,
one file share, one SQL server.
The reality is that everything is going to be distributed and decentralized and
it's going to reside and live in very in a variety of places.
And so I think it obviously becomes critical to how do you make the right data available
to the right individuals, the right applications through kind of a fabric conversation?
But as part of that, you also need the various controls that you can layer over that.
So, I think from our customers perspective, the reality is that there are larger institutions,
they will never be purely on just one cloud,
they are going to be mixed, right.
They're going to have instances where they have edge environments, whether it's,
local data centers kind of implementations of cloud near them, under their control.
They're going to have multiple clouds in terms of the public infrastructures,
they are going to have potentially SaaS applications and, again,
they are interested in how to get the right data
to the right purpose, at the right time with the right team, at the right time.
And this is I think something that they talk to you about and obviously
where we come in is providing some of the additional governance and controls on top of that.
Absolutely,
I think you are hitting on something very important here which is even
in my customer conversations there are two or three key themes that come up over and over again.
Right.
One of them is I think hybrid and multi-cloud is the future
because none of our customers want to be locked into any given provider.
But, more importantly, they care about predictability, right?
Think about predictability, think about governance, think about sovereignty.
These are issues that are becoming more
and more important, especially in large enterprise
given the macroeconomic geopolitical kind of environments out there.
So it's almost as if we are going back to the renaissance where I think
a decade ago, cloud [INAUDIBLE] can really simplify IT,
but now cloud is starting to get so complicated
where we are at a point, where On-Prem is not looking
as like On-Prem mature systems are not looking
as daunting as they used to.
More importantly.
However I think there is a lot of awareness in our customer base
around different types of data and different requirements on top of data.
And this is where I think, when there is a big idea
in some sense have a distinctive value proposition
in providing the ability to simplify governance for example and such.
So we'd love to hear from you what are some of the big challenges and
what are some of the top concerns customers have when it comes to data and governance and sovereignty.
Yeah. So look I think you touched on some of them, right?
So sovereignty is clearly a bigger, bigger issue.
There are countries in the world that disallow data to leave their nation border states.
You need to be able to both identify the subject to whom the data belongs.
Are they a resident of China or Germany or one of these countries?
You need to be able to detect and inform about data that may be crossing a border.
There are other regulations increasingly a little bit like real estate where everything is local.
There are regulations like in privacy, as an example, that could operate at a state level,
operate at a national level, operate at supra national level, like across the EU,
and those impact organizations, like how do they comply,
report on data that is constantly changing and evolving and moving.
There are obviously regulations beyond just privacy and individuals,
whether it's export control regulations, like ITAR,
whether it's a PCI or HIPAA around health care or whether it's around GLBA,
for Gramm-Leach-Bliley, or countless others,
there is no shortage of existing and then new regulations that
are getting added around breach response or NEST, etcetera,
and I think that creates a degree of complexity, right?
It creates, especially for large institutions that have diversity,
in terms of employee base by location, they operate in multiple jurisdictions
from a business standpoint and they need to be able to control
and manage and govern that data in this global environment that still has
hyper local regulations and requirements and that creates challenges.
It creates requirements around hybrid cloud, as an example,
and around the necessity for multi-cloud,
because in some places people just don't operate.
But yeah, I think data is becoming much more complex by, again,
the kind of mixing platforms where data can kind of reside and then, secondly,
the kind of explosion of regulations, whether they are sovereignty or privacy
or other that they are needing to contend with.
I think that is again, very interesting theme here, right?
What I just realized as you were speaking
was hybrid cloud is actually very attractive for highly-regulated industries.
Do you see any industry specific trends? - Yeah. Automotive, right?
I think because they operate in so many different jurisdictions.
Life sciences and healthcare, because they have not only research but sensitive data,
research data and healthcare data that belongs to citizens of different countries in different states.
Financial services, obviously, always highly-regulated where you have
not only internal audits that you could fail,
but like in the US, multiple, like the Treasury, the SEC, the OCC,
agencies that regulate them.
But there are others. Anybody that deals with a lot of consumer data
for retail, because they have to contend with various privacy regulations and, again,
even in the US, there is no single privacy regulation. There is California,
there is Virginia, there is Colorado.
and that is just the US.
And then, of course, there is other countries, like Canada has a new privacy regulation,
Singapore, etcetera.
So yeah, I think almost every industry, you look at communications,
media technology, especially the technology piece
that garners attention almost on a daily basis, right there in the news,
people are concerned about privacy at the end of the day when people,
whether it's the regulators or whether it's from the bad actors,
they want to be able to exfiltrate and take the data
or take information they want to get the data,
the crown jewels of the company that is what a digital enterprise is about.
And so again, in this kind of hyper globalized, hybridized cloud environment
where you now have this patchwork quilt of regulations.
Not only is there a challenge of getting the right data,
getting the data in this kind of decentralized way to the right place,
whether it's from a data store to a data reporting platform or an AI platform.
But, secondly, the controls around that also becomes more challenging.
No, absolutely right. I think you are right.
I mean, regulations is like a moving target, right?
As we get more and more aware of the data we are collecting as the users
are becoming more sophisticated in terms of use cases with data
and the type of insights and generating,
it is becoming more and more important for us to provide guardrails
around meaningful and ethical use of data of sorts here.
Right.
And that is where I think again if you look at topics like data governance,
sovereignty, like access controls, etcetera,
these are all topics that I think are having a renaissance right now and I think it's going to become
really important to simplify how some of these capabilities
can be front and center for the application developer.
Absolutely, I am fully aligned which is why I think we are partnering and
so excited about our partnership with you guys with that.
I'd love to wrap this session. Thanks for your time, Dimitri.
My pleasure. Thank you for having me on.