>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas,
it's the CUBE, covering IBM Think 2018.
Brought to you by IBM.
(upbeat music)
>> Hello, and welcome back to the CUBE
here at IBM Think 2018.
We're at the Mandalay Bay at the CUBE Studios
where IBM Think 2018.
I'm John Furrier, your host.
Our next guest, Brian Reagan, Chief Marketing Officer,
Actifio, and Mike Errity, VP North America,
IBM Resiliency Services, guys welcome to the CUBE,
Brian, good to see you.
(mumbles)
>> Good to see you John, yes.
>> Great stuff here at IBM Think, big show, six in one.
Six shows brought down to one.
A lot of customers here,
but the message, you're starting to see
a clear line of sight,
for customers seeing the innovation formula.
Cloud Multi-Cloud Services, On-Prem through private Cloud
as Oogie Mound reported, but really A.I. and Blockchain
are infrastructure powering data.
Data's at the center of the value proposition.
You guys are partnering with IBM.
What's the story here, what's the relationship?
>> Well, yeah, I mean you nailed it John.
I mean, data is really at the center of everything, right?
I mean we're in, we're in the midst of a massive
digital transformation on like anything
we've seen in I.T. for 30 years.
And, you know, every business is a data business.
Whether they know it or not.
And with that comes great rewards,
but it also brings a lot of risks as well,
and you know, we've been a strong partner of IBM's
for as long as Actifio's been in business.
We're a data company, or about managing data.
And now, I think with this rising tide of data threats,
you know, partnering with the world's leader
in resiliency just makes all the sense in the world.
>> (mumbles) Betting your business on data
was a good call, don't you think?
(loud laughter)
>> I think so, yes, absolutely.
>> Hey, with Watson and AM Mike, you guys are pioneering,
obviously, and we've seen this evolve
from the R&D and the, and the modern infrastructure
of the systems level, infrastructure is code.
But the real applications out there
have to drive a lot of money opportunities,
success for your clients, security's the biggest risk.
It's a lot of industries out there
for profit around security, the threats are endless.
>> Mike: Yeah.
>> There's new threats everyday.
>> Mike: Yeah.
>> This is hard business, data's the key.
What's your reaction and vision
around the current state of security?
>> What I done in our, our decades of experience
working with clients has proven that, at,
at the start of a resiliency initiative,
it starts with the data element.
We've had the opportunity to work with thousands of clients.
Everyday, we're helping them test their ability
to be able to recover from some unplanned event.
Something that could cause them damage.
And, and that experience has been evolving
over the past, I would say 18 months.
We're on warp speed to help clients achieve
literally an always on environment, and it starts with data.
>> John: Yeah.
>> The, the, the point about data that I think is important
is that clients recognize that if there's any damage at all
to their data repository, it will cause them severe damage,
so protecting it and making sure that it's recoverable
to a point in time, is what we're working with everyday.
>> I'd like you to talk about for a minute,
resiliency services, because security's broad,
but everyone thinks, command center, killing the bad guys,
offense, defense, blue teams, red teams.
There's a, the trend of I.T.s, securities kind of moving
into the direct line to the sea sweet.
>> Mike: Yeah.
>> 'Cause it's so important, the risk management alone,
on securities, so you're seeing that trend.
What do you guys do?
What is resilience service?
Take a minute to explain specifically what that is,
in context of security.
>> That is what's so exciting about being here at Think,
because we're, we have a total interconnection
between our security assets and our security domain,
and our resiliency team, and so resiliency's about
resuming business operations to the point
before you had the event.
Being back to that normal state of affairs.
Resiliency for us has been about
helping clients create a plan after assessing the risk,
and designing and implementing that plan
to, to return to a point in time where there know
that they're safe, that their applications
are back up and running.
And what we're finding in the security domain,
which is the reason why cyber resiliency includes
security, networking, and the resiliency methodologies
of getting back to normal.
>> John: Yeah.
>> Is that you have to combine all three of those categories.
>> John: Yeah.
>> To create a solution to return to
that normal state at a safe point in time.
>> Talk about the importance of the proactive front-end work
that's involved, I mean, back up in recovery
in the old tradition, oh yeah, it's at the end of the,
probably just throws it back up at it,
and then people have been bitten in the butt on that.
They've gotten really impacted.
How much work is involved?
What is the playbook on the front-end to prepare?
And give me an example where what's the consequences?
>> Mike: Oh well the,
>> Of not doing it?
>> You used the right term, it is a playbook,
and it's one that needs to be well scripted and well tested.
The work on the upfront is to design the right solution.
Technologically, to ensure that you have a,
a solution that moves data from a place that could be harmed
to a safe point, and create the environment,
create the solution, and then figure out
the right team and the right skill
and the right investment
to constantly test it, test it so that you have the ability,
and that's the work that we're doing with Actifio.
Actifio has the expertise to help us
create the right copy-data management solution
to enable a snap-snap-snap-snap copy to be able to then
travel back in time to be able to find
that right, clean point in the event of a cyber incident
that has pervasively impacted a data center environment.
>> What's the role of Actifio as an ingredient in that plan?
Are they in the insurance policy?
Are they in the front end?
When are they invoked, and with,
where, where are they in the process?
>> Well they're the, I mean to be, to use a,
an analogy that I'm comfortable with,
we, we trust Actifio to provide us the brains
of the solution, to be able to move the data constantly.
Move it to a point where we can then
create a service to be able to, as I said, go back in time,
and Brian, you might want to comment on that a little more.
>> Brian, talk about the relation to IBM in that context,
because you know, covering IBM for so many years,
you know, they're the big, the big ship, right?
They move at, at a pace, with a huge customer base,
you know, how do you guys integrate in?
What are you guys providing?
>> Brian: Sure.
>> And what's the value proposition
that you guys are fighting IBM?
>> Well I mean the, the you know, because we've been
partnering with IBM for so long, I mean literally
since the inception of the company,
we have a very common user-base, right?
We, we serve the mid and large enterprise
in global enterprises worldwide.
We have, you know, 3000 customers from Actifio
and, and almost all of them are IBM accounts as well.
One of the things that, you know, just to kind of piggyback
on, on, on Mike's discussion, you know one of the, and, and
to speak specifically to a customer base, you know,
global financials right now are not only worried about
cyber threats to production, but increasingly
they're worried about cyber-threats to their backup sets.
And in fact, there is regulations,
you know FISMA regulations in North America
that talk about, you need air-gap protection
between, you know, one backup set and another,
because they're under attack now.
So literally these threats have started to creep beyond
just the normal production data sets.
Actifio, plus, you know, resiliency services equals,
you know, a technology that can provide
that air-gap, provide the immutability,
provide all the, you know, the insurance protection
of the data, and provide the,
the wear with all the knowledge to really get that playbook
to resume business operations as fast as possible.
>> You guys need to stay on top of the big trends too,
because Blockchain's right around the corner.
>> Brian: Yeah.
>> That's immutable, that could be an opportunity.
>> Brian: Absolutely.
>> Thoughts on Blockchain?
>> Blockchain is, you know, it is a fascinating technology.
Apart from Discripto, right?
(laughs)
And, and what a better, we talk about, you know,
every business is digital, literally Blockchain is turning
every business into a digital business.
And it is the next generation
in terms of securing closed contracts,
and securing really immutability and,
and reference ability of data.
I think it has a huge play with IBM obviously.
Around GDPR and privacy.
So, we, you know, we see that
as absolutely the next frontier.
>> Well there's a lot of these supply,
IBM's been in the supply chain business for years,
running technology for companies.
And that's always been kind of the big
monolithic systems, mainframe minis, lands,
you know, CRM systems, ARPs, whatever you want to call it.
Now you have agile cloud coming in.
You got the plan, a resiliency plan.
While there's a lot of business reconstruction
going on at the business model level.
>> Mike: That's right.
>> So, are clients like banging their head against the wall?
What's some of the conversations, like with the clients?
So, I mean they got to be proactive.
At the same time, they got a lot of stuff on their plate.
>> Well they, we're sort of humbled by the role
that we're in right now, because for years,
we've been working with so many clients,
to help them build programs, we, we've got ourselves
into a very, you know, into a comfort zone
of helping them recover from the environment
you're talking about, just standard, legacy,
data center recovery.
We can accomplish the recovery time in,
in minutes, nearly instantly, with no, no data loss.
But suddenly, the humbling point is,
our phone's ringing off the hook,
asking, apply those same methodologies
to the, to the risks that I'm seeing
as my business is being digitized.
And help me evolve, and to us it's all about
orchestrating a recovery, creating a softer,
defined solution to enable data that's recovered
and systems that are automated.
>> From quality partners, and you're happy with Actifio?
>> Oh absolutely, yeah.
>> It's like changing an airplane engine out 30,000 feet.
You just, what you just talked about.
I'm like, that sounds so hard.
I got my business moving so fast,
I'm modernizing, and I got to do all this work.
>> And the devil's in the details,
and whenever we're engaging with Actifio,
they have the architects to assist us with those details.
>> What about regulatory concerns?
Obviously, that's come up a lot.
We know GDPR's out there, that be we don't want to
beat that dead horse, but you know,
when you get into things like Cripto, Blockchain,
regions of, of data centers where its cloud is deployed,
you got regulatories, it's going to be a constant issue.
>> Brian: Absolutely.
>> Your thoughts on that?
>> It is a constant issue, and part of the challenge
with regulations, is they're very ambiguously worded.
So, the interpretation of regulations
is as challenging as actually delivering solutions
to, to meet them.
I think that it really does come down to,
and in most regulations, good hygiene is
protect the data, make sure that there is, you know,
increasingly air-gaps around the sensitive data,
both production as well as non-production,
and make sure that you can resume business operations,
you know, where and when you need to,
and having the flexibility to do that on Prem,
in the IBM cloud, you know, that's, that's what IBM does.
>> And, and if I can just add a point to that Brian,
the, the driver of the conversations that we're seeing
are, is, is predominantly in a compliance area,
so businesses are concerned, enterprises are concerned
about, am I compliant, am I audit-worthy?
And can I prove that not so much at time of recovery,
but really a time of test.
Can I go prove to the market place that I'm ready?
>> No more lip service.
>> Mike: None at all.
>> You've got an actual plan.
>> And, and, and,
>> Not just for your own reasons, there's actually filings.
>> And have documented proof of it.
>> Yeah, IBM Actifio, all about the resiliency
in global economy, you got Blockchain, you got A.I.
At the heart of it is data.
You don't have a plan, you better get one.
(mumbles)
Congratulations on your relationship.
>> Oh thank you.
>> John Furrier here inside the CUBE.
IBM Think 2018, CUBE studios will be back with more coverage
after this short break.
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