>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE.
Covering Actifio 2019 Data Driven.
Brought to you by Actifio.
>> Hi, we're right outside of the Boston Harbor.
You're watching theCUBE.
I'm Stu Miniman and this is Actifio Data Driven 2019.
Two days, digging into the role of data
inside companies
in an ever changing world.
Happy to welcome to the program, a first time guest,
Archana Venkatraman,
who's a Research Manager at IDC.
Coming to us from across the pond, in London.
Thanks so much for joining us.
>> No problem, at all, pleasure.
>> So, tell us a little bit.
IDC, we know well.
The market landscapes, watching what's happening,
the 77 zettabytes that was put up in the keynote
came from IDC; tell us your focus, though.
>> Yeah, so I'm part of the data, protection,
and storage research team, but I have a European focus.
I cover the Western European markets where,
data protection is almost of a neurotic interest to us.
A lot of our IT investment is actually made
on the context of data protection,
and how do I become data driven without compromising
on security and sovereignty, and data locality.
So that's something that I look at.
I'm also part of our broader multi-cloud infrastructure team
and also DevOps practice.
I'm looking at all these modern new trends
from a data perspective as well.
>> Just a few things keeping you busy
in your world these days.
About a year ago, every show that I went to
there would be a big clock up on the keynote stage
counting down until GDPR went live.
We actually said on theCUBE many times,
we'll know when GDPR starts when the lawsuits start flying.
I feel like it was a couple of days if not a couple of weeks
before some of the big tech firms got sued for this.
Here we are in 2019, its been a while now since this launch.
How important is GDPR?
How is that impacting customers and the ripple effects,
'cause here in the States we've seen
some laws in California and beyond
that are following that,
but a push back from the,
Oh, hey, we're just going to have
all the data in the world and,
we'll store it somewhere, and sure we'll protect it
and keep it secure but, but, but.
>> So GDPR is a game changer.
It's interesting you said this big clock ticking
and everybody has been talking about it.
When the European Commission announced GDPR is coming,
organizations had about two years
to actually prepare for it.
But there were a lot of naysayers.,
and they thought this is not going to happen,
the regulators don't have enough resources
to actually go after all of these data breaches,
and it's just too complicated,
not everyone's going to comply.
It's just not going to happen.
But then they realized that
the regulators were sticking to it.
And towards the end,
towards the last six months in the race to GDPR
there was this helter skelter running
where organizations were trying to just do some DIY
and patch up exercise
to have that minimum viable compliance.
They wanted to make sure that they don't go out of business,
they don't have any major data breaches
when GDPR comes into effect.
That was the story of 2018.
Although they had so much time to react, they didn't,
and towards the end
they started doing a lot of these patch-up work
to make sure they had that minimum viable compliance.
But over time, what we are seeing is that
a lot of astute organizations are actually using GDPR
to create that competitor differentiation.
So if you look at companies like Barclays,
they have been so much on top of that game
and they include that in their marketing strategies
and their corporate social responsibility to say that,
"Hey, our business is important to us, but your privacy
"and your data is much more valuable to us".
And that kind of instantly helps them build that trust.
They have baked GDPR compliance into their operations
so much and so well that they can actually
sell those kind of GDPR consultancy services
because they're so good at it.
And that's what we are seeing is happening.
So 2019 and probably the next 12 to 18 months
will be about scaling and operationalizing GDPR
and moving from that minimum viable compliance.
>> It's interesting.
We had a conversation with Holly St. Clair,
who's with the State of Massachusetts,
and in her keynote this morning
she talked about that data minimalist.
I only want as much data as I know what I'm going to do,
how I'm going to leverage it.
Kind of that pendulum swing back from the,
I'm going to hoard all the data and think about it later.
Do you see that as a trend with, is that just governments,
are you seeing that throughout industries in Europe?
>> Interesting.
So when GDPR came into existence
there were a lot of these workshops that were happening
for organizations on how to become GDPR.
And there was this Danish public sector organization
where one of the employees went to do that workshop.
And he was all charged up,
and he came back to his employer and said,
"Hey, can you forget me?".
It took that organization about 14 employees
and three months to forget one person,
so that's the amount of data they were holding in,
and they were not deleting.
And all their processes were manual,
which took them so long to actually forget one person.
If you don't cleanse up your data act now,
meeting with all these write to be forgotten
and all these specific clauses within GDPR
is going to be too difficult.
And its going to just eat up your business time.
>> Well, connecting the dots here,
one of the big stumbling blocks is
if you look at data protection,
if I've got backup, if I've got archive.
I mean if I've taken a snapshot of something
and stuck that under a mountain in a giant tape
and then say forget about me.
Oh my gosh do I have to go retrieve that?
Do I need to manage that?
The cost could be quite onerous.
Help us connect the dots as to what that means to actually,
what are the ramifications of this regulation?
>> I think GDPR is a beast, its a dragon of a regulation,
so its important to dice it,
to understand what the initial requirements are.
And almost the first step is to get visibility
and classify the data as to what is personal data.
You don't want to apply policies to all the data
because there might be some garbage in there
so you need to get visibility and assess and classify
your data on what is personal data.
And once you know what data is personal,
what you want to retain,
that's when you start applying policies
to ensure that they are safe and they are anonymized
or pseudonymized for if you want to do analytics
at a later stage.
And then you think about how you meet individual clauses.
There is a GDPR framework.
You start by classifying data.
Then you apply specific policies
to ensure you protect and back up the personal data.
And then you go about meeting the specific requirements.
>> What else can you tell us about European markets.
I know when I look at the cloud space governance
it is something very specific to
and I need to make sure my data doesn't leave the borders,
what other trends and issues are you hearing
from your constituencies?
>> GDPR posed a lot of existential threat
to a lot of companies like say hyperscalers or SaaS vendors.
They were the first ones
to actually become completely compliant.
To understand the regulations, have European data hubs
and to have those data centers,
like I think at that time
Microsoft had this good collaboration
with T-Systems to have a local data center,
not controlled by Microsoft but by somebody
which is a German organization.
So you cannot have data locality more than that, right?
So they were trying different innovative ways
to build confidence among enterprises
to make sure that clouded option continues.
And what was interesting that came out from our research
was that we thought GDPR means
people's confidence in cloud is going to plunge.
People's confidence in public cloud is going to plunge.
That didn't happen.
42% of organizations were still going ahead
with their cloud strategies as is,
but it's just that they were going to be
a lot more cautious.
And they want to make sure that the applications
and data that they were putting in the cloud
was something that they had complete visibility into
and that didn't have too much of personal data
and even if it had they had complete control over it.
They had a different strategy of approaching public cloud,
but it didn't slow them down.
But over time they realized that to get that control of IT,
and to get that control of data,
they need to have that multi-cloud strategy
because cloud had to become a two-way street.
They need to have an exit strategy as well.
So they tried to make sure that
they adopted multiple cloud technologies
and have that data interoperability as well,
because data management was one of their key
top of mind priorities at that time.
>> Last question I had for you.
We're here at the Actifio event.
What do you hear from your customers about Actifio?
Any research that you have
relevant about what they're doing?
>> It's quite interesting.
Copy data management, that's how Actifio started,
they created a market for themselves
for this copy data management.
And we classify copy data management
within replication market,
and replication is quite a slow market
but this copy data management is a big issue
and it's one of the fastest growing markets.
They started off from a good base
where they created a market for themselves
and people started noticing them
and now they have kind of grown further
and grown beyond and tried to cover
the entire data management space.
And I think what's interesting
and what's going to be interesting is
how they keep up the momentum in building
that infrastructure ecosystem and platform ecosystem.
Because companies are moving from protecting data centers
to protecting centers of data.
And if they can help organizations
protect multiple centers of data
through a unified pane of glass
and have that platform approach to data management,
then they can help organizations become data thrivers
which gives them the competitive advantage.
If they can keep up that momentum
they going to go great guns.
>> Thank you so much for joining us
and sharing the data that you have
and the customer viewpoints from Europe.
We'll be back with more coverage here
from Actifio Data Driven 2019, in Boston, Massachusets.
I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE.
>> Thank you.
(upbeat electronic music)