(upbeat music)
>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida,
it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite,
brought to you by Cohesity.
>> Welcome back everyone,
to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite
here in the sunshine state.
I'm your host, Rebecca Knight,
co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman.
We are joined by Theresa Miller,
she is the Principal Technologist Technology Advocacy Group
at Cohesity.
Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.
>> Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure.
>> So you are an IT veteran and a Microsoft MVP.
You're here to talk about some of the integrated solutions
with Microsoft at Cohesity,
but this conference is really all about community
and I'd love to have you riff a little bit on what it means
to be part of this community,
to be such a key player,
and to be partnered with Microsoft.
And how you all come together here.
>> Right, so outside of Cohesity,
being part of the MVP program is
really a pretty spectacular thing.
It does take a lot of work and commitment to it.
I always tell people to pace themselves,
if they're going to try to work toward a Microsoft MVP
but it really is about helping others,
teaching others and being involved.
Now from the Cohesity side,
I do see a lot of benefits to both.
One kind of supports the other, and vice versa.
Cohesity's doing a lot of really spectacular things
in the Microsoft space, as a partner, specifically.
It really is a nice relationship.
We have a lot of products that support,
like Azure Stack, we just announced this week, for example.
We're in the Office 365 space protecting data there
and traditional Azure backups as well.
>> Yeah, so Theresa,
I'd love if you could bring us inside the community
a bit more.
So this show has been around for decades.
Wasn't called Ignite back in the day.
It was TechEd.
But, you know, one of the things that was highlighted
in the keynote is community and the future of jobs
and the citizen developer and moving people from,
you know, they might have before been configuring
their server to one email in their office.
And today, Office 365 takes care of a lot of that.
So, bring us through as to now the community is helping
introducing new people,
as well as the people that have been here for a while,
helping them learn new skills
and be ready for
the cloud, AI world that we live in today.
>> Yeah, the community around Office 365 is pretty amazing.
I get to network and be involved
with some pretty spectacular people, in that space.
There are some podcasts that people can
definitely check out.
There's always new writing that happens,
that covers the various angles
of what people need to learn
to make sure they're successful.
And it really is pretty tight-knit group
to be a part of.
>> There have been so many new product announcements
and new developments that are being announced here.
What are you most interested in?
What are you most excited about,
in terms of getting it in front of your customers?
>> So, from the Cohesity side there's two different angles
that I'm really interested
in getting in front of the customers.
One being the Office 365 piece.
Exchange Online and One Drive specifically,
and how data protection can get them to that next level.
I'm also very excited
to talk to companies
about a tool we have called Cloudspin
that will help them take advantage of 2008 servers
end of life.
They can,
Microsoft has a nice program that will allow customers
to stick with their 2008 servers if they go to the cloud
and we can help them get there,
as well as protecting their Azure workloads.
>> Yeah, Theresa, bring us inside the customers today.
We all talk about cloud journeys and what they're doing.
What's going well?
What are some of the challenges that they have day-to-day
and the type of activities that they do at a show like here
to help further their businesses?
>> Enterprises, I think the long-term is going to be hybrid.
Everybody's going to be maintaining some level of on-prem
as well as cloud.
And so,
with that in mind, you really need,
I'm going to put my Cohesity hat back on here,
You really do need a solution that can support you
in both areas, from a single location.
If you try to piece it together,
you're not going to have a single solution
to manage everything.
You're going to have kind of a confusing
mess at the end of the day.
So, having a single solution to help support
that hybrid journey is a big deal.
>> Yeah, no I think you bring up a great point
as customers, when they move to SaaS,
when they move to public cloud,
data protection security are even more important
than they were when I had it
in the four walls of my data center.
So, having a solution that can span those environments
and companies like Cohesity are doing that.
We're actually, in our analysis this morning
we talked about Microsoft in many ways,
in the announcements that they're making this week,
is putting out their vision for how they think it should be.
And while Microsoft has positions in all of the environments
we know that there's work that we all need to do
to make that hybrid environment of today and tomorrow
even better.
>> One other thing I'd like to add to that is,
I think a lot of enterprises assume
when they go to the cloud,
that their data is just protected.
And so I like to really call out the differentiation between
what a cloud provider like Microsoft offers
and your corporate data.
At the end of the day, your corporate data
is your corporate data.
If you're attacked by ransomware,
if there's not a backup of some form or a copy of that data,
then you may not ever be able to recover it.
And so,
cloud companies like Microsoft are really great
at making sure you have disaster recovery
and high availability.
Companies like Cohesity help with the backup,
the point in-time backup, that protects your data,
for the long run.
>> I mean what you just described with companies
not even realizing,
just assuming that once they're in the cloud,
everything is safe and secure,
would you describe companies as naive
to what the cloud can offer?
I mean, how are companies thinking about this
and approaching this,
particularly when it comes to those disasters?
>> Right, I certainly don't think companies are naive.
I think we don't know what we don't know, right?
And I think sometimes too,
like, I've talked to even enterprise peers,
people that I've worked with in the past that
you think you have the most secure system ever
and stuff just happens.
Things happen and so back up and recovery,
in a way, becomes an insurance policy even.
You may not ever need it,
but if you do, you'll be glad you had it.
>> Theresa, one of the things that Satya Nadella
spent a lot of time this morning talking about
was trust.
Talk a little bit about the relationship
customers have with Microsoft.
Microsoft is in a great resurgence under Satya Nadella,
went from a company that most of us
didn't spend much time talking to.
To now, Microsoft is, once again, front and center.
For the people that have been in the trenches
working with it,
do they have a different relationship with Microsoft today?
Does the word "trust" resonate with you and your peers
when they think about Microsoft?
>> It absolutely does resonate.
Things have changed a lot since Satya has stepped in.
I absolutely do trust what they're doing
and I think a lot of companies do.
Were there growing pains, as part of that process?
Absolutely.
Did it take time?
Absolutely.
But yes, I do see a lot of enterprise customers
trusting what Microsoft is doing.
>> And what does that mean?
So how does that manifest itself
at a time where there is deep distrust and skepticism
toward a lot of big technology companies?
How do you think that that trust is enabling Microsoft
to go from strength strength?
>> I find them to be a very transparent company.
I think when there have been issues in the past
they've always been very forthcoming about it.
And transparency does go a long way for the customer.
Plus, I've seen a lot of stability out of the products
and a lot of enhancements and improvements across the board,
that also create that trust that companies want.
>> Right, Theresa you're going to doing some speaking this week.
For people that don't have the chance to see it in person,
give us a little taste of what you'll be sharing with
everyone at the show here.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
So I have three theater sessions this week.
One of which will cover IT burn out.
I brought in a panel of some Microsoft MVPs
from around the world.
I wanted that global perspective.
And we're going to really kind of hammer through
what people are facing, but also how they can avoid burnout.
So that's one of them.
The second one that I'm doing is a
Cohesity sponsored session,
but I actually take on a subject matter expert approach
in that session, where I talk about backup and recovery
from an Office 365 and Azure perspective,
what Microsoft offers and some of the challenges that I see
companies needing to consider
if they move forward with those native options.
And then I'll talk a little bit about Cohesity
in that session,
where our cover, where we may be able to help
if some of those challenges are concerning to customers.
And then the third session that I'm doing,
is my MVP session on Exchange Online security
where I'll dive into Exchange Online protection
and advanced threat protection.
>> So I'd love to talk about the first session
because it just sounds so interesting.
This is a time and it's an extremely tight job market.
Everyone's being asked to do more with less.
There's a lot of industries that face burnout and stress.
What are the special challenges
that IT industry workers face would you say?
>> So I'm going to step back a few years in my career.
I did go through burnout
and I think that, for me,
and I think this will correlate and translate
to probably what others feeling burnout are going through
is one, I didn't even realize I was burned out
when I was burned out.
That's one issue.
But stepping back when I finally realized it,
'cause I knew I needed a change.
I took the leap.
I made a change.
Looking back, I didn't take lunch breaks.
I didn't take long enough vacations
and how I start my day, makes a big difference.
I work out every morning, even if it's just a light jog.
Taking time for me,
every day has really gone a long way
to how I feel, which not only benefits me
and my quality of life, it benefits my employer as well.
So that's kind of
my nutshell version of
what I think some of we'll talk about.
>> One the tools that Microsoft is introducing
or reintroducing is Microsoft Teams
and it has a lot of those time management attributes
and characteristics to it.
Some of the email reminders
and there's one element that will not,
if you want to write an email to a colleague it will say,
"Wait, let's make sure,
"this person is actually not working right now.
"It's 10 o'clock at night.
"Why don't we send it the next morning at 7:30,
"so it's waiting for them when they get in."
How much do you think Microsoft
is thinking about these things?
Tech burnout, stress, employee satisfaction,
in terms of the way they're bringing this humanity
to the tools that they're putting out there?
>> So I think the tools, say a lot for that already.
But you bring up a good point,
and actually, one of the things I've noticed
from some of the Microsoft employees,
and I haven't quite done it yet,
but I'm very tempted to,
you'll see in a lot of their email signatures
that even though they have sent that email,
maybe they didn't wait till the person's working
at 7:30 in the morning,
but they understand that
everybody has different working hours.
It's okay to wait.
Because, you're right, that can be a stressor too.
If you don't know when to disconnect
and you're checking email all night long,
an email could drag you right into work
when you're not expecting.
So it's a great point.
>> Great, well Theresa thank you so much
for coming on theCUBE.
It was a pleasure to have you on.
>> Thank you so much for having me.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman.
Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage
of Microsoft Ignite.