(upbeat music)
- Hi folks, my name is Vamshi Kommineni.
I'm the group product manager for Azure Object Storage.
I'm delighted to have with me Danny Allan, the CTO of Veeam.
Welcome Danny.
- Welcome, glad to be here with you, Vamshi.
- Great.
So Danny, our companies have had a
long partnership together.
Could you tell us and the viewers here a little bit
about yourself, a little bit about Veeam
and our partnership?
- Sure, yeah.
So I'm Danny Allan, I'm CTO
and senior vice president here at Veeam Software.
And we've had a very lengthy
and robust relationship between our organizations.
It goes back over a decade now.
We did data protection or backup for the Hyper V server
but over the years, you know, we've added backup
for bare metal servers and most recently, actually
we're seeing a lot of growth in the Azure front.
So we've been doing backup for Azure native workloads
for Kubernetes, for Azure Stack HCI
and most recently Veeam back up for Microsoft 365.
So a lot of history between our organizations.
Here at Veeam we're very focused on making sure
that we give our customers the confidence to move forward
with their digital services
and to ensure business continuity because
of course data is what is powering our organizations
and you enable that data to be delivered
and we help to protect that data.
- Yeah, love it.
I mean we've been very fortunate to have the partnership
and grateful for the set
of features that we can bring our shared customers.
So let's dive into the topic of the day.
We'd love to talk a little bit more
about business continuity and disaster recovery.
What does that mean for Veeam and for
you, love to get your thoughts on that.
- Sure, so the way I think
about this is there's really kind of three areas
around business continuity
and disaster recovery that we need to think about.
The first is just secondary infrastructure and as customers
if they move into Microsoft Azure
the secondary infrastructure might also be
in Microsoft Azure in another data center or another zone.
But we're seeing customers too, where they still
have infrastructure on premises and they're saying
do I really need to maintain a secondary data center?
And so they're using Microsoft Azure
for that secondary infrastructure.
And regardless of which type of customer that is
we can help support both of those scenarios.
The second part of business continuity is the movement
or portability of data, because
of course we're moving workloads from one area to another
and that might make movement from a physical server
to a virtual server or a virtual server
to Microsoft Azure or even bare metal.
We're seeing people do this
with physical laptops where they want to recover
into a new location.
And actually one of the interesting things we're seeing
sometimes people in other clouds say
I want to continue my business continuity
and they move the workload into Microsoft Azure.
So movement of data is a second big component.
And then the third of course is expertise.
Everyone thinks of the cloud
as resource pooling or resource sharing.
But one of the things that's most exciting to me,
Vamshi is the knowledge pooling.
And Veeam has always been a hundred percent channel company.
We work with partners who help organizations
establish business continuity and best practices
in ensuring that the business is fully resilient.
But business continuity really is those three components
to it, the secondary infrastructure
the movement of data from one place to another
and then the expertise required to enable that to happen.
- Yeah, that's great, Danny, and then, you know
BCDR has kind of come back to the forefront
of a lot of IT administrators and CISOs
and CIOs as we think about the threat
of ransomware and and being able to recover from ransomware.
So what is Veeam sort of vision about this?
What's the long term view here?
How are you approaching the threats that our
customers are facing?
- Well, you know what I hear every single day
ransomware, ransomware, ransomware, it truly is a disaster.
And like other disasters, whether it be floods
or fires or hardware or failures or data corruption
the key for the organization is to make sure
that they have a survivable set
of the data that they can bring back
after that particular event.
And the reason I say this, we just did a recently
a study in 76% of the organizations that we spoke
to had encountered at least one ransomware event
in the last year, 76%.
And I would argue that the one quarter
the 24% may not be aware
of the fact that they encountered ransomware.
So clearly this is a disaster that we need to impact
and we've been working with Microsoft
for the last several years on this introducing capabilities
and features to help organizations.
Because the one thing that I know
as we go forward into 2023 and 2024
we're going to continue to hear about ransomware.
And so we need to think
about ransomware in the context of security and ransomware.
Data protection by itself is not sufficient.
I mean, obviously we do need a copy of the data
but we need to think
about things like verifying recoverability of the data
secure recoverability of the data.
So while many of the things are the same as data protection
there are things that are unique to ransomware
that we do need to consider to make sure
that the business can recover.
- No, that's a great point Danny, that you know
ransomware detection and recovery is about more
than just, you know, data protection.
So if somebody is looking
at leveraging Veeam for these capabilities
what are sort of the top three things that
they should be looking at?
How should a customer, an Azure customer thinking about
Veeam think about, you know, these capabilities?
- Yeah, the first thing Vamshi,
would say would be consistency.
So we protect of course on premises servers
and endpoints via Veeam backup and application.
But they may also have workloads
in the public cloud in Microsoft Azure.
And so we have the ability to protect cloud instances
and file shares and databases.
So you want consistency across those.
And of course you have SaaS applications too
like Microsoft 365.
And so consistency across all
of these different environments is kind of point number one.
Point number two, I can't talk about disaster recovery
and data protection without talking about the 3,2,1 rule
which is three copies of the data
on two different media types and one of which is offsite.
So in Microsoft Azure, and we've actually added a one
and a zero to the end of that
because we believe it's important not only to
have one offsite, but to make sure that one is immutable
and that you have zero errors in that 3,2,1 scenario.
So that's the second thing to think about.
And then the third is verified secure recoverability.
And there's kind of two components
to that that are really interesting.
The verified, we patented this concept
of sure backup almost a decade ago
which is don't just take a backup
verify that that data can be recovered.
And then the second is around the secure
we introduce this concept of security store
which enables you to integrate
with your endpoint detection response or your
antivirus solutions that you don't
reintroduce malware back into the environment.
And so making sure
that you have verified secure recoverability is a key part
of helping our customers to protect their environments.
- Yeah, those are great points, Danny.
Like having that consistency
across all your workloads is so important.
Obviously offsite backups are really key
and you're talking about, you know
the secured and verifiable recovery.
Those are great points.
I'm curious just to dive into one of those
in terms of offsite backup.
Obviously we've partnered together over the years
on Object Storage and using it
as that offsite storage location for Veeam backups.
Can you talk a little bit more
about what those key capabilities are
of Azure Storage that you're able to leverage to
deliver sort of the value
and the requirements that customers have?
- Yeah, absolutely.
When people ask me what is one of the greatest strengths
of Microsoft Azure Blob,
I always say it's their footprint.
You have data centers literally all
over the world and having the data close
to where the workload runs is a key point.
And not just having the data nearby, but the resiliency
in the infrastructure that you've built,
it truly is a testament
to your engineering that they've been able to deliver that.
So having that footprint around the world,
the geographical distribution is kind of
key point number one.
Number two is around the compliance
and governance aspect of this.
I deal with customers all the time
Vamshi that are, you know, in Germany
or in Canada or in the US or wherever it might be
that data sovereignty comes into play.
And so here's where Azure can help in a very meaningful way.
You can make sure that the data that you're protecting stays
within the boundaries or the compliance framework
that you fall within.
And you know, after you get
through the footprint and the compliance, then you get
to all the cost efficiencies that Azure Blob brings.
We have built into our product the ability to auto tier
from hotter tiers of Storage to colder tiers of Storage.
And so not only are we helping
with the compliance and the security and the distribution
but we're helping the customers save money
and do all the lifecycle management that goes
along with that Storage footprint
as they mature applications through the life cycle.
- Yeah, no, that's great.
And you know
as we've kind of continued working together over the years
I think there's some exciting new things coming too.
What are you excited about as our partnership moves forward
in terms of what's coming up?
- I get excited every time I talk with Microsoft Azure
because you guys always have new things coming
but probably what is hottest right now
is the immutability factor.
So we've been looking forward
to this ability to move data offsite
but also to make it immutable.
Because what does ransomware try to do?
It tries to either delete your backups
or it tries to encrypt your backups.
And so with version 12, our next release of our product
we're going to be taking full support
of Azure blob immutability at an object level.
And this will ensure that all
of our customers have survivable copies of their data.
We also have been doing a lot with you around orchestration.
So we have a product called Veeam Disaster Recovery
Orchestrator that is designed to help customers recover
from disasters like ransomware.
And we have many different capabilities built
into that right now.
You can recover from backups,
you can use snapshot based replication,
you can use Storage based replication
continuous data protection.
But there's two really key recoverability
capabilities we're introducing in that.
One is around cloud DR.
We have the ability to help customers recover
and orchestrate complex recovery into the cloud.
And the reason why that's important is it's never
just one VM sheet.
It's like 10 VMs in the, you know
the directory services has to come up first
and then you have to launch your database
and you have to create your networks
and this enables you to recover into Azure.
And the one thing I'll say about Microsoft Azure
your format is faster than all
of the other clouds right now.
And so this cloud DR scenario is especially powerful
with Microsoft Azure.
The second part of it is around clean DR.
One of the hard things to do when you're hit by
ransomware is to find the last known good copy of the data.
It's a very manual process.
And so within that product
what we're doing is we're starting on your last backup
and we're testing it before you bring it back.
We say, is that malware in there?
And if it finds malware, well let's go to the previous one
let's go to the previous one.
And so it automates what historically has been
a very manual process, not only recovery of the data
but clean recovery of the data.
And that's really important because you actually
might need the core infrastructure where
that was hit by ransomware.
That might be a crime scene.
You might not be able to recover there.
So this enables you to recover
into the cloud in a very secure way
while you're doing the forensics on premises.
- Sounds like a great set of features,
especially in terms of
to your point, being able to recover really quickly
and get back up and running 'cause there are mission
critical workloads that are affected for our customers.
So with all of this work coming up, you know
how do our joint customers workloads on premises
how can they start that journey
with Veeam and Azure to the cloud?
- So whether you're trying to do data center consolidation
or create the secondary data center
or getting out of the hardware business
what we're doing is we're helping customers
both in the migration of this
but also ensuring the consistency of data protection
and business continuity as they evolve through, you know
today's generation to the next generation.
You take products like our casting K 10
which is in Azure Kubernetes service.
It helps customers to migrate
from on-prem with OpenShift into Azure Kubernetes Service.
So we enable this transition
for the customer as they move forward
with all of this wide range of enterprise capabilities.
And I love the use cases around this.
We have a customer right now
a large public healthcare organization.
I can't mention who they are, but they were hit
by ransomware on premises and thankfully they had a copy
of that data up in Microsoft Azure.
And even though the ransomware took
out their entire data center, and by the way
that included the Veeam back up and application server
because they had it in the same domain as their workload
which by the way, you should never do that.
We have best practices on how to deploy your infrastructure.
But because they had an offsite immutable copy
up in Microsoft Azure, they were able to bring that
back up online while enabling, you know
the forensics team to come in and investigate
the on premises environment.
So, you know
in the words of this customer, Veeam saved the day.
But that's the type of scenario that we try to enable
help customers move through that digital transformation
and protect their data as they evolve the business forward.
- Yeah, no, that's a great example
and you're right Danny, the more we can do to
help protect our customers and help them recover the better.
This has been a great conversation.
Just to finish up, where should customers go to
learn more about, you know, Veeam and Azure?
- Well, you can always go
to the Veeam website and drop down on solutions.
It says Microsoft plus Veeam.
But let me just throw
up a QR code here online that will take you directly there.
Like I say, it's been a very fruitful partnership, Vamshi.
We love working with you 10 years of experience
and learnings and maturity that we're bringing to market.
So it's been fantastic.
- That's great.
Thank you so much, Danny.
Have a great day.
- Thank you.
You as well.