[00:00:00] W. Curtis Preston: This week on No Hardware Required, we’re talking about Druva’s Data Resiliency Guarantee. With me as always is my co-host Stephen Manley. Thanks for joining.
Hi and welcome to Druva’s No Hardware Required podcast.
I’m your host W Curtis Preston, AKA Mr. Backup and I have with me Druva’s CTO, Stephen Manley. How’s it going?
[00:00:25] Stephen Manley: I, I am, I am in a mood. I, I like, I like all things that end in anti warranty guarantee. I can’t think of another word that ends in anti and just poker, anti, Jimmy Durante.
[00:00:39] W. Curtis Preston: There’s a Jimmy Durante Boulevard here in San Diego. Just want
[00:00:42] Stephen Manley: Is there really?
[00:00:44] W. Curtis Preston: it’s right next to the San Diego race track.
[00:00:48] Stephen Manley: okay. That makes sense.
[00:00:49] W. Curtis Preston: I wanted to talk about Druva’s new Data Resiliency Guarantee, and this is something that has just been announced.
And I, I think it’s the first in the industry in terms of what we are guaranteeing against. I know that there have been other guarantees that have been offered by other backup companies, but they have generally just focused on ransomware, meaning, you know, if you get ransomware, you’ll be able to recover or something of that nature. We felt that it was important to guarantee a lot more than that. Do you want to talk to that for a minute.
[00:01:30] Stephen Manley: Yeah, I think the, the first thing, any, any customer understands is again, ransomware, huge deal, big deal. We, we get it. But, you know, the whole point of resiliency versus just ransomware is: one resiliency means that, that, you know, you’re gonna get your business back up and running. Not just that you’re, you know, you’re that this little part of your environment is protected from ransomware.
Uh, and then I think the other is the set of threats that affect your business are a lot more than just ransomware. Ransomware’s top of mind. But it’s not the only thing that goes wrong in the world. And so, you know, if you gonna put a guarantee out there and, and you know, you want it to guarantee against something that people really care about, which is, you know, we’re gonna make sure your data’s available for your business.
[00:02:18] W. Curtis Preston: Right. Cuz there are, you know, we, I think the last podcast, we talked about a lot of the new security features that we have come out with. And they are in response to a lot of the new things that are happening to backup and recovery environments. Some of which are not ransomware related. For example, a, a rogue admin, right.
Uh, either a rogue admin or an admin that made an accidental deletion of backups, right? That talks about the human risk. Right? I know we talk about a bunch of different risks to backup data. And I know that we can talk about the cyber risk. That’s mainly about the, the idea of ransomware and other types of cyber attacks.
[00:03:01] Stephen Manley: Certainly one of the ones that I think sometimes. We forget about, because we’re so focused on, on the cyber attacks and, and bad people doing bad things. It’s just that bad things happen. Yeah. Um, hardware fails and, and sometimes people kinda well, uh, yeah, but, but I’m worried about the cyber attack.
All right. But what if your box fails? So your backups are just as gone as, as if someone had, had compromised your environment. Um, you know, natural disasters are still a thing. So I think it’s really important that people understand that, you know, this isn’t just about the cyber attack. It’s about all the bad things that can happen to your data because the whole point of doing data resiliency is that you’re gonna be there no matter what happens, not just in the event of one particular bad thing.
[00:03:49] W. Curtis Preston: I think what you brought up really illustrates the, the reason why we can do this. The other folks can’t guarantee your backup server won’t die because you are the one managing the backup server. Right? And we’re saying we’re handling that risk.
And so what we’re saying is, you know, twofold. One is because we’re managing all of the backup infrastructure. We feel it necessary to offer the guarantee, but. Equally as important because we’re managing all of the backup infrastructure. We can offer the guarantee because we offload all of those concerns that you would normally have to manage onto us.
[00:04:34] Stephen Manley: This may seem like the most boring obvious straightforward thing. But to me is, is, is one of the critical pieces that I’ve met a number of people who have just been, been blindsided by is, you know, we went to recover, let’s say from a ransomware attack, we went to recover from a ransomware attack.
And we found that in fact, our backup servers, our backup storage was not compromised. Yay. Right. The product worked as, as, as, as sort of scoped out. But it turns out we still couldn’t recover critical virtual machine X or really important NAS server Y because we hadn’t gotten a good backup in a week, uh, or we hadn’t, or we hadn’t gotten a good backup in even longer than that.
And, and so we get so focused on how do we deal with the traumatic event that we forget the daily preparedness, the, the making sure that your backups are just working. That needs to happen because I can’t restore something that was never backed up, or I can’t restore something that continually failed when it was trying to back up.
And so, so that’s one of the key pieces when I start looking at this Data Resiliency Guarantee, is just making sure that the, the reliability of the backup is there. So that again, when the bad thing happens, you actually have a backup to recover. And that’s something that, like you said, if I’m running a box, if I’m running my own environment, if I’m deploying my own software and hardware or my own hyper-converged appliance, whatever I’m doing, the failure or success of that backup is on me.
If I buy into Druva, the failure or success on your backup is on Druva. Huge difference in terms of, uh, in terms of your daily management.
[00:06:14] W. Curtis Preston: Right. And, and so that, that, that goes into the, the kinds of things that we’re offering with the guarantee. We’re talking about backup success rate. We’re talking about availability of the system itself and we’re, and we’re, here’s that word again? We talk about immutability. Again, our competitors, they talk about immutability, but because the data’s still being stored in a box that you are physically managing, it’s still possible to easily.
Um, at least if you know what you’re doing, it’s possible to easily undo that immutability. And I know I made a joke in the last one in the last recording that we, that we talked about. Where, you know, even give me something that is possibly the most immutable, which would be like a, a, a right once media, like a, like a DVD. Hand me that DVD and I’ll show you how immutable it is.
Right? The, the problem is that if you have physical access to the servers, immutability doesn’t matter for a hill of beans. Right? So we don’t have that issue. And so we can actually talk about immutability and we can guarantee it. We can talk about confidentiality, making sure that. You know that the data’s not being accessed by third parties.
Um, because again, I think it’s, it just goes back to, we felt that there was so much more to resilience and to backup and recovery and to data protection than simply saying that you’re, um, that you’re protecting against ransomware. There was a whole lot for companies like us to do long before ransomware came along.
Right. We, we have always wanted to have good backup and recovery, uh, you know, uptime and durability and reliability. But I don’t recall any of the vendors that I worked with, throughout all of the years that I’ve been doing this, offering any sort of guarantee that would offer all of those things that we’re offering in the new resiliency guarantee.
[00:08:17] Stephen Manley: and I’ll tell you that confidentiality one, you know, this is for, for the younger listeners, there used to be this joke we’d have that, uh, that, that critical data at your company got lost because the tapes fell off the truck. Now. Now, some of the people listening may not know what a tape is. Uh, I’m hoping we still wish know what trucks are, but, but the whole point was that it was not uncommon that critical data could be leaked through your backups.
And, and again, if, if you’ve got an appliance, if you’ve got something where you’re, or Hey, you’re, you’re, you’re sending ’em to the cloud. If it’s your VPC, if it’s your appliance, You’re the one in charge of making sure your network’s not compromised. You’re the one who’s making sure that you’re not replicating to a wrong location.
You’re the one who’s making sure that someone isn’t getting access to your system or your data. Now, when you back up to Druva. The whole point of Druva is, we’re watching all of that for you to make sure that no one gets access to your data. On top of the fact that we have envelope encryption, which means that you’re the only one with the key to even be able to unlock the data, cetera, et cetera.
Again, it’s just where that responsibility lies, because it just gets harder and harder to, to meet the things that your company needs. If you’re gonna have to do it all by yourself. And so, you know, a lot of this guarantee is just trying to, to, to show people you’re not alone anymore. Right? This isn’t just you against the world.
You know, we can be that army that’s fighting on your behalf.
[00:09:48] W. Curtis Preston: Right. Again, there are ways with some of our competitors to handle some of these issues that we’re addressing with this, uh, guarantee, but they’re all on your shoulders. With us, they’re all on our shoulders. And so we’re able to offer this guarantee that, that they’re simply not able to, uh, offer.
So another word that pops up in this, in this guarantee is durability. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
[00:10:17] Stephen Manley: Again, that’s another one that, that I think people, people throw this term around and, and, and I think they’re a bit casual with it. So all of us know that that. Your cloud providers, AWS, you know, being, being obviously prominent among them have these amazing durability on their storage. S3 is, is incredibly durable.
Meaning that your data, what you wrote into S3 is what you’re gonna be able to pull out of S3. And so what we see is a lot of vendors saying, well, we put our data in S3, therefore. You know, we get that same durability and you need to think about that a little bit more. Um, for a couple of reasons, the first one is, you know, all the AWS is guaranteeing is what you put into my bucket is what you get out.
Uh, if you put the wrong thing in, or, or if your backup software deletes the wrong thing, that’s not AWS’s fault. That didn’t reduce their durability. So you need to think about the fact that the durability is not at the level of the storage. It’s at the level of your backup provider, which as, as Curtis just pointed out a lot of that responsibility is on you to make sure that that data stays durable, where with Druva our long term retention and, and everything we do, tiering across multiple layers of storage. That’s again, all on us. So the durability isn’t just of an S3 bucket, the durability is for the thing you care about, which is your backup. And we make sure that’s durable.
Anytime someone says the data’s durable, but they don’t say the backup is durable. Yeah, you might wanna check to see exactly what they’re, what they’re really guaranteeing.
[00:11:56] W. Curtis Preston: And I think what you said there, again goes back to, I think what I said at the beginning, and perhaps we can finish with this and that is why we’re able to offer this in the first place. Because we’re, you know, we’re not certainly not the first vendor to write backups to S3, certainly not the first backup vendor to do that.
The, the, the difference is. When, when you use a competitive product to write to S3, you have to do all that configuration. You have to configure the S3 account. You have to configure the IAM policies and you have to configure the bucket, so that backups are written in the proper way. You then also have to configure the policies to make sure that the backups that you’re looking for are actually, you know, written to that bucket. All of this is up to you, right. Whereas with Druva you simply tell us, you know, point us to the systems and then tell us how often you want to back them up. And then literally everything else is up to us. And that’s why, um, you know, this speaks to that SaaS advantage.
That’s why we’re, we’re able to offer a guarantee that covers all of the elements of your data resiliency, uh, rather than just ransomware.
[00:13:17] Stephen Manley: One of the things I like to point out. Uh, you know, we’ve got a, a large cloud ops team, cloud operations team. And their entire job is to make sure your backups are safe. So you can hire, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 of the smartest AWS cloud operators in the world to work at your company. Um, but it’s probably a little bit easier just to, to work with Druva and get those 50 smartest cloud operators in the world, working for you by default.
Uh, and, and so when you look at the architecture and you look at the way we’re built, we operate it for you. Again, all the intelligence that goes along there. Architecturally again, we are the ones that are making sure the storage is, is handled properly. We’re the ones making sure that, you know, that, that, that the backups are happening.
We’re monitoring for failures, we’re monitoring for unusual behavior. We’re taking all of that on for you. And, and that is the heart of what a true SaaS solution is. It isn’t just a, a little GUI and that tells you what’s happening with the boxes you’re running. A SaaS solution says, Hey look, We got this, you’ve got bigger fish to fry.
You’ve got bigger business initiatives to worry about. We are gonna take care of this for you. We’re your team. And if, and if, if you look at your solution and you say, they’re a vendor. They’re selling us stuff that we have to run, as opposed to, you know, they’re a partner that, that that’s become part of our team and is solving the problem for us.
You don’t have a SaaS product. You don’t have, you don’t have a data resiliency guarantee. What you have is you have a lot of responsibility on your own hands.
[00:14:53] W. Curtis Preston: I like that. I, I feel the need to channel the guy from Men’s Warehouse. Uh, and I wanna say you’re gonna like the way your backups look, I guarantee it , I don’t know how that I don’t does that work for you?
[00:15:09] Stephen Manley: I, I, you know, this is, I, I believe you, you’ve now found a job in, in marketing now. So this is, this is it. You’re lost to us forever. Curtis.
[00:15:18] W. Curtis Preston: Absolutely. Well, well, well, thanks for, uh, chatting for a while about our new data resiliency guarantee.
[00:15:24] Stephen Manley: This is such a great opportunity. I think to again, for everybody out there listening, this is a chance to, to, to just reset and get yourself in a position for the future. Now’s the time.
[00:15:38] W. Curtis Preston: And thanks again to our listeners. Remember to subscribe so that you never miss an episode. And remember here at Druva there’s no hardware required.
