Transcript
Mike Matchett: Hi, Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data. Today we're talking about something that we've talked about a bit in the past, which is data protection. You probably realize that you should be doing it, you should be doing a better job of it, probably because in this world of threats, we got all sorts of bad actors and vulnerabilities and increasing problems that our business wants, higher availability and more resilience. And yet the world is getting more complicated. So please today to talk with cobalt iron. They've got some unique solutions. Believe it or not. You can be unique still in this space and we're going to find out just what makes cobalt iron so good at ultra secure data protection. So hang on. Hey, Greg, welcome to our show. Greg Tevis: Thank you, mate. Good to be with you. Mike Matchett: So, you know, I've worked with cobalt iron a bit in the past. I'm pretty familiar with what's going on there. So we're going to talk through this a little bit. Just first, before we dive into the details of why cobalt iron is more secure than a lot of other solutions or most other solutions out there. And I know you've got all the details. Just tell us a little bit about how you got involved in data protection. What drew you into this industry and what what gets you excited about it? Greg Tevis: Oh, boy. Well, I'm this is my 42nd year in storage and data protection all from the vendor side. And so I was with IBM for 36 years developing these solutions and cobalt iron. As I looked around the industry five or the last five, ten years, cobalt iron was absolutely the most innovative technology emerging in in enterprise backup that needs innovation. And and so I about five and a half years ago, I retired from IBM to Cobalt to come over to cobalt iron and help drive this beautiful solution to the industry. Mike Matchett: I know I've asked you a lot of questions offline when we get presentations about this and it just goes deeper and deeper and deeper and you guys always have a rock solid answer for everything. Whereas other companies, you kind of scratch the surface a little bit and it's like, Well, I don't know, We make a backup and it goes in the cloud somewhere. So I'll just tell the audience that that like you guys, you can scratch it at cobalt iron as deep as you want and you're not going to find anything that's not been covered. Greg Tevis: So we love being scratched. Mike Matchett: Mike Yeah. On there. So, so I'll just, I'll just preview that. So let's just at a high level, you've got a solution now you're calling Compass and, and Compass does a lot of things, but why do customers just at a high level not why aren't they happy with their existing data protection and why do they look at Compass and say, Oh, that's what we really need? Greg Tevis: Oh, great, great questions. In particular, first of all, I'll start with customers, large and small enterprises. Despite all the innovations by good vendors, all the features and functions, the pain and agony and the reality and the costs and complexity and the security exposures around enterprise backup today are just just awful. They're very painful for customers. Cobalt Diner is a different approach. And as you know, Mike, part of that approach is a new way of delivering the entire architecture of enterprise backup with what we call a zero access, not just zero trust, which everyone's talking about zero access architecture. So there's no access to the entire backup infrastructure or data, which is very unique. Mike Matchett: Yeah. And it's and it is a SaaS model, like partially like it's think of it as a hybrid in my own mind, but you're delivering a lot of the value in a SaaS way, so you're making it simpler for people to get this going. You're sharing values when it comes to, you know, looking at threats and sharing that threat information and analytics. And yet the customer's data is completely zero access to to anybody and including including your own staff. This is this is an interesting thing. Maybe you could just just quickly at a 25,000 foot view, what does that architecture look like? What what how can you do that? Greg Tevis: So as you said, Mike, it is delivered in a SaaS model, but not just the control from the cloud. It's sort of a multiple SaaS model in that also the actual deployment of the infrastructure for backup is delivered in a SaaS model. So it's almost like a, you know, set that you get in, you know, the cable set and you just plug it in and turn it on and it runs from there and it is very unique. So it's not just the backup software that's delivered in a SaaS model, it's the entire backup infrastructure. So the compute, the operating system, the backup storage, the backup network, the backup servers, you know, software, the backup catalog, all of those things, you know, are automated and kept current, governed end to end and managed and and automated. And coming back to a question that you ask asked previous that I might not have fully answered. There's really two reasons customers come to Compass Enterprise simplicity of those backup operations. It's just the easy button for enterprise with that SaaS model and the ongoing experience and then the security. With this architecture, there's just no entry points into that. Not just the backup server software or the backup data. They would tie backup infrastructure, and that's very unique. Mike Matchett: So that mean that that's really what you're describing. You know, this this idea of a cyber shield, I think you're explaining to me and it has a couple parts to it, Just just sketch that out. Greg Tevis: So yeah, and cyber cyber Shield represents all of the the architecture, the security aspects of the compass architecture as well as the security features. And those those include several major areas of cyber protection for customers. First of all, it's that cyber protection where you're there is no access to the backup data or the backup infrastructure or any of. The normal attack patterns and openings and vectors that customers leave open even in the most hardened environments. So cyber protection and then very mature cyber detection. So Compass has a lot of very sophisticated analytics around what patterns it's looking for, not just operational but over time, over over domains. It's very, very mature compared to what we see elsewhere in the industry and then cyber analytics at the end of that. So Compass has an especially in the last year and a half, we've added tremendous cyber analytics. So impact analysis, identifying what systems potentially might have been hit, what kind of attack it was, identifying restore points in time as well as restore objects that probably are suspect and need to be recovered. So all of those features and architecture, that zero access of the architecture, all of those are incorporated in what we call Compass Cyber Shield Shield. Mike Matchett: And just just to try to give the audience a flavor for when look at this of what I'm looking at, it's it's cobalt ion delivering this accelerator vault, this compass accelerator vault as a as a complete package that the client doesn't log into and you guys don't log into. It's it's it's sort of like they pull it into their enterprise and plug it in and then they use it through a SaaS, a SaaS management way. But it is completely isolated already on itself. So there's no way bad actors are getting into it. Greg Tevis: That's correct. It just evaporates all the normal entry points that hackers are looking for. And there's plenty in any even a hardened environment. And so that's what we call zero access. We have zero trust into the Commander Compass commander interface, where you control your policies and visibility into what's happening. But the actual environment and infrastructure for your backups, there's zero access. And with that access simplicity because you're not managing that, you don't have systems, guys, storage guys, backup guys, database guys, all in your backup environment for no real reason. Um, all of those disappear. Mike Matchett: Right? So it's completely packaged. I would say use some other words we've used in the past, like converge or hyper Converge or whatever else. But it's really, it's really just it's probably best to think of it as this thing comes in and it is your backup solution and no one touches it. No one at any point. Now, tell me a little bit about how you've extended that into the cloud. So now you've also got a cloud backup as a service. How does that. Greg Tevis: Absolutely, Mike. So part of the flexibility of Compass and the and the architecture is that we can deploy these accelerator vaults wherever customer workloads are. Traditionally, they've been large or small legacy on site systems, databases, virtual environments, etcetera, of various shapes and sizes. But as we know today, a lot of them are in the cloud, those cloud workloads, and they might be in remote offices, wherever those are. Compass can deploy accelerators and we try to deploy these accelerator vaults as close to the workloads as possible. So on premise, if you have a 100 terabyte database, you probably want that accelerator, pretty hefty accelerator near there to to give that service level. Maybe you have some in one cloud with Azure or or Google or IBM or somewhere and you want accelerators to compass. It doesn't matter. We just can deploy in any of those environments. And so it's very flexible. And then again, all that automation, no matter how it's deployed, is just there and available. Mike Matchett: And managed from one place. So I can deploy the virtual ones and the physical ones and all these things and bring it all together. Found it interesting. I found it interesting, this concept of, you know, this is in the industry, particularly for certain financials, but this idea of sheltered harbor, I think it's going to start to apply to more and more people. Can you tell us like what what sheltered harbor is and how how what you guys are doing meets those needs? Greg Tevis: Yeah, absolutely. Mike. I think as we were updating you, we talked about the tremendous security updates that Compass and cobalt Iron have made in the cobalt has made the compass in the last year and year and a half. We talked about the cyber detection enhancements on already strong cyber detection capability. We talked about zero access as part of the architecture. The additional cyber event impact analysis didn't talk about data governance, might have time to get back to that. But Sheltered Harbor is another extension that we made to Compass. Compass met most of the sheltered harbor vaulting requirements out of the box. We just had to extend it for other requirements around that specification and Compass Cobalt Iron did that extended cobalt compass to do that in the last year and that's a very unique in the industry and all financial organizations are starting to look at that as a standard moving forward. Mike Matchett: Right. And it's it's just pretty interesting how you're there already mean you've got this and now the people are still working on it going to be there. But for someone who's got these data protection solutions in. In a while working established, you know, a lot of Fortune 2000 companies. You already meet these requirements. Greg Tevis: Absolutely. And they're with simplicity is one of the beauties because others, 1 or 2 other solutions out there around this sheltered harbor vaulting. Mike Matchett: I can imagine if you start piecing and parting it together, you're going to end up with a pretty complex, nasty spider web of stuff. Greg Tevis: And it goes back to the architectures that exist in the enterprise backup market. It's they are trying to piece together something that is not natural for the architectures and they're doing a good job with it, but it's not natural. And so there's complexity, there's more complexity actually, in some they introduce security situations, but with Compass it's just natural and simple and part of the architecture. Mike Matchett: All right. Well, there's a lot more to talk about here, Greg. You guys have released a bunch of new stuff. What would you say are some of the highlights of what you have done to actually move this market forward and challenge everyone else? Yeah. Greg Tevis: So it's a cobalt iron compass is a new way of dealing with enterprise backup and its complexities and its costs and its security risks. And so really the major areas that we've been focused on in the last year or two are around security. We went through some of those cloud workload protection. So continuing to build out the protection and driving snapshots of cloud workloads right next to your enterprise on prem or wherever your workloads are. So that's an ongoing extension. Nas Protector We came out, Cobalt Iron came out with a compass protector, which is some tremendous enhancements to a very stale environment that continues to grow. But there's been no innovation in that area. Compass has brought out very recently a protector set of enhancements that really accelerate the the the protection of large environments and and inject with that acceleration. Also more flexibility and more policy driven at the object level capabilities around Nas and Nas protection. And then another area is, is compass Migrator. So this is a capabilities around migrating, allowing customers to migrate from legacy environments. A lot of customers are out there saying, I want to try something new, I have to try something new in the backup world. And they switch and then they find out, Oh, I still have to keep my other my old thing was trying to get rid of and it's like they have dual maintenance and they're in worse situation than they hope to be for just 1 or 2 features that sounded so cool during the marketing presentation. So it's a new experience, and Compass is serious about helping customers with their security risks, their complexities and their costs around enterprise backup. Mike Matchett: And there's a lot there's a lot more things to you know, we don't really have time to get into it. Maybe you can come back, but there's some auditing help that you're giving people. There's some ransomware protection. You mentioned governance before. There's some enterprise search and indexing You're you're working on across all the objects that would that would be in there. And of course, you know, just finish like tell me a little bit about what what you guys think of as immutability. I mean, a lot of people talk about immutability being something, you know, offline tape somewhere, but what do you guys think of it? Yeah, there's. Greg Tevis: Different levels of immutability and a lot of people equate that to immutable storage, which is fine, right? You have immutable storage, you can't get at it. Well, it turns out that you sort of can if you have superuser privileges and most of the solutions or products. But that's fine. All that's good. All these hardening features are great. Our view of of immutability really is multiple levels. Sure it can it can leverage the storage immutability. But more important, it's the immutability of the the data as it comes into the backup environment and every aspect of infrastructure, hardware and software components that manage and maintain that data because that's overlooked also. So some people say, Hey, I'm back up, I'm putting it on immutable storage, but they haven't protected the backup catalog and we see customers where that gets wiped out and you're immutable, storage is not used is not useful. And so it's a really an umbrella and sometimes multiple layers of protection and immutability that are, again, are just part of the compass architecture. Mike Matchett: Right? So, you know, I'm not sure I'm not sure we we did justice here, Greg, to everything that's going on in Compass to distinguish it from other solutions. But folks, you know take a look in that mention Greg where would where would someone go look if they want to learn more about Compass, where would they what would you point them at? Greg Tevis: I think the best place to start is is our website, which is w-w-w-what, Cobalt iron. Com. And Mike, as you mentioned, we love to be scratched because there's a lot of reality behind Compass and there's a lot of a lot of marketing stuff that goes around in this industry. And customers, you know, are sometimes a little confused about what's real, what's just a feature. And sometimes great features are not that useful to customers. The reality with Compass is come and explore. See what it's about. Because we have happy customers. Mike Matchett: Right. And you're starting to cover I mean, you're covering everything and you've got multiple licensing structures depending someone's doing something in different ways and covering a lot of. Greg Tevis: Flexibility. Mike Matchett: A lot of flexibility there. So. Well, thank you so much, Greg. And thank you. Have to have you come back every every so often because you guys are rolling out new stuff all the time. Um. Audience Again, take a look. If you've got data protection needs and you all do, take a look at cobalt iron. So thanks.
