Transcript
Hi Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data. And we are here talking about some security vulnerabilities people have really, really with their data protection around SaaS. I mean, do you have all your SaaS data protected? Do you even know how many SaaS apps your company is using, uh, and where all that data is exfiltrated out to? And do you need to maybe bring in and protect and make copies of lots of different concerns going on here with protecting your entire data estate? I've got HYCU here to talk about this, so just hang on. Hey. Welcome, Simon. Welcome back to our show. How are things going? Going great. Mike, thank you so much for having me here. All right. We talked before. And obviously the topic du jour is protecting your SaaS data as part of the bigger program of data state. Just let's catch people up a little bit. Who's really in the business of protecting SAS data? But what is the problem with SaaS protection. Don't the SaaS vendors protect it? I mean, why? Why? What's what's the big issue here? I would say that's the biggest myth in the IT industry, Mike. And thankfully it's starting to be remedied. But the reality is there are about 30,000 SaaS services in the world, and there's about ten of them that actually back up and recover their customer's data. You know, we have customers all the time who say, but I called my SaaS vendor and I asked them, do you back up your data? And they said, yes. And I said, yeah, but you asked the wrong question. You asked them if they back up their data, which they do. They just don't back up yours. The shared responsibility model, which was pioneered by AWS and then adopted by all the hyperscalers, made it very clear they're going to prepare and provide a service for you and guarantee you a certain amount of uptime as an SLA, but the data is yours to protect. It's yours, it's yours, it's yours. Uh, and yeah, you know, and to this point, frankly, nobody's really made the investment to back up and recover SAS data. Thankfully that's changing. HYCU has been around now for eight years. You know, sort of yelling and screaming this story. If you remember, I published a book averting the SAS Data Apocalypse years ago on this. And, you know, we're starting to see it in the news a lot more. But the, you know, the SAS issue, the SAS data protection issue remains a major issue and something that not enough people know about. Have we averted the apocalypse yet or is it still is that still danger growing? Because I think you you were you were mentioning earlier to me that, you know, people have even more SAS apps today than they did last time we talked. What what is that? Is that threat growing? Is that risk growing? It's a two there's two sides to the coin. You know the risk is definitely growing. And the reason it's growing is because there are more ransomware attacks than ever before. And there's more SAS apps than ever before. So, you know, we started out with 17,000 SAS apps when we began HYCU on this journey is now over 30,000. In the world. And so those 30,000 SaaS apps. Think of them as threat vectors upon which any ransomware bad actor can go and tear. Down your data and shut you out of what is rightfully yours. So I think on that side, things are absolutely worse. We're seeing more ransomware attacks than ever before. More SaaS services than ever before. On the other side of the coin, so that I'm not all gloom and doom here today, um, we are seeing a lot more recognition of the issue. You know, whether it's Gardner or whoever the different, you know, analytics, analytical and analyst firms are, they're all now writing about the fact that, yes, you do need to protect your SAS data. And it's not just office 365. You know, the average customer today has over 212 different SaaS applications. It's not five. It's not ten. It's 212. And we're talking about 300 person companies here. We're not talking about 10,000 person companies. So it's a real problem. But it is the recognition. Right? I think part of the assumption is if you adopted a SaaS app, you know, ten years ago, it's like, okay, now we're paying someone else to deal with it, I can I don't have to staff that. I don't have to look at that. I don't have to protect that. And we come back around and find out, no, it's still your data. And you mentioned it before. You know, I think what providers do back up their data and they can recover the whole that pie from their perspective. They don't back up your data, as you were saying, and they can't recover your data slice for you. Or if they do, it's not at a granularity or an RPO. It's not at anything that's going to be useful to you. Right? That's right, that's right. Because as we always say, you know, backing up data is the easy part. It's really about the recovery. You know, when you recover data, if it comes to you in in zeros and ones or even better yet, in an Excel file, I've seen that as well. It's completely useless to you. What you want is the ability to recover your data on your terms, and you need to be able to deliver it back to the application it came from in record time. So yeah. It's still a real problem, you know. And I think the way that HYCU has been addressing that, as you know, is to build out our marketplace of integrations so that we can better support this and anyone else in the world. Today we've got over 80 different integrations across on prem, public cloud and SaaS so that customers really can protect a much wider swath of their environment than ever before. And we talked last time, if I'm remembering right, that if you have 200 some apps, maybe more, and you guys have 80 pre-built connectors, that doesn't leave someone in the lurch because you've got some, some low code, uh, AI enabled tooling that they can bring in their other SaaS data state. Absolutely right. Look. You can't get through an interview without talking about AI. As we said. I know it's got to come out. And I think the last time we met, we talked about, uh, the fact that HYCU was partnered with anthropic. And what we've done is we've enriched anthropic so we can support our low code development platform. So effectively now you come into our cloud platform, you discover your environment at the touch of a button. It builds this kind of beautiful visualization of all your on prem, public cloud and SaaS data. And then anything that is covered by us, you pull up a marketplace integration. There's a lot of integrations that you may not or a lot of SaaS services. You actually may not need complete granular protection for. And with those, you can use our low code development platform to add a baseline of protection no matter where your data sets. It's one of the most advantageous aspects of our platform because it is truly future proofed no matter which direction the market goes. You can imagine that because it's truly extensible and is using AI, we can actually continue to generate those AI integrations and keep adding to the marketplace over time. Right in your AI tooling is going to get smarter too. As more people do more integrations, it starts to starts to get to the point where it's. Like, we don't. Know. Yeah, don't don't worry about it. We got it covered. Um, yeah. So So let's talk about some other other news. They're going at HYCU. So that was that was a that was a that was already been gosh it's already been a year since that's been out. Right. You guys do that. Yeah. Uh, so uh, what's been going on since then? I know you guys are doing some deals. You're you're expanding your you're expanding what you're doing. You're you're getting your message across that, uh, you know, data protection isn't just about your, your storage systems and your own apps, but the SaaS apps. So what's happening there? Well, I'll tell you, about a year ago, we embarked on this journey with Dell, and the idea was that Dell, you know, has the best deduplication in the world. Um, and their data domain and PBM are product lines, uh, are just incredible. And so we knew the data domain as a storage facility was fantastic. And we knew so many of our customers had it. We started to work with Dell, and we built an integration to what we call the DX boost ecosystem. And what that means is that whether you've got data domain or you're using the DD boost protocol. HYCU will connect with it. You get all the value of data domain, and you can leverage it across the on prem, public cloud and SaaS. So we thought this was really exciting. We were it was a great technical win to get that out to the market. Well, sure enough Dell comes back to us. We have a great conversation with them, and we built a relationship that ended with us being added to the etc., the Extended Technologies Partnership program. And essentially what this means is any Dell customer can now purchase HYCU from their Dell seller directly. Okay. Phenomenal thing for us. And and really the great thing about it is we're not doing this alone. You know, we're working with David Noy and the Updm team, which is Dell's own software. And it's a wonderful, wonderful software that really does an amazing job of backing up and recovering things like VMware incredibly well. So, so, so the nice thing about this is you've got PBM working with HYCU. Hand in Hand in glove. Um, and, you know, together, I think we're going to take the world by storm and really change the way that people think about next generation data protection vis a vis data domain. So that's very exciting news for us. And, you know, we're thrilled to get to get out there with our colleagues and start telling. Them there's cool stuff going on there. Um, we we were talking about also, um, uh, some of the things that you're doing with, uh, compliance and regulation and governance, uh, you know, Europe keeps moving forward on that. Uh, you know, we mentioned before how it shops weren't saying, hey, I have to I have to back this up. But now there's some actual regulations that say you have to be responsible for your data, no matter where it is. Uh, is that is that playing into what's going on with your with your, uh, marketplace in Europe? Is it coming to the United States? How are people taking that and what are they doing? You know, it's funny actually, I was in a text exchange last night with a good friend of mine who's also the CEO of a tech company, and he said, gosh, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm really stuck with this whole Dora thing, these regulations. You know, he was sort of he was sort of concerned about it. And I said, you know, for once, I actually think these regulations are good. And I'll tell you why. The Dora regulations essentially are reminding us that the data that we used to care so much about on prem needs to be taken care of when it's in SAS or in the cloud as well. And I think the world needed to wake up to this. Um, you know, there's no IT professional in the world who would disagree with the statement that you need to back up the data that's in your servers? But there are lots of them that will say, I don't need to do that with SAS, and I don't need to do that with cloud. So this regulation is is sort of forcing their hand a little bit, which nobody likes. I agree that that's uncomfortable. Um, but it's so important because such a gigantic amount of our data, by our estimates, about 80% is now spread out spread out across SaaS and cloud. And so so the idea here is we've got to make sure that individual companies and customers and organizations and governments all understand the need to get that second or third copy of their data, somewhere that is safe, somewhere that is neutral. Um, one company that really understood this was, uh, Benoit, a good friend of mine, he's on the board of advisory board of IQ as well. And he and I sat down and, you know, this is a really interesting company. They're sort of like the number one, uh, service provider for Atlassian customers. And a phenomenal job. Phenomenal job. Um, and and what's happened with them is they sort of they're, they're running into this in Europe where people are now, they're now being told two things. You should move from Atlassian on prem to Atlassian cloud. And oh, by the way, there's this door framework that has a whole bunch of requirements that you now need to stay in compliance with. So people really struggle with that. And Valentine's started working with HYCU to create an actual vehicle by which customers could log in. They could visualize their data, they could back up all their SaaS data and make it easily recoverable and stay in compliance with all the regulations, all in one package, out of the box. And so the HYCU Dora compliance framework is something that's accessible. You can go to the Valiant's website. You can buy it right from there. You can work with their team and it's fantastic. And the guts of it, the back end of course, is coming from HYCU. It's that great data protection people expect of us specifically focused around not just Atlassian, but all those SaaS and cloud services. Yeah. And you know, when we say cloud services, too, we don't just mean, you know, Salesforce and an Amazon service, we mean databases and things like that. There's it's really interesting, isn't it? The word cloud is such a misnomer really. It's I like to describe it as thousands of raindrops all stuck together Because. Because, you know, each Hyperscaler has upwards of 200 different apps and databases that come as a part of the package. And today, you know, with people having so much care and concern about data lakes, everyone's talking about their data lake. Well, if you're running BigQuery or cloud SQL or any of these things, um, what you really need is a lifeguard. You need someone who's going to reach in and help you to recover your data, stay compliant, orchestrate properly. And that's where Hycu comes in. So I think it's it's a very exciting time to be in our business because we've invested so much and so proactively in all these different areas of data protection. Yeah, yeah. And there's definitely, uh, you know, more emphasis on, uh, you know, getting, uh, hands around your data footprint and your whole data estate where, where the data is living. We mentioned that before. Um, I think I think, you know, I have a question in my mind, and, and maybe it's just a positioning question, but you mentioned our cloud before, and it's sort of the backbone of what you're doing. Could you just put some framework around that? Can you give us a visual of what our cloud actually is? Yeah. You know, one of the things we realized, first of all, our cloud stands for resiliency cloud. And and the idea behind it is that we're going to break down all your data silos and make it easy for you to manage, consume and protect all of your data in one place, no matter where that data sets. So step one of our cloud is you log in, you auto discover your environment. We build a sort of beautiful tree for you that visualizes every department in your organization and tells you what services you're running, what's backed up and what's not. If something is not protected and is not recoverable, you click on it. It pulls up our marketplace of integrations. You can from there you can start to protect department by department, every aspect end to end your entire business. So this is really, really important because all of a sudden we're giving you back control. You know you no longer have to worry about well what about the 30 things that, you know, we didn't consider in this project plan, right? What what IT professionals do with our cloud is they turn it on, they see exactly where all their data is, and they go to work. They start backing it up, they make it recoverable. They set their policies, they set their RPO and their toe so that everybody is aware in the entire company. We've actually got businesses that are taking screenshots. We actually need to build a custom report of this, because people are taking screenshots and printing them out and bringing them to board meetings and giving them to chairmen of boards and banks and saying like, hey, here's our plan. You know, here's how we're protecting everything. And and it's amazing to see. I think it shows you a couple things. It shows you that this really is new. This really is something that wasn't being done before. And it's being done now. And it shows you the need to have that kind of one ring to rule them all, so to speak, where you can sort of visualize and protect all of your data, no matter what it sources. How hard, how hard is it to get to that first view? And you mentioned in our cloud where I see the departments and I and I've got the inventory of my SaaS usage in the state, the state. How do I how soon do I get that sort of view? You can actually go to w-w-w dot com and actually turn on the service right now. Um, it auto discovers it's five clicks of a button and it integrates with your octa or your enter ID, and allows you to really get that power that, that sort of complete visualization. You know, right off the bat. It's a pretty easy to do that. Uh, I was going to ask you if someone wants more information about our cloud or whatever to do. I think you've already gotten us there. But if they just want to do one more step of research before pushing that button and kicking the tires, what would you what would you have them start? Yeah. Go right to w-w-w. Com or contact your local Dell representative. Oh yeah that's right. Because now you can get this from Dell on their on that catalog which is great, great news for a lot of people that they don't. They can just, uh, get this through their existing supplier of technology. Awesome. Uh, this is awesome. So let me just close with a question for you. Uh, Simon. You you been in the market? You've got lots of customers. Where do you see, uh, this this SaaS protection, uh, going in 2025. Does does AI help hack it? Does AI help solve it? Does, uh does does this expand? Does it integrate? Uh, what what happens in 2025 and the broad brush with this. You know, Satya Nadella made this sort of, uh, high octane statement that SaaS is trash and SAS is dead. I don't believe that. I think that SAS is a really, really easy way for people to get their arms around their apps and databases, and delivering things as a service is going to continue. I also believe that, um, with the coming of AI, well, the first thing we're going to start doing is we're going to see ease of use, simplicity. We're going to see a change in the way that UI design, UX design is orchestrated and architected. All those things will happen in the immediate future for sure. And I think the number one thing we're going to see is massive data sets. Massive. Everyone's going to have a data lake, everyone's going to have massive data sets. And the risk of having all of their data in one place is going to be very, very high. And so it's a big target, doesn't it? But that's where the big value is. You got to put it all together to get value. I'll tell you if you've got ten different if data protection vendors, um, kind of sniffing around the edges, it's really hard to manage it all. So I think the other thing we're going to see is some vendor consolidation. I think we're going to see it, you know, from an acquisition perspective. But I also think from a customer perspective, we're going to see a lot of projects where people say, hey, I don't really want a different vendor for to backup and recover every one of my SaaS services or every one of my clouds, you know, somebody just do all this for me. Um, so we're looking forward to that. I that. I think we're already starting to see some of that and excited about what the new year brings. Yeah, I mean, even if even if every vendor of SaaS did their own backups and you were, you were fine. That still doesn't give you a single point of recovery. That actually just keeps that keeps the problem bad. You still want that single point of recovery and the single point of control over that. Yeah. So it does make sense to say, hey, we've got to bring this together. Uh, well, thank you for thank you for coming here today and chatting with us, Simon. I look forward to to hearing more about HYCU this year. Uh, and at some point, you should bring around a demo of our cloud so we can just click through it and see what happens. But, um, do it, uh, looking forward to what's coming up and happy, happy 2025. Mike, thank you so much for having me on. Pleasure to see you again. Take care guys. Check out HYCU.com. That's HYCU. Com and you can get a footprint view of your real estate or real estate today I guess. So check it out.
