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In case you missed it - the Pure Report is now publishing the audio replay of each month's Coffee Break webinar program, hosted and moderated by our own Andrew Miller and featuring key thought leaders across a range of current topics. This episode features a the March Coffee Break with guest and Data Protection fanatic Jason Walker who joins Andrew to dive into the expansive landscape that is all things Modern Data Protection - it's far more than just backups. They look back at trends, current changes in landscape, and all the ways Pure can help - choose your own adventure if you will. If you want to check out the video replay: https://www.purestorage.com/video/webinars/pure-modern-data-protection-portfolio/6349319688112.html
In this episode, W. Curtis Preston, aka Mr. Backup, and Prasanna Malaiyandi discuss the fundamental technology of replication in data protection systems. They explore what replication is, how it differs from other methods, and why it's not used for everything. They also delve into the differences between synchronous and asynchronous replication and why it matters. The hosts also share news of a backup company called Alcion, which recently raised funding with support from Veeam, a backup company investing in Alcion's focus on Microsoft 365 backups for SMB customers. They also discuss a report from ESG about how cloud backup has evolved. The episode provides insights into the world of data protection and highlights the importance of replication in safeguarding valuable data.Articles discussed in this episode:https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/news/366552363/Veeam-leads-funding-round-for-SaaS-backup-provider-Alcionhttps://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/feature/Cloud-backup-and-disaster-recovery-evolve-toward-maturity
Back after a brief hiatus, we're picking up with a spirited discussion around the changing nature of Data Protection. Hear from two Pure Storage field data protection experts - Ben Kendall and Chris Sprague - all about the history of data protection and different tradeoffs that were required with various media types - tape archive, cloud and even floppy disks (remember those?). Learn what "Modern" in modern data protection really means - greater access to all backup data, ability to restore at VM and application level, and native data services, just to name a few. Pure Storage delivers the best options for protecting and securing all your data and partners with key alliances such as Veeam and Commvault, to develop integrations that make it even easier for you to adapt to the changing demands in data protection. For more info on Pure Storage's end-to-end spectrum of solutions, go to: https://www.purestorage.com/solutions/data-protection.html
Druva's tagline is "Don't worry about your backups. Ever." Since Stephen Manley, our CTO, and W. Curtis Preston, Mr. Backup, have decades of experience with non-Druva backup environments, we asked them to talk about what averages non-Druva backup administrators. Stephen talks about things from his experience on the vendor side, and Curtis talks about trying to make backup systems run in the wild. It's a fun episode that reminds you of all things you don't have to worry about as a Druva customer. Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
A term you may have heard lately is Cloud Infrastructure Resilience. Druva has been focused on resilience for a while now, so this term caught the eye of Stephen Manley, our CTO. What exactly is it? How is it different than cloud availability or cloud redundancy? Is it different? Is this just a new buzzword, or does it have value? Find out in this episode of No Hardware Required. Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
You need an incident response plan before you need an incident response plan. But just exactly what is that? How do you develop one, and what is an incident response team? Where do you find one and hire them? How does cyber insurance figure into this? These and other questions are answered on this episode of No Hardware Required!Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
There are currently two ways to scan for malware in your backups: as you're backing up (before) or as you're restoring (after). Which one is the correct way? Mr. Backup and Stephen Manley, Druva's CTO, discuss this topic, using the decades of experience they both have. They think scanning on restore is the right way, and they explain just why that is. You also learn something new and interesting about Stephen... Who would have guessed? Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
If you're thinking that you're prepared for a ransomware attack because you have a well-documented and well-tested disaster recovery plan, this episode may surprise you. The good news is you've done one of the many steps to get ready for a ransomware recovery. This epsiode focuses on the rest of the steps, which are much more about your cyber response than your DR response. How will you know what to recover? How do you stop the attack while it is in progress? How do you ensure your backups weren't also infected? We answer these and other questions in this episode. Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
Have you ever wondered why you might want to buy Druva via an MSP? If you're an MSP, have you wondered if you should add Druva to your portfolio? We tackle both of these questions on this episode of No Hardware Required, with special guests from our MSP program. Learn what Druva's MSP program is and why it might be useful to you in our latest episode.Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
Ransomware threat actors are coming for your backups. They're either looking to take them out of the equation so you will pay the ransom, or they're looking to use them to exfiltrate data ... so you will pay the ransom. This episode discusses this real threat to your company's data security, and what you can do to stop it. Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
If you're not concerned about the LastPass hack, you probably weren't paying attention. Even if you're not a LastPass customer (like our host, who uses Dashlane), there are some important things we can learn about what to do with your password manager. From a backup perspective, there's a huge lesson about what happens when you roll your own backups. Should you be doing that in this security climate? We don't think so. This and other lessons from the LastPass hack in this exciting episode!Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
The latest in our Backup to Basics series is about making sure hackers don't delete, encrypt, or exfiltrate your backups as part of a ransomware attack. (Our Backup to Basics series reviews topics from Curtis' latest book Modern Data Protection, which you can download at druva.com/e-book.) We talk about how and why hackers are specifically targeting your backup system to either disable it or use it as a source for exfiltration. Then we talk about a number of things you can do to defend your backup system against these attacks. This is our most important episode in a while.
Listen as Jennifer Didier and W. Curtis Preston talk about the importance of backing up your technology. Mr. Preston is an advocate for women and he encourages women to join his team. W. Curtis Preston Bio: W. Curtis Preston (AKA Mr. Backup) has specialized in designing data protection systems since 1993, and has designed such systems for some of the largest organizations in the world. His lively prose and wry, real-world approach has made him a popular author and speaker. He has written four O'Reilly books, the latest of which is Modern Data Protection, published in 2021. He is also the host of BackupCentral.com and its Restore it All podcast. He is now the Chief Technical Evangelist for Druva, the only at-scale SaaS provider of data protection.
In this episode, we discuss new information about the infamous OVH Cloud fire in 2021. It's been about a year and a half since it happened, and we now have reports from the firefighters that were onsite when it happened. Sadly, we still have very little from OVH – and what they have said is BAD. We discuss their only public comment regarding lost backup data, and it's not good. This story is a good one that drives home one of our usual points: you must back up the cloud. Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
About SamSam Nicholls: Veeam's Director of Public Cloud Product Marketing, with 10+ years of sales, alliance management and product marketing experience in IT. Sam has evolved from his on-premises storage days and is now laser-focused on spreading the word about cloud-native backup and recovery, packing in thousands of viewers on his webinars, blogs and webpages.Links Referenced: Veeam AWS Backup: https://www.veeam.com/aws-backup.html Veeam: https://veeam.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Chronosphere. Tired of observability costs going up every year without getting additional value? Or being locked in to a vendor due to proprietary data collection, querying and visualization? Modern day, containerized environments require a new kind of observability technology that accounts for the massive increase in scale and attendant cost of data. With Chronosphere, choose where and how your data is routed and stored, query it easily, and get better context and control. 100% open source compatibility means that no matter what your setup is, they can help. Learn how Chronosphere provides complete and real-time insight into ECS, EKS, and your microservices, whereever they may be at snark.cloud/chronosphere That's snark.cloud/chronosphere Corey: This episode is brought to us by our friends at Pinecone. They believe that all anyone really wants is to be understood, and that includes your users. AI models combined with the Pinecone vector database let your applications understand and act on what your users want… without making them spell it out. Make your search application find results by meaning instead of just keywords, your personalization system make picks based on relevance instead of just tags, and your security applications match threats by resemblance instead of just regular expressions. Pinecone provides the cloud infrastructure that makes this easy, fast, and scalable. Thanks to my friends at Pinecone for sponsoring this episode. Visit Pinecone.io to understand more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by and sponsored by our friends over at Veeam. And as a part of that, they have thrown one of their own to the proverbial lion. My guest today is Sam Nicholls, Director of Public Cloud over at Veeam. Sam, thank you for joining me.Sam: Hey. Thanks for having me, Corey, and thanks for everyone joining and listening in. I do know that I've been thrown into the lion's den, and I am [laugh] hopefully well-prepared to answer anything and everything that Corey throws my way. Fingers crossed. [laugh].Corey: I don't think there's too much room for criticizing here, to be direct. I mean, Veeam is a company that is solidly and thoroughly built around a problem that absolutely no one cares about. I mean, what could possibly be wrong with that? You do backups; which no one ever cares about. Restores, on the other hand, people care very much about restores. And that's when they learn, “Oh, I really should have cared about backups at any point prior to 20 minutes ago.”Sam: Yeah, it's a great point. It's kind of like taxes and insurance. It's almost like, you know, something that you have to do that you don't necessarily want to do, but when push comes to shove, and something's burning down, a file has been deleted, someone's made their way into your account and, you know, running a right mess within there, that's when you really, kind of, care about what you mentioned, which is the recovery piece, the speed of recovery, the reliability of recovery.Corey: It's been over a decade, and I'm still sore about losing my email archives from 2006 to 2009. There's no way to get it back. I ran my own mail server; it was an iPhone setting that said, “Oh, yeah, automatically delete everything in your trash folder—or archive folder—after 30 days.” It was just a weird default setting back in that era. I didn't realize it was doing that. Yeah, painful stuff.And we learned the hard way in some of these cases. Not that I really have much need for email from that era of my life, but every once in a while it still bugs me. Which gets speaks to the point that the people who are the most fanatical about backing things up are the people who have been burned by not having a backup. And I'm fortunate in that it wasn't someone else's data with which I had been entrusted that really cemented that lesson for me.Sam: Yeah, yeah. It's a good point. I could remember a few years ago, my wife migrated a very aging, polycarbonate white Mac to one of the shiny new aluminum ones and thought everything was good—Corey: As the white polycarbonate Mac becomes yellow, then yeah, all right, you know, it's time to replace it. Yeah. So yeah, so she wiped the drive, and what happened?Sam: That was her moment where she learned the value and importance of backup unless she backs everything up now. I fortunately have never gone through it. But I'm employed by a backup vendor and that's why I care about it. But it's incredibly important to have, of course.Corey: Oh, yes. My spouse has many wonderful qualities, but one that drives me slightly nuts is she's something of a digital packrat where her hard drives on her laptop will periodically fill up. And I used to take the approach of oh, you can be more efficient and do the rest. And I realized no, telling other people they're doing it wrong is generally poor practice, whereas just buying bigger drives is way easier. Let's go ahead and do that. It's small price to pay for domestic tranquility.And there's a lesson in that. We can map that almost perfectly to the corporate world where you folks tend to operate in. You're not doing home backup, last time I checked; you are doing public cloud backup. Actually, I should ask that. Where do you folks start and where do you stop?Sam: Yeah, no, it's a great question. You know, we started over 15 years ago when virtualization, specifically VMware vSphere, was really the up-and-coming thing, and, you know, a lot of folks were there trying to utilize agents to protect their vSphere instances, just like they were doing with physical Windows and Linux boxes. And, you know, it kind of got the job done, but was it the best way of doing it? No. And that's kind of why Veeam was pioneered; it was this agentless backup, image-based backup for vSphere.And, of course, you know, in the last 15 years, we've seen lots of transitions, of course, we're here at Screaming in the Cloud, with you, Corey, so AWS, as well as a number of other public cloud vendors we can help protect as well, as a number of SaaS applications like Microsoft 365, metadata and data within Salesforce. So, Veeam's really kind of come a long way from just virtual machines to really taking a global look at the entirety of modern environments, and how can we best protect each and every single one of those without trying to take a square peg and fit it in a round hole?Corey: It's a good question and a common one. We wind up with an awful lot of folks who are confused by the proliferation of data. And I'm one of them, let's be very clear here. It comes down to a problem where backups are a multifaceted, deep problem, and I don't think that people necessarily think of it that way. But I take a look at all of the different, even AWS services that I use for my various nonsense, and which ones can be used to store data?Well, all of them. Some of them, you have to hold it in a particularly wrong sort of way, but they all store data. And in various contexts, a lot of that data becomes very important. So, what service am I using, in which account am I using, and in what region am I using it, and you wind up with data sprawl, where it's a tremendous amount of data that you can generally only track down by looking at your bills at the end of the month. Okay, so what am I being charged, and for what service?That seems like a good place to start, but where is it getting backed up? How do you think about that? So, some people, I think, tend to ignore the problem, which we're seeing less and less, but other folks tend to go to the opposite extreme and we're just going to backup absolutely everything, and we're going to keep that data for the rest of our natural lives. It feels to me that there's probably an answer that is more appropriate somewhere nestled between those two extremes.Sam: Yeah, snapshot sprawl is a real thing, and it gets very, very expensive very, very quickly. You know, your snapshots of EC2 instances are stored on those attached EBS volumes. Five cents per gig per month doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're dealing with thousands of snapshots for thousands machines, it gets out of hand very, very quickly. And you don't know when to delete them. Like you say, folks are just retaining them forever and dealing with this unfortunate bill shock.So, you know, where to start is automating the lifecycle of a snapshot, right, from its creation—how often do we want to be creating them—from the retention—how long do we want to keep these for—and where do we want to keep them because there are other storage services outside of just EBS volumes. And then, of course, the ultimate: deletion. And that's important even from a compliance perspective as well, right? You've got to retain data for a specific number of years, I think healthcare is like seven years, but then you've—Corey: And then not a day more.Sam: Yeah, and then not a day more because that puts you out of compliance, too. So, policy-based automation is your friend and we see a number of folks building these policies out: gold, silver, bronze tiers based on criticality of data compliance and really just kind of letting the machine do the rest. And you can focus on not babysitting backup.Corey: What was it that led to the rise of snapshots? Because back in my very early days, there was no such thing. We wound up using a bunch of servers stuffed in a rack somewhere and virtualization was not really in play, so we had file systems on physical disks. And how do you back that up? Well, you have an agent of some sort that basically looks at all the files and according to some ruleset that it has, it copies them off somewhere else.It was slow, it was fraught, it had a whole bunch of logic that was pushed out to the very edge, and forget about restoring that data in a timely fashion or even validating a lot of those backups worked other than via checksum. And God help you if you had data that was constantly in the state of flux, where anything changing during the backup run would leave your backups in an inconsistent state. That on some level seems to have largely been solved by snapshots. But what's your take on it? You're a lot closer to this part of the world than I am.Sam: Yeah, snapshots, I think folks have turned to snapshots for the speed, the lack of impact that they have on production performance, and again, just the ease of accessibility. We have access to all different kinds of snapshots for EC2, RDS, EFS throughout the entirety of our AWS environment. So, I think the snapshots are kind of like the default go-to for folks. They can help deliver those very, very quick RPOs, especially in, for example, databases, like you were saying, that change very, very quickly and we all of a sudden are stranded with a crash-consistent backup or snapshot versus an application-consistent snapshot. And then they're also very, very quick to recover from.So, snapshots are very, very appealing, but they absolutely do have their limitations. And I think, you know, it's not a one or the other; it's that they've got to go hand-in-hand with something else. And typically, that is an image-based backup that is stored in a separate location to the snapshot because that snapshot is not independent of the disk that it is protecting.Corey: One of the challenges with snapshots is most of them are created in a copy-on-write sense. It takes basically an instant frozen point in time back—once upon a time when we ran MySQL databases on top of the NetApp Filer—which works surprisingly well—we would have a script that would automatically quiesce the database so that it would be in a consistent state, snapshot the file and then un-quiesce it, which took less than a second, start to finish. And that was awesome, but then you had this snapshot type of thing. It wasn't super portable, it needed to reference a previous snapshot in some cases, and AWS takes the same approach where the first snapshot it captures every block, then subsequent snapshots wind up only taking up as much size as there have been changes since the first snapshots. So, large quantities of data that generally don't get access to a whole lot have remarkably small, subsequent snapshot sizes.But that's not at all obvious from the outside, and looking at these things. They're not the most portable thing in the world. But it's definitely the direction that the industry has trended in. So, rather than having a cron job fire off an AWS API call to take snapshots of my volumes as a sort of the baseline approach that we all started with, what is the value proposition that you folks bring? And please don't say it's, “Well, cron jobs are hard and we have a friendlier interface for that.”Sam: [laugh]. I think it's really starting to look at the proliferation of those snapshots, understanding what they're good at, and what they are good for within your environment—as previously mentioned, low RPOs, low RTOs, how quickly can I take a backup, how frequently can I take a backup, and more importantly, how quickly can I restore—but then looking at their limitations. So, I mentioned that they were not independent of that disk, so that certainly does introduce a single point of failure as well as being not so secure. We've kind of touched on the cost component of that as well. So, what Veeam can come in and do is then take an image-based backup of those snapshots, right—so you've got your initial snapshot and then your incremental ones—we'll take the backup from that snapshot, and then we'll start to store that elsewhere.And that is likely going to be in a different account. We can look at the Well-Architected Framework, AWS deeming accounts as a security boundary, so having that cross-account function is critically important so you don't have that single point of failure. Locking down with IAM roles is also incredibly important so we haven't just got a big wide open door between the two. But that data is then stored in a separate account—potentially in a separate region, maybe in the same region—Amazon S3 storage. And S3 has the wonderful benefit of being still relatively performant, so we can have quick recoveries, but it is much, much cheaper. You're dealing with 2.3 cents per gig per month, instead of—Corey: To start, and it goes down from there with sizeable volumes.Sam: Absolutely, yeah. You can go down to S3 Glacier, where you're looking at, I forget how many points and zeros and nines it is, but it's fractions of a cent per gig per month, but it's going to take you a couple of days to recover that da—Corey: Even infrequent access cuts that in half.Sam: Oh yeah.Corey: And let's be clear, these are snapshot backups; you probably should not be accessing them on a consistent, sustained basis.Sam: Well, exactly. And this is where it's kind of almost like having your cake and eating it as well. Compliance or regulatory mandates or corporate mandates are saying you must keep this data for this length of time. Keeping that—you know, let's just say it's three years' worth of snapshots in an EBS volume is going to be incredibly expensive. What's the likelihood of you needing to recover something from two years—actually, even two months ago? It's very, very small.So, the performance part of S3 is, you don't need to take it as much into consideration. Can you recover? Yes. Is it going to take a little bit longer? Absolutely. But it's going to help you meet those retention requirements while keeping your backup bill low, avoiding that bill shock, right, spending tens and tens of thousands every single month on snapshots. This is what I mean by kind of having your cake and eating it.Corey: I somewhat recently have had a client where EBS snapshots are one of the driving costs behind their bill. It is one of their largest single line items. And I want to be very clear here because if one of those people who listen to this and thinking, “Well, hang on. Wait, they're telling stories about us, even though they're not naming us by name?” Yeah, there were three of you in the last quarter.So, at that point, it becomes clear it is not about something that one individual company has done and more about an overall driving trend. I am personalizing it a little bit by referring to as one company when there were three of you. This is a narrative device, not me breaking confidentiality. Disclaimer over. Now, when you talk to people about, “So, tell me why you've got 80 times more snapshots than you do EBS volumes?” The answer is as, “Well, we wanted to back things up and we needed to get hourly backups to a point, then daily backups, then monthly, and so on and so forth. And when this was set up, there wasn't a great way to do this natively and we don't always necessarily know what we need versus what we don't. And the cost of us backing this up, well, you can see it on the bill. The cost of us deleting too much and needing it as soon as we do? Well, that cost is almost incalculable. So, this is the safe way to go.” And they're not wrong in anything that they're saying. But the world has definitely evolved since then.Sam: Yeah, yeah. It's a really great point. Again, it just folds back into my whole having your cake and eating it conversation. Yes, you need to retain data; it gives you that kind of nice, warm, cozy feeling, it's a nice blanket on a winter's day that that data, irrespective of what happens, you're going to have something to recover from. But the question is does that need to be living on an EBS volume as a snapshot? Why can't it be living on much, much more cost-effective storage that's going to give you the warm and fuzzies, but is going to make your finance team much, much happier [laugh].Corey: One of the inherent challenges I think people have is that snapshots by themselves are almost worthless, in that I have an EBS snapshot, it is sitting there now, it's costing me an undetermined amount of money because it's not exactly clear on a per snapshot basis exactly how large it is, and okay, great. Well, I'm looking for a file that was not modified since X date, as it was on this time. Well, great, you're going to have to take that snapshot, restore it to a volume and then go exploring by hand. Oh, it was the wrong one. Great. Try it again, with a different one.And after, like, the fifth or six in a row, you start doing a binary search approach on this thing. But it's expensive, it's time-consuming, it takes forever, and it's not a fun user experience at all. Part of the problem is it seems that historically, backup systems have no context or no contextual awareness whatsoever around what is actually contained within that backup.Sam: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you kind of highlighted two of the steps. It's more like a ten-step process to do, you know, granular file or folder-level recovery from a snapshot, right? You've got to, like you say, you've got to determine the point in time when that, you know, you knew the last time that it was around, then you're going to have to determine the volume size, the region, the OS, you're going to have to create an EBS volume of the same size, region, from that snapshot, create the EC2 instance with the same OS, connect the two together, boot the EC2 instance, mount the volume search for the files to restore, download them manually, at which point you have your file back. It's not back in the machine where it was, it's now been downloaded locally to whatever machine you're accessing that from. And then you got to tear it all down.And that is again, like you say, predicated on the fact that you knew exactly that that was the right time. It might not be and then you have to start from scratch from a different point in time. So, backup tooling from backup vendors that have been doing this for many, many years, knew about this problem long, long ago, and really seek to not only automate the entirety of that process but make the whole e-discovery, the search, the location of those files, much, much easier. I don't necessarily want to do a vendor pitch, but I will say with Veeam, we have explorer-like functionality, whereby it's just a simple web browser. Once that machine is all spun up again, automatic process, you can just search for your individual file, folder, locate it, you can download it locally, you can inject it back into the instance where it was through Amazon Kinesis or AWS Kinesis—I forget the right terminology for it; some of its AWS, some of its Amazon.But by-the-by, the whole recovery process, especially from a file or folder level, is much more pain-free, but also much faster. And that's ultimately what people care about how reliable is my backup? How quickly can I get stuff online? Because the time that I'm down is costing me an indescribable amount of time or money.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or if you are looking to go beyond just caching and unlocking your data's full potential, these folks have you covered. Redis Enterprise is the go-to managed Redis service that allows you to reimagine how your geo-distributed applications process, deliver, and store data. To learn more from the experts in Redis how to be real-time, right now, from anywhere, visit redis.com/duckbill. That's R - E - D - I - S dot com slash duckbill.Corey: Right, the idea of RPO versus RTO: recovery point objective and recovery time objective. With an RPO, it's great, disaster strikes right now, how long is acceptable to it have been since the last time we backed up data to a restorable point? Sometimes it's measured in minutes, sometimes it's measured in fractions of a second. It really depends on what we're talking about. Payments databases, that needs to be—the RPO is basically an asymptotically approaches zero.The RTO is okay, how long is acceptable before we have that data restored and are back up and running? And that is almost always a longer time, but not always. And there's a different series of trade-offs that go into that. But both of those also presuppose that you've already dealt with the existential question of is it possible for us to recover this data. And that's where I know that you are obviously—you have a position on this that is informed by where you work, but I don't, and I will call this out as what I see in the industry: AWS backup is compelling to me except for one fatal flaw that it has, and that is it starts and stops with AWS.I am not a proponent of multi-cloud. Lord knows I've gotten flack for that position a bunch of times, but the one area where it makes absolute sense to me is backups. Have your data in a rehydrate-the-business level state backed up somewhere that is not your primary cloud provider because you're otherwise single point of failure-ing through a company, through the payment instrument you have on file with that company, in the blast radius of someone who can successfully impersonate you to that vendor. There has to be a gap of some sort for the truly business-critical data. Yes, egress to other providers is expensive, but you know what also is expensive? Irrevocably losing the data that powers your business. Is it likely? No, but I would much rather do it than have to justify why I'm not doing it.Sam: Yeah. Wasn't likely that I was going to win that 2 billion or 2.1 billion on the Powerball, but [laugh] I still play [laugh]. But I understand your standpoint on multi-cloud and I read your newsletters and understand where you're coming from, but I think the reality is that we do live in at least a hybrid cloud world, if not multi-cloud. The number of organizations that are sole-sourced on a single cloud and nothing else is relatively small, single-digit percentage. It's around 80-some percent that are hybrid, and the remainder of them are your favorite: multi-cloud.But again, having something that is one hundred percent sole-source on a single platform or a single vendor does expose you to a certain degree of risk. So, having the ability to do cross-platform backups, recoveries, migrations, for whatever reason, right, because it might not just be a disaster like you'd mentioned, it might also just be… I don't know, the company has been taken over and all of a sudden, the preference is now towards another cloud provider and I want you to refactor and re-architect everything for this other cloud provider. If all that data is locked into one platform, that's going to make your job very, very difficult. So, we mentioned at the beginning of the call, Veeam is capable of protecting a vast number of heterogeneous workloads on different platforms, in different environments, on-premises, in multiple different clouds, but the other key piece is that we always use the same backup file format. And why that's key is because it enables portability.If I have backups of EC2 instances that are stored in S3, I could copy those onto on-premises disk, I could copy those into Azure, I could do the same with my Azure VMs and store those on S3, or again, on-premises disk, and any other endless combination that goes with that. And it's really kind of centered around, like control and ownership of your data. We are not prescriptive by any means. Like, you do what is best for your organization. We just want to provide you with the toolset that enables you to do that without steering you one direction or the other with fee structures, disparate feature sets, whatever it might be.Corey: One of the big challenges that I keep seeing across the board is just a lack of awareness of what the data that matters is, where you see people backing up endless fleets of web server instances that are auto-scaled into existence and then removed, but you can create those things at will; why do you care about the actual data that's on these things? It winds up almost at the library management problem, on some level. And in that scenario, snapshots are almost certainly the wrong answer. One thing that I saw previously that really changed my way of thinking about this was back many years ago when I was working at a startup that had just started using GitHub and they were paying for a third-party service that wound up backing up Git repos. Today, that makes a lot more sense because you have a bunch of other stuff on GitHub that goes well beyond the stuff contained within Git, but at the time, it was silly. It was, why do that? Every Git clone is a full copy of the entire repository history. Just grab it off some developer's laptop somewhere.It's like, “Really? You want to bet the company, slash your job, slash everyone else's job on that being feasible and doable or do you want to spend the 39 bucks a month or whatever it was to wind up getting that out the door now so we don't have to think about it, and they validate that it works?” And that was really a shift in my way of thinking because, yeah, backing up things can get expensive when you have multiple copies of the data living in different places, but what's really expensive is not having a company anymore.Sam: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We can tie it back to my insurance dynamic earlier where, you know, it's something that you know that you have to have, but you don't necessarily want to pay for it. Well, you know, just like with insurances, there's multiple different ways to go about recovering your data and it's only in crunch time, do you really care about what it is that you've been paying for, right, when it comes to backup?Could you get your backup through a git clone? Absolutely. Could you get your data back—how long is that going to take you? How painful is that going to be? What's going to be the impact to the business where you're trying to figure that out versus, like you say, the 39 bucks a month, a year, or whatever it might be to have something purpose-built for that, that is going to make the recovery process as quick and painless as possible and just get things back up online.Corey: I am not a big fan of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt approach, but I do practice what I preach here in that yeah, there is a real fear against data loss. It's not, “People are coming to get you, so you absolutely have to buy whatever it is I'm selling,” but it is something you absolutely have to think about. My core consulting proposition is that I optimize the AWS bill. And sometimes that means spending more. Okay, that one S3 bucket is extremely important to you and you say you can't sustain the loss of it ever so one zone is not an option. Where is it being backed up? Oh, it's not? Yeah, I suggest you spend more money and back that thing up if it's as irreplaceable as you say. It's about doing the right thing.Sam: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting, and it's going to be hard for you to prove the value of doing that when you are driving their bill up when you're trying to bring it down. But again, you have to look at something that's not itemized on that bill, which is going to be the impact of downtime. I'm not going to pretend to try and recall the exact figures because it also varies depending on your business, your industry, the size, but the impact of downtime is massive financially. Tens of thousands of dollars for small organizations per hour, millions and millions of dollars per hour for much larger organizations. The backup component of that is relatively small in comparison, so having something that is purpose-built, and is going to protect your data and help mitigate that impact of downtime.Because that's ultimately what you're trying to protect against. It is the recovery piece that you're buying is the most important piece. And like you, I would say, at least be cognizant of it and evaluate your options and what can you live with and what can you live without.Corey: That's the big burning question that I think a lot of people do not have a good answer to. And when you don't have an answer, you either backup everything or nothing. And I'm not a big fan of doing either of those things blindly.Sam: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is why we see varying different backup options as well, you know? You're not going to try and apply the same data protection policies each and every single workload within your environment because they've all got different types of workload criticality. And like you say, some of them might not even need to be backed up at all, just because they don't have data that needs to be protected. So, you need something that is going to be able to be flexible enough to apply across the entirety of your environment, protect it with the right policy, in terms of how frequently do you protect it, where do you store it, how often, or when are you eventually going to delete that and apply that on a workload by workload basis. And this is where the joy of things like tags come into play as well.Corey: One last thing I want to bring up is that I'm a big fan of watching for companies saying the quiet part out loud. And one area in which they do this—because they're forced to by brevity—is in the title tag of their website. I pull up veeam.com and I hover over the tab in my browser, and it says, “Veeam Software: Modern Data Protection.”And I want to call that out because you're not framing it as explicitly backup. So, the last topic I want to get into is the idea of security. Because I think it is not fully appreciated on a lived-experience basis—although people will of course agree to this when they're having ivory tower whiteboard discussions—that every place your data lives is a potential for a security breach to happen. So, you want to have your data living in a bunch of places ideally, for backup and resiliency purposes. But you also want it to be completely unworkable or illegible to anyone who is not authorized to have access to it.How do you balance those trade-offs yourself given that what you're fundamentally saying is, “Trust us with your Holy of Holies when it comes to things that power your entire business?” I mean, I can barely get some companies to agree to show me their AWS bill, let alone this is the data that contains all of this stuff to destroy our company.Sam: Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. Before I explicitly answer that piece, I will just go to say that modern data protection does absolutely have a security component to it, and I think that backup absolutely needs to be a—I'm going to say this an air quotes—a “first class citizen” of any security strategy. I think when people think about security, their mind goes to the preventative, like how do we keep these bad people out?This is going to be a bit of the FUD that you love, but ultimately, the bad guys on the outside have an infinite number of attempts to get into your environment and only have to be right once to get in and start wreaking havoc. You on the other hand, as the good guy with your cape and whatnot, you have got to be right each and every single one of those times. And we as humans are fallible, right? None of us are perfect, and it's incredibly difficult to defend against these ever-evolving, more complex attacks. So backup, if someone does get in, having a clean, verifiable, recoverable backup, is really going to be the only thing that is going to save your organization, should that actually happen.And what's key to a secure backup? I would say separation, isolation of backup data from the production data, I would say utilizing things like immutability, so in AWS, we've got Amazon S3 object lock, so it's that write once, read many state for whatever retention period that you put on it. So, the data that they're seeking to encrypt, whether it's in production or in their backup, they cannot encrypt it. And then the other piece that I think is becoming more and more into play, and it's almost table stakes is encryption, right? And we can utilize things like AWS KMS for that encryption.But that's there to help defend against the exfiltration attempts. Because these bad guys are realizing, “Hey, people aren't paying me my ransom because they're just recovering from a clean backup, so now I'm going to take that backup data, I'm going to leak the personally identifiable information, trade secrets, or whatever on the internet, and that's going to put them in breach compliance and give them a hefty fine that way unless they pay me my ransom.” So encryption, so they can't read that data. So, not only can they not change it, but they can't read it is equally important. So, I would say those are the three big things for me on what's needed for backup to make sure it is clean and recoverable.Corey: I think that is one of those areas where people need to put additional levels of thought in. I think that if you have access to the production environment and have full administrative rights throughout it, you should definitionally not—at least with that account and ideally not you at all personally—have access to alter the backups. Full stop. I would say, on some level, there should not be the ability to alter backups for some particular workloads, the idea being that if you get hit with a ransomware infection, it's pretty bad, let's be clear, but if you can get all of your data back, it's more of an annoyance than it is, again, the existential business crisis that becomes something that redefines you as a company if you still are a company.Sam: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we can turn to a number of organizations. Code Spaces always springs to mind for me, I love Code Spaces. It was kind of one of those precursors to—Corey: It's amazing.Sam: Yeah, but they were running on AWS and they had everything, production and backups, all stored in one account. Got into the account. “We're going to delete your data if you don't pay us this ransom.” They were like, “Well, we're not paying you the ransoms. We got backups.” Well, they deleted those, too. And, you know, unfortunately, Code Spaces isn't around anymore. But it really kind of goes to show just the importance of at least logically separating your data across different accounts and not having that god-like access to absolutely everything.Corey: Yeah, when you talked about Code Spaces, I was in [unintelligible 00:32:29] talking about GitHub Codespaces specifically, where they have their developer workstations in the cloud. They're still very much around, at least last time I saw unless you know something I don't.Sam: Precursor to that. I can send you the link—Corey: Oh oh—Sam: You can share it with the listeners.Corey: Oh, yes, please do. I'd love to see that.Sam: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.Corey: And it's been a long and strange time in this industry. Speaking of links for the show notes, I appreciate you're spending so much time with me. Where can people go to learn more?Sam: Yeah, absolutely. I think veeam.com is kind of the first place that people gravitate towards. Me personally, I'm kind of like a hands-on learning kind of guy, so we always make free product available.And then you can find that on the AWS Marketplace. Simply search ‘Veeam' through there. A number of free products; we don't put time limits on it, we don't put feature limitations. You can backup ten instances, including your VPCs, which we actually didn't talk about today, but I do think is important. But I won't waste any more time on that.Corey: Oh, configuration of these things is critically important. If you don't know how everything was structured and built out, you're basically trying to re-architect from first principles based upon archaeology.Sam: Yeah [laugh], that's a real pain. So, we can help protect those VPCs and we actually don't put any limitations on the number of VPCs that you can protect; it's always free. So, if you're going to use it for anything, use it for that. But hands-on, marketplace, if you want more documentation, want to learn more, want to speak to someone veeam.com is the place to go.Corey: And we will, of course, include that in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking so much time to speak with me today. It's appreciated.Sam: Thank you, Corey, and thanks for all the listeners tuning in today.Corey: Sam Nicholls, Director of Public Cloud at Veeam. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry insulting comment that takes you two hours to type out but then you lose it because you forgot to back it up.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
In honor of Halloween, we recorded an episode where we talk about the things in technology that scare us. (We know it's a little late, but we recorded it in October.) Both Stephen and Curtis talk about one thing that keeps them up at night. Spoiler alert: they're backup-related. Both of them are about things that people believe or think that don't match reality, or a reality that's scary that many don't seem to acknowledge. As usual, you learn a few things while having fun. Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
We spend a lot of time and energy to protect our businesses and our client's businesses from threat actors, natural disasters and even user error. I'm pretty sure we don't spend enough time focusing on the backups of the data that we are trying to protect. Join me as I sit down with W. Curtis Preston of Druva to discuss his passion around business continuity and backups. Be sure to listen for the URL thrown out to download a free ebook, "Modern Data Protection. (an O'Reilly publication)"
As we continue our "Backup to Basics" series, we touch on one of the most important questions of all: what is backup and restore? (And how does it different than archive and retrieve?) The answer to these questions are both simple and nuanced. It's important to have a solid understanding of backup and restore in order to understand how archive is different. Reminder: You can download a complimentary copy of Mr. Backup's latest book, Modern Data Protection here: https://druva.com/ebook.
MONEY FM 89.3 - Prime Time with Howie Lim, Bernard Lim & Finance Presenter JP Ong
Ransomware remains a top cyber risk for organisations globally while business email compromise incidents are on the rise and will increase further in the 'deep fake' era. Authorities and companies are pulling out all the stops to tackle cybercriminals and central to these all is data protection. In the Spotlight, Prime Time's Bharati Jagdish speaks with Matthew Oostveen, Chief Technology Officer & Vice President, Asia Pacific & Japan, Pure Storage about modern data protection.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We get right to the heart of the matter in this next episode of our Backup to Basics series. (See what we did there?). Why do we even back up? It is expensive, time consuming, and no one seems to want to be in charge of it, so we do we even do it anyway. This episode is based on Chapter 1 of W. Curtis Preston's latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection, which you can download for free courtesy of Curtis' employer, Druva. Curtis believes there are three categories of reasons: human disasters, mechanical failures, and natural disasters. We talk about the odds of each of these happening, and how that's changed over the years. The episode also starts with Mr. Backup telling the story of how he got into backup in the first place, as well as telling the story of the first time he lost data. It's the whole reason he ended up dedicating his career to backup, and he learned a lot of things from that failure. Here are the links to other episodes we discuss in this episode of the pod. https://www.backupcentral.com/real-life-hurricane-disaster-recover-story/ (Real Life Hurricane Disaster Recovery Story) https://www.backupcentral.com/disaster-recovery-after-a-hurricane-a-first-hand-account-restore-it-all-podcast-82/ (Disaster Recovery after a hurricane - a First Hand Account) https://www.backupcentral.com/stop-ransomware-attacks-in-seconds-restore-it-all-podcast-126/ (Stop Ransomware Attacks in Seconds). (Includes the Derecho story)
MONEY FM 89.3 - Prime Time with Howie Lim, Bernard Lim & Finance Presenter JP Ong
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. As ransomware continues to be a growing cybersecurity threat to businesses, In the Spotlight on Prime Time, Bharati Jagdish speaks with Jacqueline Jayne, Security Awareness Advocate, KnowBe4 on how businesses can take preventive measures to mitigate the risks and also be prepared to deal with a ransomware incident, before it happens.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
If you're not including RTO & RPO in your conversations when talking about your data protection and resiliency systems, you are missing a core concept. We only back up so we can restore, and we only restore what matters to the organization. This podcast makes the point that no matter how fast your restore is, and no matter how much data you lose (or don't), your recovery will be a failure if it doesn't match the expectations of the stakeholder. Learn about RTO and RPO, and how they need to be agreed upon before hand in order to have a successful recovery – and to get more funding for your data protection system.Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
A recent survey by IDC of over 500 companies of various industries and sizes revealed some shocking results, starting with the fact that 47% of them have successfully attacked by ransomware, and 50% of those affected by ransomware also lost data. What's even more shocking is many of them seem to have high confidence in their abilities to defend against and respond to the ransomware threat. Listen as Mr. Backup (W. Curtis Preston) and Stephen Manley (Druva's CTO) discuss this fascinating survey and its accompanying whitepaper. Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
Most "cloud" backup services are based on lifting and shifting a legacy backup product into the cloud. Druva reps discuss this a lot, but they often get pushback with phrases like "why do I care how the vendor makes my backups happen?" This episode answers why you should care very much. It affects your flexibility, cost, and risk – all for the worst. All SaaS services should be delivered in such a way that allows a customer to consume them however and whenever they want, while the technology and cost scale up and down based on their needs. That's simply not possible with a lift-and-shift system, and this episode explains why. Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
Get inside knowledge into the world of Data Backup and Recovery from a Leading Privacy Expert!In this episode, renowned Privacy Expert, popularly known as Mr. Backup shares insights from his wealth of experience on how to successfully backup data. He discusses the importance of finding a niche in the industry, how to become a thought leader and the common mistakes most Privacy Pros and organisations must avoid when backing up data. Hi, my name is Jamal Ahmed and I'd like to invite you to listen to this special episode of the #1 ranked Data Privacy podcast. Discover: The most common backup errors every Privacy Pro needs to know How to store and encrypt backups to prevent ransomware Costly misconceptions about cloud backups And so much more… W. Curtis Preston is an expert in backup & recovery systems; a space he has been working in since 1993. He has written four books on the subject, the fourth of which is Modern Data Protection from O'Reilly. It was published in May 2021. He is the Chief Technical Evangelist at https://www.druva.com/ (Druva), a data protection as a service company. He is also the host of the https://soundcloud.com/restoreitall (Restore it All podcast), and the founder and webmaster of https://www.backupcentral.com/ (backupcentral.com), a website dedicated to backup and recovery. Follow Jamal on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmjahmed/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmjahmed/) Listen to - https://soundcloud.com/restoreitall (Restore it All podcast) Find out more about Druva - https://www.druva.com/ (https://www.druva.com/) Get Exclusive Insights, Secret Expert Tips & Actionable Resources For A Thriving Privacy Career That We Only Share With Email Subscribers► https://my.captivate.fm/%C2%A0https://newsletter.privacypros.academy/sign-up ( https://newsletter.privacypros.academy/sign-up) Subscribe to the Privacy Pros Academy YouTube Channel► https://www.youtube.com/c/PrivacyPros (https://www.youtube.com/c/PrivacyPros) Join the Privacy Pros Academy Private Facebook Group for:Free LIVE Training Free Easy Peasy Data Privacy Guides Data Protection Updates and so much more Apply to join here whilst it's still free: https://www.facebook.com/groups/privacypro (https://www.facebook.com/groups/privacypro)
W. Curtis Preston aka “Mr. Backup” is the Chief Technical Evangelist at Druva, a data protection as a service company. He's an expert in backup & recovery systems, a space he has been working in since 1993, designing data protection systems for some of the largest organizations in the world. He is also the host of the Restore it All podcast, founder and webmaster of backupcentral.com, a website dedicated to backup and recovery and has written four books about backup and recovery. In this episode we cover: 00:00 - https://flyingcatmarketing.com/ (Flying Cat Marketing - Content-Led B2B SEO Agency) 01:08 - Intro 02:20 - SaaS Applications And Higher Risks Of Data Loss 07:59 - The Basic Features That SaaS Data Protection Companies Includes 11:05 - Difference Between Protecting Privacy & Data Security 12:57 - Challenges & Risks Of Backing Up Data Using A Traditional System 18:27 - What You Should Be Aware Of When Choosing A Backup Service Team 25:20 - Does Migrating A Company's Backup To A Cloud Provider Mitigate Risks? 30:53 - How Often A B2B SaaS Should Be Backing Up 33:20 - Curtis' Favorite Activity To Get Into a Flow State 34:08 - Curtis' Piece Of Advice For His 25 Years Old Self 34:52 - Curtis' Biggest Challenges at Druva 37:10 - Intrumental Resources For Curtis' Success 38:38 - What Does Success Means for Curtis Today 40:08 - Get In Touch With Curtis Get In Touch With Curtis: https://twitter.com/wcpreston (Curtis' Twitter) https://www.druva.com (Druva Website) https://go.druva.com/WS-Hybrid-CW-eBook-Curtis-Book-Modern-Data-Protection.html (W. Curtis Preston's Book "Modern Data Protection" Free Copy On Druva's Website) Mentions: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sfoskett/ (Stephen Foskett) https://www.backupcentral.com/ (Backup Central's Restore It All Podcast) Books: https://www.amazon.com.br/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/0684852861 (First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman) https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0671027034 (How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie) Tag Us & Follow: https://www.facebook.com/SaaSDistrictPodcast/ (Facebook) https://www.linkedin.com/company/horizen-capital (LinkedIn) https://www.instagram.com/saasdistrict/ (Instagram) More About Akeel: https://twitter.com/AkeelJabber (Twitter) https://linkedin.com/in/akeel-jabbar (LinkedIn) https://horizencapital.com/saas-podcast/ (Best Rated SaaS Podcasts) https://horizencapital.com/saas-consulting-services/ (Learn About Our SaaS Consulting ) https://horizencapital.com/how-to-value-saas-business/ (Learn How to Value a SaaS Company)
Druva becomes the first data protection as-a-service (DPaaS) vendor to offer an end-to-end data resiliency guarantee. While other vendors cover only ransomware risks, Druva's $10M guarantee covers all aspects of how our service works. The Data Resiliency Guarantee provides unmatched protection against 5 key data risks– Cybercrime, Human, Application, Operational, and Environmental, and guarantees the security, immutability, and availability of customers' data - up to $10MM. Stephen Foskett (Druva's CTO) and W. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup) discuss this amazing new development for Druva and its customers. This podcast breaks down the five areas the guarantee covers, explaining them in plain language so anyone can understand. It also explains how only a company that offers data protection and resilience as a service can offer a guarantee that covers this much. Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
If you're one of those people that look at typical storage offerings for backup and recovery and say, "I can't afford this," you're not alone. A lot of ready-to-go storage solutions can get very expensive very quickly. Our guest this week (Erik Ableson from https://www.Infrageeks.com (Infrageeks.com)) ran into this a lot with his small-government customers and SMBs in France, and knew he had to get creative. He wanted to build a hardened Linux repository for Veeam backups, and he also wanted an S3 object storage system to serve as the second copy. His customers couldn't easily buy cloud services, so he needed something they could own and manage themselves. (He explains the unique reason they can't buy cloud services.) He built the Linux repository using a Synology box to run both the storage and a Linux VM, and he built the object storage system out of the free version of MinIO and what I will call a very unique build of hardware. Learn the details in this fun episode of a real practitioner's solution to a unique and challenging problem. Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
Druva has released a suite of new security features, collectively referred to as the Druva Cyberattack Readiness Launch. This episode of No Hardware Required explorers each of these new features, and why Druva feels they have become essential in today's backup environment. Druva already has air-gapped, encrypted backups that protected against any ransomware attack to your environment. But we wanted to do better, to protect your backups against other types of attacks, and even human error. That's what the cyberattack readiness launch is all about: improving your security posture, providing the ability to roll back mistakes and attacks from rogue admins, and even the ability to disallow any kind of deletions to the environment. We never stop making your backups more secure; check out this exciting episode to see how!Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
Hammerspace offers a global filesystem that creates a single namespace across multiple storage systems and cloud storage providers. Hammerspace's name is inspired by the name for the magical place that cartoon characters get them from (e.g. Bugs Bunny pulling a huge hammer out of his pocket). They've taken a different approach to a global filesystem, using metadata to significantly minimize actual data movement and increase performance. Molly Presley, their SVP of Marketing (and friend of the pod!), explains the interesting use cases for this technology. Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
This episode of Serious Privacy, Paul Breitbarth of Catawiki and Dr. K Royal of Outschool have a robust conversation with W. Curtis Preston, (on Twitter as W. Curtis Preston), the Chief Technical Evangelist with Druva, Inc.. In this conversation, Mr. Backup himself, explains the difference between backups and archives, reminiscences about tape backups, and provides insight on how backups relate to privacy. As part of this, they discuss guidance from several data protection authorities in Europe on backups (Danish, French, UK) (or at least an acknowledgement of the difficulties of backups) and the ever-beloved right to deletion. Join us to hear his personal experiences and recommendations related to ransomware, restoration, and more. Also, he has published four O'Reilly books, the latest one - Modern Data Protection- available for free as an ebook on Druva's website.Also, catch the next webinar from TrustArc on July 19 - Level Up Your Healthcare Privacy Program. Let them know you heard about it from us!As always, if you have comments or questions, let us know - LinkedIn, Twitter @podcastprivacy @euroPaulB @heartofprivacy @trustArc and email seriousprivacy@trustarc.com. Please do like and write comments on your favorite podcast act so other professionals can find us easier.
2022 is a new world in the cyber attack space, and Katie Nickels, SANS instructor, and director of intelligence at threat detection vendor Red Canary, describes the top five new attack they are seeing in the space. Spoiler alert: one of them is attacks against backups! Learn from an expert as we discuss the top five attacks they are seeing right now. We talk about living off the cloud, MFA exploits, an increase in nation-state hackers, the increased use of stalkerware, and YES: attacks against backup infrastructure. We discuss each of these in this important episode of Restore it All! Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
Druva often makes the claim that it reduces customers' TCO by up to 50%, but just how does it do that? Two men who understand backup and resiliency costs more than most answer that question. W. Curtis Preston (AKA Mr. Backup) and Stephen Manley (CTO), talk about the hard and soft costs that Druva reduces. The discussion focuses mainly on hard costs, as many customers dismiss soft costs. But Curtis and Stephen discuss soft costs as well, as they feel they are part of the TCO story as well. Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
This week we talk about this exciting "new" medium for archiving data that is especially attractive to SMBs and home users. It's an optical disc that looks like a DVD and is readable in all Blu-Ray drives, but underneath it's something very different. If you haven't heard of it, then you're in luck! Thanks to Daniel Rosehill, backup anorak and friend of the show, we're going to talk about it – and its competitors on this week's episode! We discuss the good and bad about using all of the following for archiving: paper, SSD, disk, tape, DVD, Blu-Ray, ending with M-Disc. Learn what's wrong with these other mediums, and what's so great about this one in another fun episode of Restore it All! Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
Someone that knew Bill Gates when he was a boy in on the podcast this week, although we only talk about Bill Gates for a moment. He has 30+ years in backup experience and tells us what it's been like to adapt to all of the backup changes over the years. His first backup was to punch cards and punch tape, and he was in the same Boy Scout troop as Bill Gates. Fans of the podcast know his name already, as it comes up randomly on the show as a friend of Curtis. But this is the first time Stuart Liddle has graced us with his presence. Like Mr. Backup, his career starts with a data loss story that actually involved people having to re-enter data. We discuss a lot of configuring and running backups, including deciding on retention periods, treating all backups the same (or not), virtual tape libraries and other dedupe systems, and how important a change management data database (CMDB) is. We also talk about the danger of becoming entrenched in a specialty like backup, knowing only one specialty or product. We talk about how it's not good for you or your company. Finally we talk about the different way people are using the cloud today for IT and backup, and how that affects cost. Curtis and Prasanna use a great analogy that helps it make sense. This week's episode is fully of useful information. Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
Small to medium businesses (SMBs) and similarly-sized government organizations often have the same regulatory and security needs of larger companies, without the IT budget or personnel to accomplish them. This week's episode of no hardware required focuses on the unique needs of such organizations and talks about how Druva‘s data resiliency platform is uniquely positioned to help customers meet those needs. With Druva, you get the power and security of a large backup, DR, and resiliency system - without having to build it, maintain it, or secure it. Listen in as Stephen and Curtis discuss this important topic.Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
Today we are joined by security expert and host of the Secure Talk podcast, Mark Shriner, to discuss information security. We talk about it from a personal perspective, as well as for organizations. Mark, Curtis, and Prasanna talk about what are the bare minimum things you should be doing as an individual to protect your personal information and data, both from a security and backup perspective. We then move on to talking about it from a company perspective, and how very important things like MFA (while good) do not solve everything, and then we talk about many other things you could be doing. Then there was the moment that created the title of the podcast, where Prasanna disagreed with Curtis – but not quite. When it comes to information security and data protection (and many things in life), perfect is the enemy of good. Try not to be overwhelmed with all the things you could or should be doing; just pick something and do something. Something is always better than nothing when it comes to these areas. This episode is jam-packed with good information you won't want to miss. Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
So many people are surprised when their restore is slower than their backup. You shouldn't be, as it's quite common. The good news is there are things you can do to make it faster – if you know them in advance. W. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup) and Prasanna Malaiyandi tackle the seven reasons why your restore may be slower than your backup. Topics covered include RAID penalties, tape issues, database concerns, and others. You'll walk away knowing what to do in order to find out how slow your restores are – and how to fix them. This podcast is packed with good info! (And the death of a USB hub.) Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
Druva felt that their support for Salesforce needed to go beyond simply backing it up and restoring it. We discuss the added functionality in this episode, after tackling the ever-present question of whether or not you need to back up Salesforce at all. (It's become harder to argue against it after Salesforce came out with their own backup service.) After explaining how Druva's service works, Stephen Manley (CTO) explains what else it does. Sandbox seeding (with datamasking) and Salesforce archiving are two features that will bring a lot of value to Druva's customers. Check out this episode to learn all about Druva's support for Salesforce, and how it goes far beyond backup. Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
Pat Mayock is a Data Protection Warrior for HPE, and he helped us to understand where he thinks LTO & RDX (a removable disk technology) sit in the market. He explains how much tape is used today in enterprise and cloud environments, especially in the public cloud that so many think is a tapeless world. He says the cloud vendors are some of LTO's biggest customers! We talk about what LTO is good at, what it's not so good at, and what that means for how you should use it. Then we shift gears to talk about RDX, a removable disk product that has been around for roughly 15 years. It consists of a docking station and a disk-based cartridge that is built to kind of resemble a tape! Each cartridge contains a single disk drive that you can use very much like you would use a tape, except it appears as a drive letter (mounted filesystem) versus a tape drive. He explains what its target market is and how it meets a niche in the removable storage market in between removable USB disks and a standalone LTO tape drive. This is a fascinating episode you won't want to miss. Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
This episode of No Hardware Required focuses on the risk that holidays like Memorial Day pose from a cybersecurity perspective, and especially for your backups. Stephen Manley (Druva's CTO) and W. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup) delve into this topic, discussing why this is the case, and what can be done about it. The episode gives advice to both Druva customers and to those who haven't made that decision (yet). Learn what to do to secure your backups prior to this upcoming holiday weekend. Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
This whole episode is a Mr. Backup rant, where he talks about things that people should really stop doing with their backup systems, starting with backing up directly to tape. There is a place for tape, but it is NOT at the front end of the backup system. Curtis and Prasanna passionately discuss and explain several relics of the ways we used to do things, and why they no longer make sense. Another one is repeated full backups - synthetic or otherwise. Many of them can be addressed by just changing how you use your backup product, but a few of them may cause you to think about making a change. (Hint: if your backup product has been around for more than 20 years, it probably can't get away from some of the relics of the past.) Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
This week we are joined by emergency preparedness expert and prolific author and speaker, Virginia Nicols, webmaster of EmergencyPlanGuide.org. We talk about why and how to prepare for a disaster/emergency in your personal life, as well as how to do it for a small business. This is a bit different than our usual episode, as there is very little talk about backup and recovery. We talk about where to start when assessing what to do, and what steps you can take right away to prepare. Virginia is extremely knowledgeable on the subject and we learned a lot. You will too! Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
W. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup) and Stephen Manley (Druva's CTO) discuss how Druva has enhanced how its customers can backup AWS EC2 instances. Customers can now create a single policy that specifies how many snapshots they want to keep, and how many of them they want deduplicated and migrated into the Druva cloud. The latter offers quicker recovery; the latter offers both enhanced security while also reducing costs. This is one of those rare instances in IT where you get something that is less expensive, while also being more secure and easier to use. Take the win and check out Druva's EC2 backup.Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
If you liked last week's episode where we talked about this "so let's talk about ransomware" series on reddit, you'll love this week. We have the author, Snorkel42, to talk about the origins behind the security cadence series, and why he decided to finally write some on ransomware. (He explains that everything he talks about his ransomware, but he admits he's been "Mr. Myagi'ing" it for a while.). This guy knows his stuff, and this is the second time he has been on the podcast. He's knowledgeable and entertaining. One of those rare combinations. This is a great episode you will not want to miss. Here are the three posts: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/tdvbp4/security_cadence_okay_fine_lets_talk_ransomware/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SecurityCadence/comments/tedapy/security_cadence_ransomware_part_2_actions_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SecurityCadence/comments/tfm927/security_cadence_ransomware_part_3_the_worst_case/ Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
Curtis Preston (AKA Mr. Backup) has specialized in designing data protection systems since 1993, and has designed such systems for some of the largest organizations in the world. His lively prose and wry, real-world approach has made him a popular author and speaker. He has written four O'Reilly books, the latest of which is Modern Data Protection, published in 2021. He is also the host of BackupCentral.com and its Restore it All podcast. He is now the Chief Technical Evangelist for Druva, the only at-scale SaaS provider of data protection. Scott Schober is a #cybersecurity and wireless technology expert, author of Hacked Again and Cybersecurity is Everybody's Business, host of 2 Minute CyberSecurity Briefing video podcast and CEO of Berkeley Varitronics Systems who appears regularly on Bloomberg TV, Fox Business & Fox News, CGTN America, Canadian TV News, as well as CNN, CBS Morning Show, MSNBC, CNBC, The Blaze, WPIX as well as local and syndicated Radio including Sirius/XM & Bloomberg Radio and NPR. Subscribe and follow: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0... iHeart Podcasts: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/70626340/ Amazon Music Podcasts: https://scottschober.com/wp-content/u... YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxqx... Twitter: @ScottBVS Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scott_schober/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/snschober Website: www.ScottSchober.com
Curtis Preston (AKA Mr. Backup) has specialized in designing data protection systems since 1993, and has designed such systems for some of the largest organizations in the world. His lively prose and wry, real-world approach has made him a popular author and speaker. He has written four O'Reilly books, the latest of which is Modern Data Protection, published in 2021. He is also the host of BackupCentral.com and its Restore it All podcast. He is now the Chief Technical Evangelist for Druva, the only at-scale SaaS provider of data protection. Scott Schober is a #cybersecurity and wireless technology expert, author of Hacked Again and Cybersecurity is Everybody's Business, host of 2 Minute CyberSecurity Briefing video podcast and CEO of Berkeley Varitronics Systems who appears regularly on Bloomberg TV, Fox Business & Fox News, CGTN America, Canadian TV News, as well as CNN, CBS Morning Show, MSNBC, CNBC, The Blaze, WPIX as well as local and syndicated Radio including Sirius/XM & Bloomberg Radio and NPR.
This week, Prasanna and Mr. Backup (W. Curtis Preston) review a series of posts made by Snorkel42, who previously appeared on this podcast in the episode called "Security expert rips Okta for their response to hack." Things were recorded out of order, so this is the episode where we discovered him on Reddit, and tried our best to distill several thousand words into about 30 mins of advice on how to protect against ransomware. We talk about how to prevent getting it in the first place, how to limit its damage if you do get it, and how to respond and restore your data once that happens. There is a ton of really good advice here, so check it out! Here are the three posts: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/tdvbp4/security_cadence_okay_fine_lets_talk_ransomware/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SecurityCadence/comments/tedapy/security_cadence_ransomware_part_2_actions_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SecurityCadence/comments/tfm927/security_cadence_ransomware_part_3_the_worst_case/ Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
Vast is a massively-scalable storage system designed around multiple pieces of technology that weren't available just a few years ago (e.g. NVMe, Storage class memory, QLC) that offers both file and object functionality, immutable snapshots, and integration with the cloud to address the "smoking hole" problem. Their typical sale (of which they've made many) is north of $1 million, and they have many exabytes of disk in the wild. It's a scale-out storage system without all the typical East-West traffic such systems have. We do our best to poke holes in their offering, but Howard Marks goes toe-to-toe quite well. This one went a little long (one hour) but we truly were fascinated with the Vast story Howard was telling. Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
Two experts who have built hundreds of on-premises backup systems talk about how difficult it is to build them correctly – especially the first time out. W. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup) and Stephen Manley (CTO) have helped hundreds of customers navigate these challenges, and so can speak to them first hand. The two biggest challenges they talk about in this episode are capacity planning and cyber security. They say it is impossible to correctly provision an on-premises backup system, and they explain why. Secondly, they discuss how important cyber security is in the current world where the bad actors are coming directly for your backups. They do all this while being entertaining as well. Enjoy! Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
This episode is a unique look inside the Conti ransomware group, courtesy of a four-part series from Krebs on Security. We review the interesting takeaways from Brian Kreb's series of over 12,000-words from quite a bit of research. The series was inspired by a hack of Conti that resulted in a traunch of internal documents being made public. This gives a unique view into how the organization thinks, how it is laid out just like any other business, the weapons it uses to spread ransomware, and its attempts to branch out to other areas of cybercrime. If you enjoy the episode, be sure to check out the articles that inspired it: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/03/conti-ransomware-group-diaries-part-i-evasion (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/03/conti-ransomware-group-diaries-part-i-evasion) https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/03/conti-ransomware-group-diaries-part-ii-the-office (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/03/conti-ransomware-group-diaries-part-ii-the-office) https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/03/conti-ransomware-group-diaries-part-iii-weaponry (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/03/conti-ransomware-group-diaries-part-iii-weaponry) https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/03/conti-ransomware-group-diaries-part-iv-cryptocrime (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/03/conti-ransomware-group-diaries-part-iv-cryptocrime) Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
In this episode of Beers & Bytes, we are joined by "Mr. Backup" W. Curtis Preston, Chief Technical Evangelist at Druva, data resiliency and enterprise Cloud Backup and data management platform for edge, on-premises, and cloud workloads.W. Curtis Preston is an expert in backup & recovery systems, a space he has been working in since 1993. He has written four books on the subject, the fourth of which is Modern Data Protection from O'Reilly, published in May 2021. He is the host of the Restore it All podcast, and the founder and webmaster of backupcentral.com, a website dedicated to backup and recovery.Beverages:New Belgian - Voodoo Ranger Future Hop - https://www.newbelgium.com/beer/voodoo-ranger-future-hop/Virginia Beer - Liquid Escape - https://virginiabeerco.com/beer/liquid-escape/Stone Brewing - Dayfall - https://www.stonebrewing.com/beer/year-round-releases/stone-dayfall-belgian-whiteDragons Milk - Dragons Milk - https://dragonsmilk.com/about-dragons-milkSt. Arnolds - Juicy IPA - https://www.saintarnold.com/year-round-beers/#juicyipaW. Curtis' own Belgium Trippel - https://twitter.com/wcprestonMore Information:Druva - https://www.druva.com/W. Curtis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrbackup/Site: https://www.backupcentral.com/Fortify 24x7 - https://fortify24x7.comFluency Security - https://fluencysecurity.comBeers & Bytes Web - https://beersandbytespodcast.comBeers & Bytes SoMe - https://linktr.ee/beersandbytesSupport the show (https://beersandbytespodcast.com)
This week we are joined by John "Ricky" Martin, Director of Strategy at NetApp (and former owner of a tape recovery business), to talk about his paper that declares that backup is fundamentally evil and done in an unintelligent way. Mr. Backup wasn't sure how this one was going to go, and there were at least one or two arguments along the way. No blows were thrown, though. We definitely talk about what a tape recovery business is, and what it was like to do that. We also talk about tape backup, full backups, multiplexing, tape handling, and other elements of how backup is still done today by many people. It's a fun episode where you should learn a lot. Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
Did you know the day before April Fools is World Backup Day? If not, now you do! Druva's W. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup) and Stephen Manley relate backup stories from their lengthy careers, in commemoration of this important day. Then they both wax philosophical on what they think backup and resiliency will look like five years from now.Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
We have none other than Snorkel42 from Reddit on the podcast today. He has 20 years experience in InfoSec, and is a prolific writer on Reddit under the handle Snorkel42. (Check out his posts here: https://www.reddit.com/user/snorkel42/). (We will not be using his given name during the recording.). He thinks Okta managed to turn a mole hill into a mountain by incorrectly handling the hack that happened in January – that we just learned about last week. That's right, we just found out about a hack that actually happened in January! We dive deep into what happened, what it means, and how the worst problem of all is how Okta responded to it. Our expert says he no longer trusts Okta, and gives advice to customers on what to do next. This is a very timely episode that you will really enjoy – unless you're an Okta customer or employee. Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
Gary Williams tells a great story about earlier in his career that taught him the value of testing backups and updating documentation. He explains how he thought his backups were fine, until a "new guy" came onto the scene and dared to ask the question, "When was the last time you tested your backups?" As Gary explains, sometimes new people have the best perspective. They let him do the first test, and .... it failed spectacularly! It all came down to the documentation they were so proud of. Hear Gary's story and learn from his mistake – one that defined his career. (Mr. Backup also tells the story that defined his career as well!) Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
Stephen and Curtis discuss how customers should react to the invasion of the Ukraine from a cyber security perspective. They review a series of articles from Krebs on Security that talk specifically about the Conti ransomware group and how they are responding to this crisis. This a Russian-based group that is known for targeting the backups of its victims. This episode gives solid advice on how you can be better prepared for this new threat.Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
When you back up your SaaS apps (because you know you are supposed to), should you back them up to a SaaS service or on on-premises backup system? After defining what SaaS is and isn't, Prasanna and Curtis discuss this important question. First they look at how sizing a SaaS system for backup is different than when you do it in a datacenter, and how that creates challenges for backup design. Does it make sense to use on-premises backup to backup a cloud resource like SaaS? Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
Learn from others' mistakes by reviewing last year's worst ransomware attacks with Mr. Backup and Prasanna Malaiyandi. Listen to them review the 10 worst attacks from 2021, then discuss lessons learned: Colonial Pipeline, BrennTag, Acer, JBS, Quanta, NBA,AXA, CNA, CD Projekt, and Kaseya. Then they discuss the trends they see, and the lessons we can all learn from these horrible attacks. Mentioned in this episode: Free eBook version of O'Reilly's Modern Data Protection For a limited time, you can get a free ebook copy of my latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection. Just go to druva.com/podcast and download it!
In part 2 of our enterprise series, Curtis and Stephen talk about three challenges that enterprise customers have when trying to protect their data: one very large server, many large servers, and data distributed across many locations. For each of these challenges, we talk about how one would do that with an on-premises system, and then explain how we solve that problem at Druva. The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud is designed to handle all three of these challenges, and this episode will help you to understand exactly why.Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
In this episode you will hear Curtis's insights on the current status of the Backup and Recovery industry. Curtis is an expert in backup & recovery systems; a space he has been working in since 1993. He has written four books on the subject, the fourth of which is Modern Data Protection from O'Reilly was published in May 2021. He is the “fellow” host of the Restore it All podcast, and the founder and webmaster of backupcentral.com, a website dedicated to backup and recovery. He is now the Chief Technical Evangelist at Druva, a data protection as a service company. We discussed the following topics among others: What are the challenges/risks of backing up data using a traditional on-premises backup system? Does migrating a company's backup to a cloud provider mitigate those risks? How does a SaaS-based data backup and recovery system different? Do all backup-as-a-service vendors offer the same risk level? Isn't backing up and recovering a large datacenter to/from the cloud difficult? If you want to be our guest, or you know some one who would be a great guest on our show, just send your email to info@globalriskconsult.com with a subject line “Global Risk Community Show” and give a brief explanation of what topic you would like to to talk about and we will be in touch with you asap.
This episode of Druva's No Hardware Required explores the idea of an enterprise-class data resilience product, starting with how data protection is a little different than other parts of IT. To be enterprise-class in data protection, you really need a system that incorporates the entire environment. Stephen and Curtis also discuss how some see SaaS products as NOT being ready for the enterprise, and they explain why this simply isn't the case. In fact, they make the claim that Druva is more ready for the typical enterprise client than many of our competitors. We talk about our infinitely scalable dedupe engine, and how restores get the unlimited power that the cloud offers. (Druva competitor's products have limits on the size of their dedupe catalog, and they can only restore as fast as the server they're running on – which is typically not a very powerful one.) The way Druva is designed gives you the infinite power of the cloud, with a bill smaller than you would pay for a much less powerful system on premises.Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
W. Curtis Preston and Stephen Manley discuss Data Privacy Day, and what that means for everyone, and especially for Druva's customers. They start with a discussion of how much more important privacy is to today's consumers, and opinions as to why that might be the case. They then give an overview of large privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, as well as some discussion on the upcoming implementation of CPRA, the update to CCPA. Finally, they discuss how all of this impacts an organization's data resiliency efforts, or how data protection can help positively impact an organization's attempts to be compliant to these various regulations. Finally, Stephen discusses a very valid point about how you should attempt to comply with these regulations even if you're not subject them.Mentioned in this episode:Free eBook copy of Modern Data ProtectionYou can get a free eBook copy of Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com/podcast.
This week, we talk to Nick Craigwood, the creator and principal developer of rclone, a very popular open-source tool for copying data to and from cloud providers. Rclone is downloaded roughly 250,000 times each month, and has over 30,000 stars on GitHub. There are six core developers, and a great community of users and other developers at rclone.org. We talk a little bit about Nick's development philosophy, which is that he doesn't mind adding features - as long as they don't break backwards compatibility. Then we talk about how rclone works, and what it's like to sync a filesystem to an object store – including support for multi-part uploads and downloads. We also talk about rclone's encryption support, while Nick was “relaxing” on holiday. We then talked about how rclone can be used to minimize the risk of backing up to any one cloud provider, preventing things like what happened during the OVH fire earlier in 2021. We also discuss some strategies, such as backing up directly to two different clouds, versus backing up to one, then syncing to another – and how CloudFlare's R2 might figure into things. Finally, we talk about Nick's plans for rclone's future, such as making their web UI better to increase usability for many more people – while not sacrificing the command line. Join us for a fascinating episode, the first one where we're talking to the creator of the tool in question. Don't forget the drawing for a free e-book version of Modern Data Protection. All you have to do to be eligible is sign up for my newsletter at https://www.backupcentral.com/subscribe-to-our-newsletter/
We cover my latest book, Modern Data Protection, by O'Reilly & Associates on this podcast. I give an overview of the book, which covers the "Why, What, Where, and How" of backup, archive, and disaster recovery. After giving an overview of the book, I talk about why I wrote, and what it's like to write a book for O'Reilly. Prasanna acted as a tech editor on the book, so he offered his unique perspective as well.
Moderniser vos architectures de protection de données. Rien que ca ! Durant cet échange informel nous tentons de rappeler cette définition et les grands sujets qui entourent cette course à l'innovation. Un défi d'objectivité pour certains membres de l'équipe, mais le challenge a été relevé et la discussion, nous l'espérons, a été à la hauteur du sujet !
W. Curtis Preston, Chief Technical Evangelist at Druva talks about business continuity and the importance of protecting against insider threats, unique ways of protecting all of your data utilizing tried and true methods of backup, and some interesting stories about ransomware.
Datacenter manager Dan Frith (@penguinpunk) joins us on the podcast for our first discussion of the #OVHFire. A massive fire destroyed a datacenter of a large cloud provider in Europe, and millions of websites disappeared. We talk about the lessons we can learn from this event. Dan talks about how outsourcing the servers doesn't outsource the responsibility for data protection. I make the point that this fire shows what happens when you completely rely on a single entity for both production and data protection. We end up talking about the 3-2-1 rule and how it applies in this scenario. I also give a discount code during the podcast for my new O'Reilly book Modern Data Protection, which is now available for purchase. If you use the URL below and the code I give on the podcast, you can get 35% of the retail price. https://shop.aer.io/oreilly/p/Modern_Data_Protection_Ensuring_Recoverability_of_/9781492094050-9149
Zu Beginn des heutigen IBM Livestudio Podcasts gibt es Einblicke, was Besucher beim TEC Technology Summit vom 17.- 19. Juni erwartet. Danach geht es um aktuelle Herausforderungen bei Cyber Attacken: Josef Weingand, Business Development Leader Data Protection & Retention / Storage Platform DACH und Thomas Schaefer, Sales Leader Spectrum Storage Software DACH erläutern, wie der IBM Ansatz einer Modern Data Protection Unternehmen schützen kann. Die Automobilindustrie ist wie keine zweite Industrie von der Digitalisierung betroffen. Mit dem Konzept Mining the Automotive Industry zeigen Niklas Stoehr, Data Scientist, IBM AI Core, und Michael Frommelt, Leiter der Abteilung AI & Data Core, wie Automobilhersteller ihre Marktorientierung in diesem Umbruch neu ausrichten können. Danach beleuchtet das IBM Livestudio aktuelle Trends für die Industrie 4.0 und gibt einen Ausblick auf die neue Video- und vielleicht bald auch Podcast-Serie von IBM zu Industrie 4.0-Themen. Ralf Bucksch, Technical Executive Watson IoT Europe erzählt, welche spannenden Themen die Zuschauer*innen und Zuhörer*innen erwarten.
ESG Analyst Christophe Bertrand joins the Pure Report to discuss the requirements and market trends driving a new approach to data protection. Hear about how to move beyond classic DR and backup/recovery use cases to capitalize on opportunities to improve data insight for both on-prem and cloud-connected deployments. Christophe brings 25 years of experience in services, software, and high-end storage systems to deliver unique perspectives for this important and fast growing data management space. For more detail on ESG's take on Data Protection: https://www.purestorage.com/pure-folio/showcase.html?item=/type/pdf/subtype/doc/path//content/dam/pdf/en/white-papers/protected/wp-esg-modernizing-data-protection.pdf