What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Backup Nirvana: One View, 90 Workloads, Zero Headaches
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
The data protection landscape has fundamentally changed. Gone are the days when IT leaders maintained complete control over data housed solely in on-premises environments. Today's reality is vastly more complex – a scattered ecosystem of on-premises systems, multiple clouds, and countless SaaS applications that Andy from HYCU aptly describes as "everything is everywhere all at once."
In this eye-opening conversation, we explore HYCU's groundbreaking expansion of its rCloud platform to protect over 90 workloads across on-premises, public cloud, and SaaS environments – all through a unified interface. This represents a quantum leap beyond the industry norm, where organizations typically juggle six to nine different backup solutions just to maintain basic protection. Andy reveals how this fragmentation creates administrative nightmares, escalates costs, and introduces significant security vulnerabilities that modern organizations can no longer afford.
The discussion dives deep into HYCU's enhanced cyber resilience capabilities through its R-Shield scanner, bringing real-time anomaly detection and malware scanning that operates directly at the source – eliminating the third-party risks that plague traditional approaches. We also explore their pioneering protection for AI infrastructure, including vector databases and data warehouses that form the backbone of modern AI systems. As Andy explains, corruption or deletion of this data can lead to model degradation and loss of trust, making robust protection essential for organizations investing in AI capabilities.
Whether you're struggling with backup fatigue, concerned about ransomware targeting your recovery systems, or planning your organization's AI strategy, this conversation offers valuable insights into the future of data protection. Listen now to discover how consolidation, intelligence, and automation are reshaping what's possible in safeguarding your most critical digital assets.
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Hey everybody, haiku just dropped a major update to its rCloud platform, expanding protection to over 90 workloads across on-prem public cloud SaaS, all under a unified interface. So much innovation happening at Haiku, andy. Congratulations. How are you?
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, evan we're doing very well, very proud of this achievement. Today we're buzzing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the buzz is deservedly so. Before that, maybe introduce Haiku for those who aren't familiar, a little bit about your background and journey at Haiku.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. For those who are meeting me for the first time, I'm Andy. I'm on the product team here at Haiku. I've spent my entire life in data protection at different vendors, but really found a passion and a mission here at Haiku. Those who are thinking what Haiku is we are the fastest growing data protection as a service company in the world and our mission is the universal protection of data. So, regardless of the choices that your organization is making, we want to be there to help protect and make sure that your data is always recovered and accessible.
Speaker 1:Wow, you make it sound so simple. There's so much to peel back today, but let's talk about the big news our Cloud supporting over 90 workloads. What's driving this expansion and why now? Yeah, absolutely, evan.
Speaker 2:This is years in the making Obviously many folks who've been following Haiku.
Speaker 2:We came to market it and we came to the world saying, look, there's a massive problem with the amount of silos and applications, whether it's on-prem in a public cloud or SaaS, where organizations are really struggling to keep up and data protection has not even come close to keeping up.
Speaker 2:And what we decided to do is really bring our cloud platform and our development platform to the world to be able to accelerate the scale and the growth of our protected workloads. And that reaches to this point today, evan, where we have 90 workloads. That is orders of magnitude more than several folks in the industry, especially when you compare it to legacy backup, because our approach is to make sure that we protect everything, not just a couple of workloads. That suits us. The reason that we got to 90 as well, evan, is because we were able to also announce support for hypervisors like Hyper-V, early access for Zend Server, but continuing to drive SaaS applications, not only things like iManage Cloud, but also Microsoft Planner Teams with complete bring-your-own storage as well. So it's very exciting, but it's been years in the making and it's only possible because of our platform, evan.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's pretty amazing, and the new release emphasizes one global view for managing and protecting data. That's a big shift in, you know, the culture of juggling tools and tabs and screens Talk about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know. I mean think about the way that environments have completely evolved, right, you know, back in the day you were the king or the queen of your castle, you had all of your applications on-prem. So as long as you had uniform virtual backup, physical backup, file share backup, you were okay, and usually that meant that you were leveraging one or two trusted backup providers, especially when you think of a legacy backup industry. But as organizations started maybe lifting and shifting, modernizing, and then this exact explosion of SaaS applications, all of a sudden you start to see data protection stats emerge just to be able to keep up. It's not unusual for us to have a conversation with a prospect who's sitting there with six, seven, eight or nine backup point solutions just to protect a couple of workloads.
Speaker 2:So our focus and our emphasis is two things. It is one continue to provide the most possible coverage that you don't need to go and find and procure another point solution that's going to introduce new documentation, support, everything that comes with onboarding a new vendor, but then also making sure that you're not managing seven, eight, nine different screens and you have several full-time jobs on just backup. What we've delivered is the ability to actually have one universal view, one global view to manage your SaaS applications, your cloud services, all three public cloud services and, of course, also your hybrid cloud workloads all in one place. Of course, customers have the option to isolate that, but this gives you the first time the industry has ever seen a real single pane of glass. That's extremely cliche, evan, but this is the first time we can prove that there's a single pane of glass for your technology stack.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. You also announced on your R-Shield scanner some enhancements to bring real-time anomaly detection and built-in malware scanning. That's huge for speed, agility, security. What's the big idea there?
Speaker 2:hacker. The first thing that I'm going to go after is the company's backups. That's all the leverage. If I have that, then they have no leverage and I can maximize the extortion. Now what you need to be able to do is make sure that you are effectively and very quickly scanning for malware, and a few months ago, Evan, we released R-Shield, which is the cyber resilience framework that's built into our platform. R-shield scanner is just one of those components, and what you're seeing is major upgrades to the scanner. One thing that I want to make sure people understand too, Evan, is when HITU scans, when our shield scans, it is scanning at the source.
Speaker 2:The data is not sent over Metadata is not sent over somewhere else outside of your control, introducing third-party risk. It is done at the source. We have consolidated this into one single policy engine for backups. We've consolidated this into one single policy engine for backups, for retention and for malware and anomaly detection as well. That's a critical way to continue to make our customers' lives easier. But guess what, evan, that is just one aspect of the workflows. Right, you have completely different attack vectors in cloud, very different threats in SaaS. You want to make sure that you protect those as well, and we've continued to add supply chain resilience for things like GitHub Entry ID and protect those as well. And we've continued to add supply chain resilience for things like GitHub Entry ID and Microsoft 365 as well, and that really encompasses all the new stuff that we have for our shield.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So you continue to onwards and upwards with your integration and partnership with Dell, simplifying multi-site and multi-copy backup environments in a Dell environment. What does that unlock for customers? There must be some excited Dell customers out there as well.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. There's two core things with Dell. Obviously, there's the partnership that we have with Dell. We want to make sure we continue to drive the value for Dell customers, dell and Haiku customers. The first one is many customers are running multiple data domain sites, so we're offering a much easier, much more efficient single view once again for all data domain sites, with our replication integration as well. The other key component, evan, and that first bullet, is to make sure that customers makes their life easier. How do we, at every single point in time, can we reduce the amount of time spent on backups so folks can focus on building? The other side, though, is also a lot of organizations, now that they're accelerating the path outside of VMware, are looking at Nutanix, but a lot of them wanted to leverage their own infrastructure as well.
Speaker 1:Their own storage.
Speaker 2:And Dell PowerFlex was an incredible offering as well that Haiku supports jointly and validated with Nutanix and Dell as well.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. So a lot of IT leaders and managers are facing backup fatigue Well, fatigue in general, they're overworked, but you know these fragmented tools and policies that exist out there. What are they telling you? What's the feedback been on changing this kind of dynamic?
Speaker 2:You know, evan, 20 years ago. If I'm a CIO, I'm very focused on what is our core infrastructure, what is the storage provider, our networking, everything is very uniform, monolithic, and I have a full control of everything. The word or the phrase today is lack of control. Why? Because people with a credit card can provision software cloud services anywhere and it's done at different departmental levels. So, from a CIO's perspective, what we're hearing today is I don't even know everything that I need to protect, and when I know what I need to protect, it takes an army to make sure that I am protecting this effectively.
Speaker 2:It is expensive, it is time consuming and it's very, very risky as well. So we go from this world of everything is in a castle and a data center that I can protect to everything is everywhere all at once, and I need sanity to understand where it is and the ability to protect it in a uniform fashion. Cios are getting so much thrown at them, evan, you are not only continued to be pressured to reduce costs, but you have to become an innovation center. You are managing new infrastructures. You're managing cloud adoptions. You're managing SaaS. You have to provide some form of infrastructure for AI. It is very difficult. There's no time to waste when it comes to keeping the lights on, and our goal is to automate that for them.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Speaking of AI and ML, there are all these new workloads coming on stream and you're evolving as well. What's the unique behind the data protection challenges for AI and AML? Besides the volume of data, what else do you have to consider when it comes to data protection?
Speaker 2:You know, evan, the fundamentals of this thing right. What is the critical data? Are there scenarios where I could lose that data and how does it work? Right? So, when you think about a lot of the AI infrastructure that we're seeing customers, they have some form of data warehouse and some form of vector database, whether it's Pinecone, things like Google, bigquery, even Redis, that serves almost as a vector database as well. These are critical, critical elements that are essentially the heart of a model, and if there is deletions or corruptions or any incident, then you have degradation of this model, you have loss of trust. So, just like you do with every other aspect of your infrastructure or every other SaaS application, you have to make sure that you protect it as well. So we're very proud that HITU is really the first backup and recovery provider to do so for these vector databases, but also for data warehouses like BigQuery, to be able to make sure that these workloads that are the most important workloads now are also protected, resilient and recoverable.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Where do you see data protection headed over the next couple of years? Can you make it completely invisible and seamless? You seem to be headed in that direction, but what are you most excited about, as you look forward a bit further out?
Speaker 2:I'm most excited to see where we land in forms of infrastructure, because there is no uniform question anymore. We have customers who said, look, I'm never leaving on-prem. We have customers who are fully running prod in cloud or running multi-cloud and we have customers who are coming back. So it's going to be super interesting to see where those workloads go. How do people choose their infrastructure and how do they protect it?
Speaker 2:But obviously we know that AI is going to be a key, key component here. How do I leverage my backup data in order to run these models? And then how do I protect these models and make sure that there's not another massive supply chain incident as well? The one thing I will mention is, as we look at a lot of the supply chain incidents, cyber attacks or mistakes have happened. You know, as people are adopting agentic workflows, as people are rapidly pressured to adopt these workloads, there will be incidents and it's going to be more critical than ever to understand, like, how am I protecting this, can I prove that I'm protecting it and can I recover? So you know the future is going to be how are we protecting these new, vastly important, powerful, ever-expanding workloads with AI infrastructure?
Speaker 1:Wow, big questions, big challenges ahead, but you guys are really stepping up. Big release this week.
Speaker 2:congratulations, You're gonna have a little bit of downtime, or are you back on the road over the next few weeks, Evan? We are continuing to rumble. There is no stopping here. There are always more workloads, more use cases that we want to provide for our customers. So this is we'll take a nice breath of fresh air today, but then we'll get back to work.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. You're a machine, you and your team, onwards and upwards. Thank you so much, evan. Have a great day, thanks and.