D2DO314: Backups SaaS – Safety as a Service

Ned Belavance (0:07)

Today's podcast is sponsored by Gartner. The Gartner IT Infrastructure Operations and Cloud Strategies Conference, December 8th through the 10th in Las Vegas, brings together heads of infrastructure, cloud ops pros, platform engineers, and security leaders. Learn more at gartner.com/io.

Jim Jones (0:29)

The dirtiest secret to data protection in the age of AI is it's the same story that we've been telling since data began.

Ned Belavance (0:36)

Welcome to Day 2 DevOps, where the DevOps is in the details. I'm Ned Belovitz, and I'm joined by my indefatigable co-host, Kyler Middleton.

Kyler Middleton (0:46)

Hi, Ned. Today we're discussing backups in the age of hybrid cloud and AI. We had to shim AI in there somewhere, right?

All these platforms and tools help you and your adversaries move at lightning speed. Do you know if your backups are valid?

Ned Belavance (1:03)

That's a good question. Guiding us through the need for cyber resilience in an AI world is our guest, Jim Jones. Let's get into it. Well, Jim Jones, welcome to Day 2 DevOps. We're very excited that you're here. It's been a while since we chatted.

Before we get into the topic at hand, why don't you tell the good folks out there a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Jim Jones (1:24)

Yeah. Hi, everybody. My name is Jim Jones. I am a product architect for a little company called 1111 Systems that you may not have heard of. But we are the hyperscaler VMware service provider these days, but with a very big focus on data protection and ensuring that your path to the hybrid cloud is one that is not as fraught with danger as can happen from time to time.

So I focus in our product team on the data protection products. And that can be anything from, I need to back up a VM to I need this really crazy restore scenario for my entire enterprise in case everything goes down all at once.

Kyler Middleton (2:09)

So that's me.

Ned Belavance (2:11)

I'm continually surprised at how popular hybrid cloud is.

I really thought if you'd asked me 10 years ago, I would have been like, everybody will just move to the cloud. No one will have on-prem stuff anymore except for that poor file and print server that sits in a corner and lets Lucy print her TPS reports at the end of every day. Everything else is going to be in the cloud. And I was clearly wrong. What's driving hybrid cloud from your perspective?

Jim Jones (2:39)

Well, so from my perspective, I think that hybrid cloud is probably the long-term solution. Especially during the pandemic, I was very much right there with you that we were going to go from everything is for host in a cloud of dust of a hypervisor, to we're going to lift and shift everything that is custom, and then everything that isn't, we're going to put it into SaaS. I think what we've realized, and especially as we get into the modern world where ransomware went up right as long as everybody else's cloud and SaaS aspirations went up, is that there's some things that you just frankly have to guard more and keep the control of that resource, then you're willing to say, okay, I'm just going to remove myself from the responsibility of making sure this application has uptime, or that the security of this application is up, because the shared responsibility model is a thing. As you get into that second contract for a lot of companies, and everybody, you buy into a vision, you buy into a dream, and it's three years at a time. And you've done it for three years, and then you've probably had that oopsie.

And once that oopsie hit, now you react and you start to draw some things back. And that's where I think the long-term will be some variant of the hybrid cloud, you know what I mean?

Kyler Middleton (4:09)

I remember the before times and the times after this particular event for our team, when we had this realization, and our CIO realized this, that we could have someone delete our entire technical infrastructure in the cloud in a matter of minutes, which is an automation script and one misconfigured IAM role. And after we realized that, I mean, first of all, it just sends a chill up you. Like in the olden days, in the on-prem days, you need a database engineer credentials to touch the database and a network engineer credential. And all the tooling is so different, the languages are different, and it's just difficult to own all those verticals and cripple everyone entirely. But thankfully, in the cloud era, you can cripple someone entirely really quickly, really simply with very standard APIs, thank goodness.