Powering Forward: Unstoppable Growth with HPE and Veeam

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Dave Russell

Senior Vice President, Head of Strategy, Acting CTO

Veeam Software

Emilee Tellez

Field CTO - Veeam Software

Veeam Software

Veeam’s latest ransomware report reveals industry-wide challenges and solutions

Ransomware prevention has rapidly become a top priority in cybersecurity due to the increasing sophistication and frequency of cyber threats.As these threats become more advanced and widespread, businesses are struggling to protect data. Maintaining operations has become increasingly challenging in the face of these escalating risks, according to Dave Russell (pictured, left), senior vice president, head of strategy and acting chief technology officer at Veeam Software Group GmbH.Veeam’s Dave Russell and Emilee Tellez talk to theCUBE about ransomware prevention.“Two weeks ago, we came out with our third Ransomware Trends Report, not of Veeam customers, but of the whole industry

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Powering Forward: Unstoppable Growth with HPE and Veeam

Dave Russell

Senior Vice President, Head of Strategy, Acting CTO Veeam Software

Emilee Tellez

Field CTO - Veeam Software Veeam Software

>> Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of HPE Discover 2024. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside Dave Vellante, my co-host and co-analyst for this event. I would like to welcome back to the show, Dave Russell. He is the senior vice president, head of strategy at Veeam. Thank you so much for being such a good friend of theCUBE.

>> It's great to be back.

>> And Emilee Tellez, she is the senior technologist at Veeam. Welcome to theCUBE, Emilee. Your first time, very exciting.

>> Thank you. It's my first time, very excited to be here.

>> The green Veeam, the color, I love Veeam's colors. Color of money. Color of Celtics, right? Just had to get that in.

>> Yeah, you're a Celtics one?

>> Yes, yes.

>> How about the Boston Celtics? Just-

>> Yeah....

>> yeah, exactly.

>> These guys don't-

>> once every 18 years.

>> These guys are West Coast .

>> No, I was a Celtics fan actually for this one, because we were just talking off-camera about Arizona, so I'm a Phoenix Suns fan. Live in Colorado now so I'm a Denver fan, too. Hey, if someone's going to beat those two teams, then I'm all about the East-

>> Oh, all right. Well, You're just buttering us up.

>> No, it's true.

>> So Dave, I want to start with you because a recurring theme that we're talking a lot here on theCube today is this ongoing battle against ransomware. I would love you to really give our viewers the lay of the land in terms of confronting the threat and really what companies are up against right now.

>> Yeah. Well, I don't want to be too much of an alarmist, but it's not a good-news story. And everything that you read about in terms of concern, in terms of increase, the rise is true. Two weeks ago, we came out with our third Ransomware Trends Report, not of Veeam customers, but of the whole industry. So 1,200 organizations that were hit with ransomware, not just 1,200 organizations, but they actually had to have suffered a cyber attack in the last 12 months. So if we double-click on that, to your point, what are people up against, it's getting worse, meaning the variant of attacks is increasing. The number of people that responded, "Hey, people are going after my backup repositories, my safety net, if you will," is increasing, and cyber insurance coverage is essentially decreasing. So again, not to try to be an alarmist, but the odds are not in your favor. We're in Vegas. If you're a betting person, don't bet against cyber plan for cyber.

>> You know, I was watching whenever the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting was a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a month or so ago, and somebody in the audience asked Ajit Jain, who's like one of Warren's successors, what they thought about cyber insurance because they're obviously heavily into the insurance business. And he was like, "We hate it. It's too unpredictable and we don't like it." Now, of course, the whole industry, we know this bubbled up. There's been a lot of action and modern type of insurance companies coming up. But the fact that one of the savviest investors in the planet is saying, "I don't want to touch it," said to me, "Wow, the world needs technology help and process and people and training." What do you think about that? I was shocked to hear him say that.

>> Yeah, but I can see why. Because now we're going on two years in a row when we've asked specific cyber insurance questions and, unfortunately, it's a case of where the premiums go up, the coverage decreases, and it's like eating at a restaurant. We were just talking about food before we went on the air. And if you go and have a bad meal, the remediation plan isn't really going to make you whole. You still have an outage. On average, the outage is 3.4 weeks, so you're approaching almost a month. That's on average. So again, if you're a glass-half-full person, maybe you can beat that. If you're more of a realist, maybe you're not. It's going to be a month or more. So now let's say that we're collectively, the four of us, in the insurance business, how do we play something that's hugely random, that's, literally, doesn't discriminate against any company, any geography? You name it.

>> First of all, I love this study and I haven't dug into this year's study. But first of all, you get organizations that have been attacked in the last 12 months, specifically ransomware attack or... Yes, okay, so that's not easy to find. So that's 1200. I mean, that's a big number. So age-old question is, I know I've asked you this before and you know it's coming. Do you pay the ransom, right?

>> Well, you shouldn't pay the ransom. But yeah, we even asked that question, too, for customers, which were the ones that actually did end up paying the ransom. And actually, it was really staggering because the customers that did pay the ransom still didn't even get their data back. So you can't count on paying the ransom. You have to count on having a strategy, having an incident response strategy. You have to practice for it so that way you know what you need to do when that actual issue strikes. Because what we're finding is and we actually, two weeks ago, we just came off of Veeam One. We had a VIP session where we brought all of our top customers in and we walked them through an incident response workshop. So we got them all together and we gave them the opportunity to go through what does it look like when you're hit by ransomware from a blackout. You have no communications, you have no email, you have no access to phones. What are your steps? And it was staggering to watch some people say, "Actually, you know what, we haven't gone through this exercise before and we really need to be straightening up and tightening up what we need to do because practice is only going to help us in the long run."

>> So what is that? Is that willful ignorance or is that a real lack of understanding of what's going on? Why are enterprises so numb to this very real and very expensive threat?

>> I think part of it is a hope that, "It won't happen to me. We're not a very interesting company or a target," like a Sony that was very much directed at a company. But this is oftentimes a crime of opportunity. I'm sure there absolutely are targeted attacks, but that's part of it. The other part of it is people are very, very busy. There's a reason that they haven't patched known vulnerabilities. They're going on two years old. Unfortunately, that's also one of the greatest attack vectors.

>> Yeah. So when I was laughing, saying I know what's coming, because the answer is don't be in that situation.

>> Right.

>> So when you were describing, Emilee, the process that you guys went through with customers, what was going through my mind is like the cloud guys are really good at securing their infrastructure. They're better than 99% of the companies out there. Is it similar for you guys as data protection experts where you actually have the expertise and you know the processes, you know the technology intimately, you obviously know your technologies. Did it necessitate and sort of an all-Veeam approach? Well, Veeam isn't everything. You don't sell compute and storage and-

>> Right....

>> Right? And so obviously you have to interconnect to those. You've got to integrate with companies like HPE. So I'm curious as to what those conversations were like and if you could share, that'd be great.

>> Absolutely. I mean, so HPE is a perfect example. We've had this relationship for over 10 years now, and I think the biggest benefit is that our two companies work strongly together to help customers, specifically when it comes to ransomware and to having better security practices put in place. So even take their HPE Alletra line. Veeam integrates from that, from a production storage to back-up targets, leveraging catalysts and immutability. So it's taking all the best practices that every customer should be leveraging, which is a 3-2-1-1-0, which we add the extra, too, for the backup zip code for all of our customers to be following as a basic strategy of getting data offsite, making sure it's being checked to ensure you're not going to have any type of corruption and you're not going to have any vulnerabilities or things like that. But then working with someone like HPE to help fulfill that from a storage perspective because they're going to be able to help make it easier for our customers to be able to flip a switch and have that immutability and have that access to ensure that no backups are going to be deletable or anything like that. So I think the biggest benefit is just, A, coming up with the number one strategy and then following with some of these technology vendors that are partnering coupled together to ensure that customers can have a better outlook and a better plan of attack when the attack hits them.

>> Explain for the guys the 3-2-1-0 best practice.

>> Sure, yeah. So it says three copies of data, two different types of media, one being kept off-site, preferably air-gapped or immutable. Then on top of that, you're going to be ensuring that that one is you're going to get at zero, which means zero errors. You're checking, you're testing, you're verifying that your backups are going to be recoverable when you need it the most. I think that's one thing that we see customers really struggle with is backup is easy. The recovery process, are we testing? Are we validating? Are we doing true testing? And not just, "Hey, I recovered a file because somebody put in a help desk ticket and we're going to call that our test for the year." It's true testing of orchestration and disaster recovery to ensure you have a full business continuity plan.

>> And the media still includes tape?

>> It does still include tape, yeah. That's part of the Ransomware Trends Report as well. So there's a onward forward-looking approach as to what are you doing now to harden your infrastructure and be better prepared against ransomware. And we have customers that are responding saying, "We're leveraging tape to give us a true air-gapped solution," so absolutely.

>> And this is really part of the strategy of radical resiliency. Can you describe, Emilee, how you see this evolving as the threat landscape evolves along with it, too?

>> Absolutely. Yeah. So for us, data is everything for customers. That's going to help produce their overall outcomes, what's going to drive their business forward. So they need to have a good strategy. They need to be able to have data freedom to be able to move that data wherever they see fit. They need to ensure that it's going to be secure. They're also going to have to ensure that from a security perspective that they're able to follow all the best practices. To Dave's point, it's an equal opportunity from a ransomware perspective or a cyber threat. It's out there for anybody. So we really have to be better prepared and put some better practices in place and the only way that we're going to be able to do that with customers is to help them practice and ensure that they have a good strategy.

>> Speaking of strategy, what is Veeam today? Backup, recovery, data protection, data management, security, all the above. How do you describe Veeam today from a strategy standpoint?

>> Yeah, I used to say for the last few years, we're unapologetically a backup company. Backup is maybe not a word that the marketing departments and those types get excited about.

>> Not that sexy, yeah.

>> It doesn't sound that exciting, but let's face it, we've all lost data in our personal lives, probably in our professional lives, and that's on a good day before some of the cyber things that we've just spoken about. I would fundamentally say we're in the data management, data resiliency business. So first and foremost, all the things that we're used to worrying about, meaning network errors, the water pipe breaking, those things still happen, and we've got data to back that up, and then you add cyber on top of that. So that's a bit of issue avoidance or issue remediation. But then you've got something more aspirational. What can I do with this data from an AI perspective? How can I go and mine a non-production copy of my data, maybe my large language models is but one example? So that's why I put us in the data resiliency camp, but really in the data management camp.

>> Was there any big surprise in this year's study? I think a lot of the times you see a progression and a time series. Was there anything that jumped out you said, "Wait a minute, that is really surprising. I need to dig in." You dig into the data and you say, "Wow, this is actually really accurate." Anything that like freaked you out?

>> I'll give you one example. You know, Emilee had a good point, which was 23% said, "We paid the ransom and still didn't get the data back," but we saw that trend last year. The worst, the freak-out moment that what you said, Dave, is when we asked people, "But what did you do to make sure you were clean prior to getting into production?" The number of people was staggering. About three out of four essentially just said, "We bring it back to production and then monitor it, test it, keep an eye on it." Like what are you keeping an eye on? At the moment you have an indication, you've been infected. Less than a quarter said, "We're going to sandbox that, put it in a controlled state prior to reintroducing it into production." That actually was hugely surprising and not in a good way.

>> Yeah, because that is really rolling the dice. It's like-

>> Yeah.

>> Hugely.

>> "Let's hope it works."

>> We actually asked specifically, one of the responses was, "Are you going to put it in production and monitor it closely," and that got better than one out of four respondents. So that's like saying, "I'm going to put my hand on the stove, but as soon as it feels really hot, I'll remove it." But you've already experienced the incident.

>> Yeah.

>> Well, exactly. And Dave and Emilee, Dave, you're head of strategy, Emilee, you're a senior technologist, so much of what you're describing really seems like it's a mindset shift that you have to work with customers to really change how they view this and the kind of practices that they are doing on a day-to-day basis. So what is that kind of... I mean, is it change management? I mean, it really is a whole different thought process that's required.

>> Absolutely. So usually where I start with when I'm having conversations with customers or partners, it's all about people, process, technology. Those are the three things that we can all agree on, is that that's what the customer needs to be thinking about, especially when it comes to incident response. So who are the people? Who are the ones that are going to be working on the systems? Are your people in the right mental mindset? Because usually when you get hit by a ransomware or some type of threat, it doesn't happen on a Monday. It happens usually going into Christmas Eve, going into a long weekend. It's done so by design. So the people that you're going to be working with that you're going to have to count on to bring your data back, what does that look like for them? Do you have enough onsite or boots-on-the-ground help in order to get you through that process? And what we probably are seeing is those that don't have the help are the ones that are just moving forward with, "Let's just recover it inside of that environment and let's just watch it," because they don't have either the people or the capacity to really stand it up and start and sandboxing and testing and ensuring that that data is clean. That's where it comes down to the process and the technology where we talk to customers about, "Okay, this is why you need to have a process in place. This is why you need to know all the technology that you have available to you to ensure that you're not just reinfecting yourself." Because then, to Dave's point, three and a half weeks of business of being down and out, if you're doing that more than once a year for customers, then at the end of the day, they might not be in business for very long.

>> Okay. So I'm a customer, I'm sufficiently now engaged, you've scared me.

>> We're scared.

>> Sorry, yes.

>> And I want really address this problem, and I want to understand how you can work with HPE because they get strong services organization. That's not what you're known for. You're a product company, just works. Take me through a typical customer engagement, starting with kind of the overall sort of assessment and what role you guys play and what role HPE plays all the way through solution.

>> Yeah. So as you say, I mean, we're software only. We're a pure play software organization, HPE, greatest infrastructure provider on the planet, literally, centuries of engineering years. They put into everything you can imagine, tape, disc, flash, et cetera. So leveraging a great foundation in terms of where you're going to protect your data on the production system, on the secondary systems, multiple copies, to Emilee's point, different types of technology, tape, flash, cloud, spinning disc, of course. Also, what we really want to do, because I feel like we've really kind of focused on the scared straight notion to your point, but what's the good news? The good news is we can now have a greater appreciation of where are the vulnerabilities? Where are the escapes? To Emilee's point about, okay, if everyone's busy and not able to always do everything that they know they should, how can we automate that in the software? How could we leverage hardware-enabled immutability or encryption or data movement and speed to be able to take advantage of things that, just a few years ago, wouldn't have been possible? So a big part of it is trying to reduce the friction between daily best practices and the reality of what's going on.

>> If budget's not an issue, it always is, but let's take finances out of the equation and I'm in a, let's say, below average posture, can you get me to where I need to be inside of 12 months, inside of six months, even?

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think the biggest benefit, and for me actually before joining product strategy, I worked primarily with public sector customers, who didn't have the best budget, didn't have a lot of people that was built inside their IT organization, and that usually we're waiting one, two years in order for a new budget cycle to come in, right?

>> Right.

>> So it was working with those types of customers to really help them to get on the right path of having a better data protection strategy and partnering with HPE and giving them opportunities like leveraging HPE GreenLake. So that way, they can do a purchase as you go and be able to still get the best of both products and both vendors without having to go and scramble to try to find budget for those.

>> Okay. So we're ending on a happy note.

>> Yes.

>> I really think so.

>> Yeah.

>> Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE.

>> Thanks, guys.

>> Absolutely.

>> Thank you.

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante and John Furrier. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of HPE Discover. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.

Powering Forward: Unstoppable Growth with HPE and Veeam

>> It's great to be back.

>> And Emilee Tellez, she is the senior technologist at Veeam. Welcome to theCUBE, Emilee. Your first time, very exciting.

>> Thank you. It's my first time, very excited to be here.

>> The green Veeam, the color, I love Veeam's colors. Color of money. Color of Celtics, right? Just had to get that in.

>> Yeah, you're a Celtics one?

>> Yes, yes.

>> How about the Boston Celtics? Just-

>> Yeah....

>> yeah, exactly.

>> These guys don't-

>> once every 18 years.

>> These guys are West Coast .

>> Oh, all right. Well, You're just buttering us up.

>> No, it's true.

>> So what is that? Is that willful ignorance or is that a real lack of understanding of what's going on? Why are enterprises so numb to this very real and very expensive threat?

>> Yeah. So when I was laughing, saying I know what's coming, because the answer is don't be in that situation.

>> Right.

>> Right....

>> Explain for the guys the 3-2-1-0 best practice.

>> And the media still includes tape?

>> And this is really part of the strategy of radical resiliency. Can you describe, Emilee, how you see this evolving as the threat landscape evolves along with it, too?

>> Speaking of strategy, what is Veeam today? Backup, recovery, data protection, data management, security, all the above. How do you describe Veeam today from a strategy standpoint?

>> Yeah, I used to say for the last few years, we're unapologetically a backup company. Backup is maybe not a word that the marketing departments and those types get excited about.

>> Not that sexy, yeah.

>> Yeah, because that is really rolling the dice. It's like-

>> Yeah.

>> Hugely.

>> "Let's hope it works."

>> Yeah.

>> Okay. So I'm a customer, I'm sufficiently now engaged, you've scared me.

>> We're scared.

>> Sorry, yes.

>> Right.

>> Okay. So we're ending on a happy note.

>> Yes.

>> I really think so.

>> Yeah.

>> Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE.

>> Thanks, guys.

>> Absolutely.

>> Thank you.

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante and John Furrier. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of HPE Discover. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.