Webinar

Backup, Re-use, Win

Maximizing Your Salesforce Data Protection Investment

Speakers

Christophe Bertrand

Sr Analyst @ ESG

LinkedIn

Joe Gaska

CEO @ GRAX

LinkedIn

About this talk

Now more than ever, cloud applications run the show. Salesforce and other SaaS apps make up 1/3 of all mission-critical enterprise apps, according to ESG. Savvy businesses know they can’t afford to lose any of that data, which is why backup has become such a high priority.

The other is re-use. As ESG found, 80% of organizations see backup data re-use as the next phase, or even the replacement of, their existing data protection strategy. They want to tap into their backup data for everything from compliance, cybersecurity, and revenue growth, to ML/AI training sets.

Watch Christophe Bertrand, ESG’s Senior Analyst for Data Protection, and Joe Gaska, GRAX’s CEO and co-founder, as they discuss:

  • Trends in data backup requirements (hint: data loss tolerance is shrinking to nearly zero minutes)
  • Overcoming cloud data backup re-use challenges, including costs and copy sprawl
  • How real-world companies are using their backup data

If your business counterparts aren’t already trying to use cloud backup data for strategic purposes, they will soon. Watch this webinar to learn how to ensure your SaaS app data is backed up and ready to drive greater value from your data protection investment.

59 min. Published on

Transcript

- All right, we're going to get started. Thanks, everyone, and hello. We are excited to have you join us today for our webinar Backup, Re-use, Win: Maximizing Your Salesforce Data Protection Investment.

Today, we will be discussing trends in backup requirements, overcoming cloud data backup reuse challenges, how real-world companies are using their backup data, and then we'll end with an interactive Q&A session.

Before we jump in, just a couple of quick housekeeping items. First, this webinar is being recorded, and we will share it out after. Second, at any time during this session please feel free to drop your questions into the question box, and we'll do our best to answer all of your questions during the live Q&A portion of the show.

So I'm Diane, and I'm from the product marketing team here at Grax. And I'll be your moderator for today's webinar. And leading off today's discussion will be Christophe Bertrand who is a senior analyst at ESG with over 25 years of expertise in the data protection and data storage space.

And joining Christophe is Grax founder and CEO, Joe Gaska, a serial entrepreneur in the Boston tech space, who made Grax the fastest-growing application in Salesforce history. And with that, I'd like to hand off the mike to Christophe to kick things off.

- Thank you very much, Diane. Hello, everyone. As you can see, we have a bunch of research we're going to be sharing with you. And let me just give you a little background first. My focus, as Diane indicated, is data protection, backup recovery, wherever it lives. And that also includes, of course, looking at well beyond the data center and into the cloud.

I've also spent some time recently researching how data can be reused for other purposes. And certainly, this is a very big topic that we'll be covering today in the context of SaaS applications, also in a general context of what best practices might be for organizations that are digitally transforming.

So, let's get into the details. Let's talk a little bit about what's going on in the backup space. And one of the things I want to point out from this recent research-- we went out and talked to hundreds of IT professionals.

So people like you are people who make decisions every day on the best strategies, the best products are using their organization, the best solutions, and IT decision-makers, as well as people who are tasked with implementing those data related type of solutions.

And what we see is that cloud is becoming a key mechanism of protecting data not only in a data center but wherever it lives that includes, of course, SaaS applications. And the ready-to-service-model is becoming very popular across the way.

So not only just as an application to consume-as-a-service but also as a data protection disaster recovery type of service. That's really what you see here on the left-hand side, and we're in the process of updating this research. So in the next few months, we'll see how things have evolved in terms of what topologies are leveraged.

On the right-hand side, what you see is that mission-critical apps obviously run their show, right? And a bunch of them now are actually in delivered as a cloud service. That's very important because the time of on-prem applications only is really only part of the story.

And now what we see is a lot of cloud resident applications and again services. So what the point I want to make here is that with a third of applications in SaaS deployments the question becomes, what is your responsibility? Can you abdicate your responsibility for the data?

And I'll give you the answer. The answer is no, you can't. You're responsible for the backup. You're also responsible for the management compliance of that data. And a good example of that would be salesforce.com, for example, which I think the vast majority of organizations use around the world, and therefore it's very key that organizations understand how to plan and how to protect those environments. But again this is just a starting point, there's more that can be done with that data.

So next slide, please. I always like to look at some metrics for whatever I do. It's good to have metrics as you know in the space of data protection, backup recovery, disaster recovery, it's really about recovery time objective and recovery point objective.

Here we're focusing a little bit more on the recovery point objective, which is how much data can you really afford to lose. It's remarkable that majority of the market is under one hour, in other words, I can't afford to lose more than one hour of data.

And if you notice a little more closely starting from the left-hand side-- first of all, you see some people who want full high availability. No data loss, very laudable objective, sometimes hard to actually achieve, but it's very important. It shows you how critical data is to the business.

The fact that under the 15 minutes bar you have a vast majority of the organizations out there which, I think, it adds up to 59%. So I think that's pretty remarkable because it's not just about data protection, it's also about data reuse.

The point I want to make is that data is an asset and an asset that has to return something back to the organization. And it really can't be lost. I mean you wouldn't go throw away your machinery. If you're in a production business you would not go do that. So why do it with data? Doesn't make any sense.

So you have to be able to guarantee a great level of protection for the data. And this is now something that's become really super-critical for SaaS environments. As I said, your responsibilities do not go away because it's in SaaS.

Next slide. So here you'll see we're going to build this up slowly but surely. There are a number of new capabilities that are emerging. The question we asked as you could see on the left-hand side so that you all know what you're looking at is essentially what type of data management capabilities you find applicable to your environment.

And as we build up the slide, you will see that there are two colors, the dark blue and the light blue. The dark blue is "give me your primary," and the light blue is the popularity contest, "give me all that apply."

So that's why the dark blue adds up to 100% for those of you who are adding things up, and I know some of you are, and whereas the light blue is more again of that popularity contest. What's important here is that it gives us to tell us a story.

And the story is that enabling copies and access to data for non-data protection goals is very important as things move forward. I would say the other important use case is that you're going to see emerging here, and this is again remember professional's IQ, so this is where the market is going. It's really going to be around cloud leverage and more importantly compliance.

I really want to say that compliance has a very central role to play here. You cannot really reuse data that's not compliant. And of course, you still want to protect your data. So the traditional use case of backup recovery, disaster recovery that doesn't go away. It probably gets enhanced over time, but it goes far beyond just having a backup.

Again this is becoming all the more important as you consider the fact that you have SaaS applications where, in a sense, you've decided to trade control for service. So do you still have access to that data the same way is one of the interesting questions that comes up very often.

So again a number of very important capabilities here are emerging, and I would say highlighted is the fact that secondary data reuse is becoming top of the list. As a matter of fact, you'll see in the next few minutes we have more data on that point.

Next slide. So here's what's interesting is that I would say the backup processes are extremely well-positioned to help today, but there also is a lack of instrumentation. The fact that these respondents here told us that they see data reuse or intelligent data management as their equivalent.

The fact that you can reuse the data, it means you have intelligent data management capabilities as an extension of data protection. It sort of tells you the technology story. I have all these backups or I have the ability to move a lot of data around and back it up, et cetera. Why don't I do more with it? That makes perfect sense.

So that's why a lot of people see it as an extension and in time as a replacement. The fact that one in five sees it as an actual replacement tells you that in a sense backup and recovery probably becomes something that disappears over time being only one use case of a more general sort of data reuse set of capabilities. And we'll see more specifically what I mean by that.

So again, I don't think we'll cut it moving forward. I think backup recovery time goes away. But it can be a fundamental or angular piece to setup data reuse in DataOps, DevOps, and we'll see analytics. And really, it's really just evolution towards intelligent data management.

That's one of the things I've been looking at very closely. And for those of you who follow ESG, we have an intelligent data management model that shows this evolution and what technologies are involved. And that's why we're here today.

Next slide. So Joe, I think, this is yours.

- Thanks, Christophe. Perfect, perfect segue into-- couldn't agree more with everything that you just spoke about. We're seeing it continuously across all of our customers. We work with some of the most iconic global brands that you'll hear throughout this presentation today.

But really talking about this use case, it really speaks to what you've just or you just kind of described for the audience. A lot of customers that we talked to today are really trying to deliver on their tactical obligations of backup, archive, restore, disaster recovery.

They're trying to mitigate risk by capturing the history of their data. And they're really trying to ensure the business continuity. And people are starting to really look at how can I use that history and not just my, answer my tactical obligations. They're really looking at reusability.

And a lot of customers that we're talking about today, they have many consumers internally actually hitting the API and reaching API limits because different people within the organization have different requirements for using the historical data.

So a lot of the leaders today, much like, I'm sure a lot of the listeners on the call today, are starting to realize that this historical data could be used more than just an insurance policy. How can I deliver more value for the business, not just ensuring that if something nefarious happens or if say an error in data happens, I can quickly recover from it?

Businesses have been quicker, faster, and more requirements. As you said, all of our customers are pushing for the highest fidelity and the highest frequency of data capture. And that is doing nothing but going as fast as we possibly can.

And we have customers today that expect near real-time access to that data. And access to the data what we really think about it is the extensibility not just to deliver on the tactical requirements that they need of I need to back up, I need something to have, but OK, what else can we have?

And you spoke about the duplicity of data across the enterprise and just how much that costs, and the burden and the obligation of those replicas, and how do I ensure that the replicas are also compliant? Those really the costs are escalating the more you replicate data.

So when we really thought about Grax and making sure that our customers own their data and really having the availability to use it and reuse the data, one piece that we do-- so this is really a global brand, and what they really came to us after understanding that we're capturing every version of their history, how can they use it downstream?

When we started talking about their business intelligence, their operations, their data analytics, they really started to re-imagine this, not just say that, hey, this historical data is a source of truth that I can reuse. And whether it's data operations or the analytics, they started saying, well, if we only have to manage one historical snapshot what are the other benefits our business can do? And they started dialing in.

And that's really where it comes in and speaks exactly the same. Every one of our customers and every one of our leaders are saying not only capture the quickest, highest fidelity, highest frequency but also give me the optionality of how else and where else can I use it.

And that's been critical for our customers. So I totally agree with what, everything you've said. So why don't we jump on to the next slide?

- Great. So Joe, I just wanted to-- maybe a comment on one thing you brought up which is the API calls, the governor limits that come up in Salesforce. People need to understand it's-- first of all, the APIs were never designed for backup and recovery. I will tell you that.

I know I'm not going to have a lot of, lots of friends at Salesforce for this one, but hey, that's the reality. We've seen this before in other technologies. It's going to get better over time. And it gives companies like you, organizations like you the ability to go help.

The one thing I want to point out is that if you hit those governor limits you could actually lock yourself out of the service. That's really not what you want to do. What you're trying to do is to protect the data or leverage it for other purposes.

Remember you're still responsible for it. And most recently Salesforce actually had a very minimal data recovery service, and they've actually decided to [INAUDIBLE] that. So there is a big, a big ask here. If you're in the Salesforce management space here in your organization, you have to be able to do your backups, and therefore you need to be looking at solutions. But it goes beyond that.

And you also brought up another point which was very important, which is the cost. Cost of data and all that data that you're duplicating potentially. And here I have some statistics I want to share with you. Again this is based on us asking organizations, so what data do you have for backup?

One terabyte of production creates x terabytes of backup and x terabytes of secondary data reuse. As you could see, I mean, I think it's pretty crazy that one terabyte of production, which already, as we know, there's more and more and more data, to begin with, turns into eight to nine terabytes of actual data. So one equals eight or nine.

Somebody's going to pay for it, and it's going to go somewhere-- whether it's cloud or storage even long-term storage. The bottom line is it's OK to have multiple copies of data. To a certain extent, I think there are some good practices there for sure, but eight to nine x, that's probably little too much.

And that's why you're seeing that aside from the cost, it's also a compliance nightmare, and a management nightmare, because you have to make sure all of those copies are compliant whether they are reused or not.

So operationally, it's inefficient. It's a real hindrance for effective reuse. So that's why we can see some reuse already in place today, happening today, but it can get better, and one of the reasons is all of the silos and all that multiplication of data that really is unnecessary at the end of the day.

Next slide. So data is an asset, right? As I was explaining earlier, and Joe, you made that point as well-- I want to do something else with this data. Think about people talking about digital transformation. What do you think that's about?

That's about being smart about the data that you generate in your business and leveraging data to create more services or augment your offerings. Doesn't matter whether you're selling a tangible good or an actual service that's data-based.

The point being is that the ability to reuse data is critical and has to be fresh. As you could see here, a number of organizations with fresh data certainly daily, vast majority daily, but some of them hourly or even more frequently.

So the point I want to make here is that I think that the hourly sort of sequence or frequency, I should say, is likely going to become more of a standard moving forward. I would expect that in some more sophisticated organizations that really 100% rely on the data for their services and require to analyze quickly or to go take certain actions quickly.

You might even see that becoming, as Joe was suggesting, almost instant. Again one more thing, remember before you can reuse, you also have to be compliant, and don't forget you still have to back up.

Next slide. OK, so this is another one where we're going to highlight multiple points and you're going to see we're going to be building up the slide. First of all let's ask ourselves, what are the ways to reuse secondary data, and which ones have had the most or have the greatest potential impact?

And again remember these are people just like you thinking about, hey, how do I reuse data? What's going to be, what is the benefit going to be? So of course, the BC/DR, as I said, an extension to great practices, and that's, a lot of it is motivated also by cybersecurity and by ransomware, why?

Because testing has become very necessary to be able to identify ransomware before it hits. Sometimes it hides. There is ransomware that goes after your backups. There are lots of things going on with an increased or heightened frequency of attacks actually due to the expanded surface of attack with COVID and working from home.

But testing is a great way to reuse data, again cybersecurity, and what I call sandboxing, but also patch testing. I mean, are you going to blow up the application or the service or the microservices as you apply that new build.

And of course, that is where you now think about well I know that's great but that could also apply to my Salesforce environment. There are lots of things you can do in Salesforce. You may want to be testing things out. And then compliance as I said is important.

You cannot perpetuate your problem of compliance. Should I be able to see this data that may be, may have PII or personal identifiers of personal data depending on which compliance regulation you talk about? Maybe not, as a developer, I probably shouldn't.

So are there ways to obfuscate the data or convert it into something that makes it less meaningful from a privacy breach perspective? So hey, Joe becomes John or Joe becomes Christophe. You can't recognize me that way, right? These are some simple examples.

The point I want to make is that I think BC/DR are some of the very important starting point but other use cases are really top of mind for many organizations. And again, we're dealing here with new players. People who deal with analytics. People who are in the DevOps space.

So I think this is where you see that from an IT standpoint, as IT professionals you are going to be dealing with maybe other parts of the organization as you implement more intelligent data management.

Next slide. So I was hinting at the fact that OK, you're getting a return on investment, OK? And that is actually something that we've been able to survey here and look at. We've specifically asked here, as you could see, the question is at the bottom left.

We always put the question on the slide so you know what we asked. And here we asked specifically what benefits have you actually, have you realized or do you expect to realize? And I think it gives you a very good idea of why you should be doing this.

It's a business-- both a business and sort of an infrastructure set of benefits. Greater business agility, I know it sounds pretty wide, but it's actually very important. An agile business can morph and adjust and adapt to situations, including some catastrophic situations. And we've seen that happen in the past year.

So the business agility is never bad. It's always critical. And they are strategic in nature, by the way, those benefits-- long, last long term, lasting improvements. When you lower your operational costs and you're building more efficiency, which is the second one here we're talking about.

You could see how that becomes a benefit. There's more money, more budget to reuse for other things, right? To expand the business, to expand the capabilities. And by the way, why doesn't it add up to 100%? Because you could answer, here people could pick three answers. So it's a bit of a popularity contest if you will.

What's interesting also is the visibility over data meaning you now know what you have, where it is, where it lives, and therefore what you can do or can't do with it. And at the end of the day again, the strategic initiatives like AI, ML, DevOps can be satisfied, and are essentially sort of the technical benefits of putting in place a solution that really fosters data reuse beyond backup and recovery.

Of course, there are some great benefits. We can see here the ugly head of cyberattacks at the bottom of the list as well as business uptime. But fundamentally one of the point I want to make is intelligent data management, data reuse is about business as much as it is about data.

Next slide. But of course, there are also some things that get in the way. It's something we always do in our research. We try to be balanced. We ask for hey, what's good about this. Hey, what's in the way?

And here what you could see on the flip side if you will, is that there are some impediments to reusing more data. And as you can see they are a combination of technical, economic, and organizational, OK?

Of course, cost can be a problem. Yes, if you have seven or eight x times, the amount of, times the amount of data, it may be hard to manage. I was hinting at that earlier. And that's going to cost you money.

I think the big one again that that comes up is governance or compliance requirements. So governance would be more internal what you do as a business and what regulations you sort of self impose, and of course, compliance is coming from external regulators.

Those are not potentially in a position. They should actually be in work-in-harmony, but the point being is that it's still something you have to do and that's hard. Especially when you think about again the enhanced risks that we see these days around cybersecurity.

I think the data silos which is your sort of fourth one here is the one to think about. And one of those data silos, by the way, could be a SaaS application. So it's important to find a way to understand the various sources and to really try to understand the issues.

Because if you can do that, then you can potentially reduce the number of copies, and then you can use the tools or the backup tools that will help you work from a sort of unified data set without incurring all of that replication that we saw.

So really it's in your hands. It's not something that someone else will do for you. It's something you have to do as an end-user, as an organization. Which means that today, and I understand, the instrumentation is not 100% there, and that's why you're seeing these type of impediments to reusing more data for those who already benefit from data reuse.

Next slide, please. So so here what's interesting is that traditional methods that are used for the use of data tend to be storage-based space I know, I know really well. But that can be pretty onerous, pretty expensive.

Our research shows that not many users actually, as you could see on the right-hand side, actually leverage the functionality. And in a sense, they may be depriving themselves here from the benefit of that secondary data reuse.

But they're also avoiding costs in a sense because we know it's not very efficient. So really the way I'm showing, the reason why I'm showing you this that that's what's going on in a data center. But in the SaaS space, the good news is that where storage again is not directly owned and managed by the end-user, right? That's the principle of it, the service.

There are some backup tools for those SaaS applications and Salesforce of course is a big one that really allow you to go expose not only the backup and archive data to analytics tools but to other parts of the organizations without necessarily having to create multiple copies.

But that's really the big thing. The world is changing, and I think Joe, you have some great examples to share with us.

- Thanks, Christophe. Yeah that's-- you covered a lot there. But let's dive into it. It's, so this global brand is one that probably many of you are wearing on your wrist today, right? And as you were speaking Christophe earlier, data is growing exponentially.

And how people are listening to their customers, and talking with their customers, every interaction with your end customer is creating more data and more data is creating more backup data, and making quick, efficient reuse of that data is critical to this company.

Now their company themselves were actually hitting limits. They're hitting data overages. They're hitting performance issues. As they are increasing their speeds, their performance with some of their SaaS applications was degrading because of a lot of their historical data.

So one thing with Grax-- there are a few things to it. Every piece of data that you backup and archive has to be available in real-time access where it exists today. So nothing that, nothing that you archive or backup is lost to the business.

You have real-time access to it. It's critical for this company to have not only real-time access to all of their history but also how can I go back and how can I choose what data do I want to keep in my system or where do I want to move it to a more scalable, cost-efficient storage?

And one of the biggest premiss and the reason why we started Grax itself is when we protect our customers, we also make sure that we put the data where they own it forever. We don't lock it in our cloud and lease access back to them.

We actually let the customers own their data 100% in their infrastructure as a service of choice, AWS. So think of every version of all their most critical data choosing what they want to keep resident in their SaaS application or store it inside of their more cost-efficient scalable storage, but still, maintain real-time access.

What this does is it takes off their performance strains on the SaaS applications. You can choose which is most critical, but you always retain access to that from your business users, but most importantly as companies start gradually increasing their needs for historical data, they still have the optionality of every bit of history that they've captured.

You really have to think of Grax itself as think of it as a black box for business information. It captures every version of your most critical data and puts it in a place where if you want to and need to analyze that historical data, any part of your business can tap into it that you choose.

Now, this is most critical. Always compliance and regulatory access control audits, we work with the most heavily regulated industries from financial to government agencies to health care industry. So not only how do you encrypt that data but how do you audit it? How do you have WORM compliance? How do you have HIPAA compliance? How do I store it and maintain what's called chain-of-custody-of-data?

When you set it up, all of your historical data has to maintain all those rigid controls that your business requires but also make sure the optionality for future downstream consumption is there, right? So really making sure how do we drive down the total cost of ownership of the SaaS applications capturing everything but also maintain it.

As you said-- you're 100% right. I could not agree more. When you said data is replicated seven times, seven times. And people say, oh data storage is cheap. One thing that you hit on was critical. Storage may be cheap but maintaining the access controls, the regulatory, the compliance, the business problem, how do I backup that data that's stored so I don't affect it?

All of those things multiply, believe it or not when we talk to these businesses, exponential, right? So these companies right now are starting to think of, hey, I want to deliver on these tactical obligations of backing up the data or reducing the friction or costs or stresses that we're causing.

But really these leaders that are backing up their data are starting to really think about, OK, how else can I reduce the burden and obligation for the business themselves? And how do I give access downstream? So a 100% could not agree more about the data reuse, efficiencies, and inefficiencies, and people starting to rethink.

We've seen this time and time again for some of our customers. And it's just been a-- for every customer, it doesn't have to be this whole revolutionary thing. It's an evolutionary path to say, OK, I want to start, I want to press record on my data right now.

So if you think of it right now, if you start right now, it's-- you're saying, I want to record all of my history. Later on down the line, you can choose how do I want to look and analyze the history. But you first have to say, I'm going to start pushing record right now to capture everything and be as efficient as possible and take ownership. This is the key thing.

SaaS applications when they, when, we've seen customers. They love it, and they love to pay for it. APIs break down to store massive amounts of information and access this sort of reach limit. But people want to have that history and we'll talk about it maybe a little bit later.

Historical data is how you feed machine learning and artificial intelligence. So taking ownership of your history also takes ownership of machine learning and artificial intelligence as that is the source of truth.

And what we're seeing with how our customers not only-- again, starting with the tactical obligations, cutting down savings but making sure that they're putting in the foundations for their future. Back to you.

- Well, so, Joe this is obviously very, very compelling. And I think more importantly what you're experiencing as a business and the clients you have-- well certainly this, my research shows this is exactly what's happened.

The dynamic in the market today and you don't want to be left behind because what happens when you combine data recovery with data reuse what you get is really the ability to support digital transformation. So you'll see here we have some interesting findings.

By the way for those organizations that have had to accelerate digital transformation because of COVID, right? It's been interesting to see how much faster they've been able to adjust their business. It hasn't been easy for everyone. We have other research on that. But certainly, something to bear in mind.

The one thing I want to point out here is, you see the distribution of, OK what, in terms of an investment priority, where do you land? Where does your organization land? Is it top one, top five, top 10? We could see it's a pretty healthy distribution. It's starting to move. The market is starting to shift.

And I will tell you for those organizations that do not shift with the market, they will be left behind as a business. Those infrastructures have to evolve. For those who have made it a top priority what's interesting is we've looked at it from the perspective of-- well, are you really a promoter?

In other words, I love data reuse. I love intelligent data management. I'm 100% behind it. And how well are you doing when you cross-reference that or bump that against people who say they have derived some incremental business value?

And it turns out that those who actually are promoters are really heavily invested, see more value into it. So in a sense, if you don't do it right, yeah, I think you can't get, get a lot of value if you're halfway there. But for those who really invest and really think through it, they get a lot out of it, and which is really the idea, right?

You want that data to return something to you for the business. By the way, what's interesting too is the age of the organization is a factor. The organizations that are sort of cloud-native or digital natives what we call them 10 years or less, tend to do everything cloud-first, probably SaaS first as well, but they've also been really smart about understanding the data reuse.

So it's an interesting data point. It doesn't mean that if your organization is older, you can do it, but it is maybe a culture internally that you have to think about where things may be less obvious from an organizational standpoint that you need to do things in a certain way.

Again the people who succeed are those people who are really embracing digital transformation here and are making the right decisions putting in place instrumentation and simplification for efficient data reuse and very likely again as we can see here, very likely SaaS-based applications.

There's so much data in there to use, and I think I love the idea of this sort of recording of the history of everything. Yeah, I mean if you don't have it, you can't do anything with it, right? So the thing is to have it smart. You don't want to have it seven, eight, nine times over, right? That's really where we're landing on this. Everything's costly these days.

So I know I covered quite a bit. I think we have a couple more slides that Joe, you'd like to cover with us.

- Well, great. Thanks. Thanks, Christophe. I couldn't agree more with everything you've been speaking about, and kind of ESG, the metrics are really proving, right? And there are so many companies that I get the-- I get the wonderful blessings of talking to you through this.

And again this is just the kind of evolutionary slide of how a lot of our discussions go. And a lot of people start with Joe, why do I need all this history? How can I reuse it, and how, why would I really need that? And people say that's overkill.

Well, if you really think of some of the most largest brands in the industry that are using your rich history and people that really get upset by it. Think of Google, think of your search history, think of Facebook, who are your, how are you, how are you connecting to different people? How are you touching them? How is your timeline effective?

All of that is the rich history of who you're interacting with and what you're doing. Your most strategic business data, the historical data is mapping out how your interactions with your customers affect your business, and how you listen to it.

And most of our customers that we're talking to are really like you said digital transformation. It starts with the first thing of saying, first thing I need to do is capture my history. Before I can really think about the strategic value of how I'm going to use that to really influence my business or compete-- because every one of our customers if they're not doing it, their competitors are.

And if they're listening to their customers, and they are paying attention to their interactions and reacting quicker because of their history and their intelligence that's really where we start to see digital transformation and quicker interaction.

So a lot of our customers start down this path and say, listen, I heard that webinar, and I'm going to start-- I'm going to press record right now and get my history. And I just have a tactical need of answering these, these little pieces.

What you're doing is you're storing all of your history in your own storage that you own forever. That means optionality in the future if you want to use it for that higher strategic one, that is day zero that you can look back to.

If we want to do data archiving or time machine or get into the data hub where you're doing these rich analytics, it always starts from that point you press capture all my history, right? So really, it starts job one with let's capture the history, and then really starting to figure out we have these tactical needs. It could be operational costs or overhead.

A lot of our customers, the first thing they're tackling is they say we have seven to eight, and I would argue that a lot of these customers have more than 8 to 10 copies of their backup data, whether it's business intelligence, data analytics, data scientists, they all have replicas of their data.

And a lot of these people are starting to realize the cost and the risk associated with that. So it starts there and it's really evolutionary. I mean it's really evolutionary kind of gradual movement for the business but it's having that optionality of getting there.

And again, a lot of the leaders and the customers that we're talking to, it's the switch of saying well, it starts with backup, but wait a minute backup is really just my history. And how do I take ownership of my history so I can have optionality in the future?

And that's really where we've seen a lot of our customers go too much like a lot of your research is proving. And I could not agree more that it started, and it starts with every one of the customers about saying, hey, listen I just want to back up the data. Then the next question is, well, well, wait a minute, what can I do with that? Now that I have that history, what are the things can I do with it? Can I feed it into machine learning? Can I feed it into AI? Can I feed it into the data warehouse?

And then a lot of our customers say, well, wait a minute. Well, we have four data warehouses we use. We use Tableau. We use Snowflake. We use Redshift. How can I use one source of that data not just as kind of one?

So it's really refreshing to hear how much alignment that your company has really stated because it's what we're seeing in the market day in and day out. So reuse, tapping into the history, and kind of what do I have to answer the strategic business problems, the tactical obligations are always going to be there.

The backup, archive, compliance, auditing, those pieces are forever for businesses that are there. But I could not agree more as to the people that are moving the fast is really starting to adopt their historical data, and how do I, how do I react to it?

And we can talk about this all day about how historical data creates data, business velocity changes, and whatnot. And it's amazing to see what some companies are doing with their data reuse. So first thing to do, start capturing your history, everything else comes next.

Really capture the versions of the history. It all flows off of that. But the first piece is let's just capture every version of history and kind of move on there. So Diane why don't we move to the next slide. We're just going to recap a little bit before we move on.

So as Christophe-- what we're seeing just to kind of restate what he actually already said is the first thing to do is taking ownership of the history. History is value. Taking ownership of that value, and really, really starting to kind of give optionality for it, access controls, making sure that you can manage and control access to the historical data as well as you can reduce the overhead and friction of storing and then capture.

You need to capture the highest fidelity and the highest frequency of data. So one of the biggest pieces is you never want to not be listening to history of data that you really want to capture in the future.

So it all starts with one, one little thing. You just have to press record on your data and start capturing the history and everything downstream. What we've seen is really just about what comes after starting to capture the versions of the history. So with that I'll kind of click it back to you, Diane.

- Thanks, Joe, and thanks, Christophe. I think with that we can open up for our live Q&A portion. As a reminder, please submit all your questions in the question box. So let's see if we have our first one. All right, it looks like we do have our first question in from our viewers.

And this one's actually for Joe. They're asking about cost of storage are going down. So why should it matter if I make all these copies of my data?

- So that's a great question as we kind of touched on earlier, and I know Christophe touched on this a little bit. So the data storage, believe it or not, the actual raw metal storage it's not really where the expense in data storage costs are.

It's the people time. It's the managing access and controls. It's the managing all that data and the replicas. When you replicate data, those systems then get backed up. And those backups get backed up. So it's an exponential decay of cost for storage.

But if you really think about the people time, and the business continuity planning, and the costs of who's using the data where, and especially, especially if you're going to maintain compliance on all those replicas of data which most people don't. They have kind of-- the ignorance is bliss.

Where if the right to be forgotten or CCPA or the HIPAA compliance, those replicas, a lot of customers, they do not actually apply their regulatory. So that exposes them to even more risk for the business as a whole itself. And I'm not sure if Christophe wants to add anything to that.

- That's pretty obvious to me. It's operational efficiency related. The cost of storage first of all, while it's going down, but it's not free. And if you think that, for example, cloud storage, even cold storage is not costly, we'll just take a closer look at your bill every week, and every month, and don't discount egress fees if you were to do something that data has to come back and go back somewhere, number one.

Number two is the fact that data silos just have emerged over time. And that's really what we're dealing with here. So you may be very successful in one part of the business with one silo, but as you multiply the silos you multiply these efficiencies. So it's not just about cost of storage.

- Awesome. And then we have a second question. They're asking about SaaS vendors. So they're asking, don't SaaS vendors generally back up data for their customers? I thought Salesforce still does this for me.

- OK, wrong answer.

[LAUGHTER]

- No, they don't. Don't confuse-- people conflate availability with recoverability. If you go, delete a bunch of stuff in Salesforce by mistake or automatically because you coded it wrong, guess what? It's gone, right? There's no backup. The backups are your responsibility always, always, always.

And SaaS vendors provide availability that may provide some level of backup for their service, right? OK. But that's not their responsibility, their responsibility to be protecting your data. What they do is to provide a service where they make it available for whatever process or whatever application you're paying them for. So I want to be very clear.

- Great, and then let's see, we have another question. This one sounds like it's actually for Joe. They're asking how does Grax back up data? And what's the architecture like?

- That's a longer question, but-- so when we built Grax, the technical architecture wasn't possible until about late 2017. And if you think about it, the architecture is as simple as this. So we capture every single version of data and we store it in its most purest form.

We don't transform the data. That's why when you transform the data and put it into a data warehouse, you actually lose kind of fidelity of the data itself. So think of it this way, we capture every version of the data. We put it in the most cost-efficient storage. We store it within the infrastructure-as-a-service that you own.

So think AWS, GCP, or Azure, we store the version of it there. The reason why we did that is very critical. You know one thing that Christophe touched on was egress fees. The egress fees are what kill you with data. So imagine a world where-- now this is the big thing. Backup data is history.

The basis of knowledge comes from history. So if you have all of this history of your data stored within your cloud, how you want to interpret that history to gather more knowledge can be done using other first-party applications within that.

If you think Redshift, SageMaker, QuickSight, and AWS, all of those things are used to extract knowledge from your history. And we wanted to store it as close as possible for your consumption to reduce the friction. So in simple part, we put it in your infrastructure as a service of choice. We don't hold customers hostage, and we replicate the highest frequency and highest fidelity.

And believe it or not, without going into detail, your data never leaves any facility that you don't own. We maintain chain of custody from source to storage.

- Wonderful. We have another question actually about ownership this time. Someone's asking, why is ownership important? I thought when I buy backup I own the data because I pay for this service.

- I'll take that one and then maybe if Christophe wants to add some. So the biggest thing when you pay for-- so a lot of vendors and a lot of things, and the reason why we built Grax is a lot of the backup vendors what they do is they backup data, and they store it within the backup-as-a-service their cloud itself.

And then what you do is you have to pull that data out via API. If you shut their service off, you lose all access to your history. All history again is stored within your owned infrastructure-as-a-service of your choice. So you never lose your history ever. It's always there. It's always accessible. And it's always available for your business itself.

So we're not, we don't, that's, we don't believe in really holding customers hostage by leasing access to their history. And there's a lot of other reasons for API consumption and egress and ingress of getting access to it, but basically, ownership of the data is critical when you look ahead in the future.

- And I will just add that it's not just ownership, it's governance. Again your business, your data, your problem. That simple. Your responsibility. Can't make it simpler.

- Well said.

- Very well said. We have another question from the group. And they're asking-- it's a real specific question. So their role is focused on backup and recovery. They're asking why should I even care about reuse when it's not really their job?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

- Yeah, I can give you a perspective real quick. So I think, yeah you're right, you're the backup person. So why should you care? Well, guess what, I'm just going to come knocking on the door from maybe the DevOps team or from another part of the organization saying, hey, look I need to take a look at historical data because I need to go improve a product or create a new solution, or I need to go do some, very simply, some dev, test dev or app patching, whatever the case may be.

And you'd better have the instrumentation in place to make it easy to share, transport and share. And the thing is about backup and recovery, you're really good at one thing which is backup and recovery. And that's why things are changing.

As the research shows the organization you work for is likely going to change and ask you to make that data more accessible, more visible, more actionable. So that's why you should care because it's going to coming your way.

Now it doesn't mean it's going to become your responsibility to all of a sudden change into and become this intelligent data management actor, right? But you're going to be part of the solution. And I think it's a great position to be in. This is a very powerful position to be in.

Well, think about it, you can really be part of something that makes the infrastructure evolve, makes your business evolve, and it still gives you the benefit of having, of doing what you're doing, which is backup and recovery. So I would take it as a great advantage and opportunity but one not to miss for sure.

- And one thing, one thing just to add to that is a lot of the people that we're speaking to when they really taking ownership of, I need to protect the business. Now not only protecting the business from the bad things that may happen from backup and archive but making sure they protect the optionality in the future.

So we're starting to see a lot of people really say, this is my job because I'm protecting the business and making sure the best interests are protected. So it's been quite interesting to see how their role has progressed to the ownership of really looking downstream.

And we see it day in and day out. It's been great. They're pushing us really far because they're saying things to us that they need that we haven't even imagined. That's a whole different discussion.

- Thanks, guys. The next question we have is what's the best way to make my SaaS app data accessible to my company's intelligence and data science teams. I guess, Joe do you want to kick this one off, and then we'll pass it to Christophe?

- Sure. So again, when we really sat down and thought about rethinking this whole world of backuping historical data, the one key point is to capture data in its most purest form. So don't transform it, don't choose what you do capture, what you don't capture, the highest fidelity, the highest frequency stored in its most purest form.

The requirements for businesses now are doing, are exponentially growing for historical data. Machine learning, AI, data analytics, they all wanted different forms. They all want different perspectives. They all want different subsets of data.

It all starts with having the historical facility. How you distribute and publish that data? That's a bigger discussion for that and kind of down pops up, pops up downstream. We can talk about that at a different webinar.

But having it, the key thing, having the most purest, rawest form, store it somewhere that's cost-effective. Then you can manage who can access that. There are many tools in the market that can ETL it, that can transform it and publish it, give access to it, consume it, whether it be parquet or JSON, all of those things we offer.

But first thing is to do, capture the highest frequency, the highest fidelity in the rawest form. Store it in the most accessible place that you own and you manage. And then the downstream questions start coming afterwards, right?

So it starts, get all your history, put in a place that you own, that you manage, and then give the highest optionality downstream, and that kind of comes secondary.

- I will only add to this that in this process whatever policy you build, or whatever you decide to do it, however, so whatever solution you pick, don't forget compliance. That's the one thing I would add, Joe, make sure that not just for security and access, but also, I mean, can I really go consume this data if it's got stuff that is only should not be seen, should not be seen by others. So that's the only thing I would add as a compliance component to the answer for sure.

- Thank you both, and it looks like we have time for just one last question. So our last question of today's session is SaaS apps like Salesforce have been around for quite a while. Why is SaaS, SaaS backup data reuse getting more attention now than in the past? I guess, Christophe, maybe we can start with you, and then we can hand it to Joe.

- Yeah, so first of all, I think it's true that some services have been around for a while. But as I was explaining earlier, the APIs, I think may not have been designed with backup recovery or other data movement outside of the service really built for that purpose.

It's kind of something that we've seen with other technologies. The databases on-prem took years before you could really back them up correctly. And so, so this is a natural evolution. And again, not putting blame on anyone here, I'm just saying, look you need to be able to have mechanisms to capture the data so that it can be protected. And that's really the first step.

The reuse piece I was just explaining, it's because of digital transformation and the need to get more out of your data. So those two in combination give you that perfect store. Add to this, the fact that when you make those calls to get the data back, you're actually taxing the system.

Remember this is not something you own, it's on a shared infrastructure. You can't go freeze a SaaS application to back it up. That doesn't work. You can't freeze the whole system for everyone, right? So that's why you have to have those, those mechanisms in place.

And what's happening is because SaaS application have become so mission-critical, well a CSO or a CIO will be looking at the governance piece of this, and maybe chief compliance officer, and look at this and say, well, look, hang on, where's my, where's my protection here, where my backup?

What do I do if something comes up? Or we have an initiative to go build applications that evolve every day, and I need to be able to test. How do I do that? So this is why it's become so important, and why it's sort of coming up as a question.

And I will tell you, I think the market is not there yet. Overall organizations are not ready. They don't have the solutions. That's why you need to be looking at Grax. That why you need to be thinking through those problems.

It's a very-- I think there's a bit of a disconnect in the market right now, and well, great opportunity to get things fixed and to improve. Every change we make is an opportunity to improve. And this is one of them.

I also expect SaaS vendors to again in time add more and more capabilities to facilitate the use, the reuse of data on the backup, but we're not there yet.

- And just to add a little bit to-- just to add a little bit to that is, so if you think the evolution in the last 10 years, people are moving more of their business's most critical strategic data into these SaaS applications.

But if you really think about what these SaaS applications have ended up, whether it was in your old days of infrastructure, client-server, you still end up with data on islands. So you end up with data islands whether it be an ERP or a CRM data in these major SaaS vendors.

Now when people want to ask questions and relate that data, how do I actually look at that data itself? People have been trying to solve this problem for years. It's about saying, hey, I want to understand the relationship between manufacturing and my ERP and my order system inside the Salesforce, and how do they relate?

So when we really start thinking about data reuse, people have been thinking about this problem in about by history and about how do I look at this data, and how do I join data across the data islands. That's really when people are really starting to analyze their business, so they can respond quicker.

This isn't a new piece that has been around. It's become a bigger problem because people need to be able to respond quicker and faster to every one of their customer interactions. When you're talking to a customer support line in Salesforce, and you have to understand what their, all their data records were inside of their manufacturing or ERP, that's sort of people really want to have all of these analytics at their fingertips.

And really that is really who are starting using data reuse and historical data. We've seen it time and time again.

- Thanks, Joe, and thanks, Christophe. Thank you, everyone, for staying a minute over. I just wanted to say thank you for all the excellent questions. Thanks again, Christophe and Joe for all the great info today.

And as a reminder, the on-demand version of this webinar will be available shortly. On behalf of Grax and ESG, thank you so much for attending today's webinar, and have a great rest of the day. Take care, everyone, bye.

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