EN
Keepit Reel Episode 1: Considering shared responsibility in disaster recovery
View transcript
I'm Niels van Ingen, Chief Customer Officer here, sitting in a bunker in McKinney, Texas. This is normally where they put the backup guys, but today they made some room. And I'm sitting here with Brent Ellis, Key Analyst at Forrester. Thank you, Niels. Hi, I'm Brent Ellis, Senior Analyst from Forrester Research. You cover many, many areas, including sort of backup, but a lot of times we talk about backup when we actually should talk about risk management and data recovery. And over the years, it has changed a lot. It came from the on-prem days where pretty much everything was protected to cloud, where not much seemed to protect it. Can you talk a little bit about, in your view and what you've seen, how customers are making the transition from where they've been from an on-prem perspective to a hybrid environment with different protection schemes, but also different DR challenges? You know, if you think back, say, to the mid-90s when I was starting my IT career, every backup was essentially an engineered system. Like, IT was completely responsible for it They had complete control over the compute, the network, and the storage. And so they were trusted to just take care of backup and disaster recovery and all of the technology resilience issues. But we live in a different world now. And it started with that cloud infrastructure as a service movement, moving to AWS or Azure or GCP or wherever. And then you develop the shared responsibility model. People started to get used to, like, what they were responsible for, what their vendors were responsible for. But it's gotten even more confusing because every SaaS platform is a little bit different. You know, they have different APIs for backup. They have different ways to actually get data in and out. And ultimately, the business doesn't control any of that infrastructure the way they used to in the data center. And so it becomes a question of not just how do you acquire the right technology tools in order to backup, restore, and recover your systems. It's, did you put the right... Did you put the right clauses in place when you were talking to that SaaS vendor? Did you negotiate the right SLAs? And it becomes a risk management discussion, to your point earlier. Like, it's not just, hey, Joe in IT, is that backed up? It's now, hey, what happens if, you know, we have an outage for four hours? How does that impact our business? And since we don't have any kind of control over getting this back online within a certain timeframe, what are the contractual obligations? What are the obligations that our vendor has in order to address that problem? So do you see customers actually dealing with this issue or have the understanding to actually figure this out? Because our experience is, we're still in education phase, where a lot of customers assume to your point, like the SaaS vendor will take care of it. We're definitely in education phase. I would say that like two, two and a half years ago, people weren't thinking about this at all, really. They really thought that Microsoft 365 had their data all backed up and cleanly taken care of. Like, same with Salesforce. And the SaaS providers haven't made this easy. Like some of the really big ones have flip flopped back and forth on whether or not they protect your data. So the third party ecosystem that's developed in order to protect the data that's in SaaS platforms, I think, is actually really important in this aspect, because at least you have some consistency about what you're getting as a product. You don't have the SaaS vendors suddenly saying, oh, well, we're not really responsible. It's the same story with every new provider. I think that's the really hard thing. You went through this process with Microsoft 365. You kind of got to a place you were okay with. You go through this process with Salesforce. You got to a place where you're okay with. Then you adopt another really core enterprise SaaS tool, and another one, and another one. And suddenly, you've moved from a business where 90% of your applications were either in a data center where you could easily backup and restore, or in cloud infrastructure as a service, which is essentially a data center in the cloud, to the situation where you essentially have an external party running your workload and hosting your data for 70%, 80% of your workloads. And it's a very different story for most enterprises.