ESG's Christophe Bertrand talks with Beth Phalen, President of Data Protection for Dell EMC.
Read the related ESG Blog: Data Protection Conversation with Dell-EMC
Christophe: Hello, my name is Christophe Bertrand. I'm a senior analyst here at ESG focused on data protection. I am joined today by Beth Phalen who is the president of the Data Protection division at Dell EMC.
Beth: Good morning, Christophe. Nice to be here.
Christophe: So Beth, you have quite the portfolio at Dell EMC. Tell us about your role there and what you do with the products and solutions.
Beth: Yeah. Happy to talk about the role. It's a great position to have. I'm responsible for the full Data Protection portfolio. So, that means everything we sell for Data Protection within Dell EMC, including Data Domain, the Integrated Data Protection appliances, and Data Protection Suite. So, I get to work with the engineers around the globe, product management, everyone to make sure we're bringing the best products to market.
Christophe: So, you work around the globe, you have access to many, many customers. I heard you had a couple customers around the world. You must see a lot of different needs and requirements. How do you handle that and what do you do that's a big different maybe from other organizations?
Beth: Yeah, absolutely. You know, many customers today are struggling with the need to continue to have the same confidence in the Data Protection while they're expanding out into multi-cloud, bringing in new type of applications, but they still need that trust and confidence that their data will be protected. And so, a lot of what we have to offer really helps them to have that confidence.
Christophe: Perfect. So, you mentioned cloud and multi-cloud. So, you have a number of solutions that go far beyond the traditional on premise business. What are your perspectives, what are you hearing from customers about that?
Beth: Yeah. And some of the solutions that we have, since you mentioned it, are the Cloud Snapsnot Manager that works in the major cloud providers, running DDVE in the cloud, protecting VMware Cloud. So, there's a whole set of capabilities for people that have moved their applications into the cloud. Two things I'll mention. One, the majority of the customers who have multi-cloud environment, Data Protection is one of the areas that they're using the cloud to amplify and to take advantage of it, whether it be backup long term retention, archiving.
Second thing is we do see a lot of customers who are beginning to move workloads entirely to the cloud, traditional workloads. And so, making sure that they still have that protection even though they've moved to the cloud, is something that they're getting a lot of benefit out of working with us.
Christophe: Yes. An area we have just researched, and I know there's a lot of very interesting findings about that, what are your perspectives on the wave of ransomware we're getting, and how Data Protection helps in a context of cyber attacks.
Beth: I mean, first of all, it's a huge risk. The number of people that are getting impacted by ransomware is breathtaking and concerning. And the number of people that aren't able to get their data back is really striking. The data loss costs, you know, millions of dollars for many companies. What we've done is we've introduced the products called Cyber Recovery, that allows people to have a vaulted copy of their data which is often at except when a backup is being done, and even then with great controls, so that if a company is affected by malware, they still have that data that they can recover, and boy, what a great feeling that would be to know that you were able to not be held victim to the impact of a ransomware attack.
Christophe: Absolutely, a big problem and it's great that you have a solution. And unfortunately, I'm sure you're going to be selling it for awhile. It's not getting any better.
Beth: Yeah, I agree.
Christophe: Well, thank you so much for your time, Beth and I would like to thank all of our viewers for joining us today.