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Christophe: Hello and welcome to "Data Protection Conversations." My name is Christophe Bertrand, and I'm a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. I am joined today by Matt Richards, who is the chief marketing officer at Datto. Matt, welcome.

Matt: Christophe, great to be here.

Christophe: So Matt, tell me a little bit about yourself, about Datto, about what you do there?

Matt: Sure. So let's start with what Datto does. Datto is a technology provider to small and medium businesses through our channel of what we call "managed service providers." And one big part of what we provide to the managed service providers is a data protection suite we call "Unified Continuity." And I'm privileged to run marketing for that.

Christophe: So what changes are you seeing in the market, and what are your partners or the many partners you deal with telling you is going on? And what do you see coming up in the next few years?

Matt: We may have an interesting perspective because Datto has over 14,000 managed service providers serving the small and medium business market. So from them, we're hearing that there's a few things going on. Macro trends, of course, move to the cloud. So as a managed service provider, a lot of technology services you might have delivered onsite in the past are certainly slowly moving to the cloud, O365, SaaS applications, and other things.

So that's certainly part of it. I think the other two elements we're seeing here is the increasing importance of regulation. We have a large chunk of our business in Europe, so we see things like GDPR. And, you know, we can go on for a long time about GDPR…

Christophe: Of course.

Matt: …general data protection regulations, and all of the associated data subject access requests, and things are getting more complicated there. And the third element that we're seeing is just security becoming more and more a problem across the board. Just thinking about Europe, 50%, 60% of all cyberattacks are targeting small and medium businesses, which of course drives small and medium businesses into managed service providers as the experts to help them.

So we're seeing those three trends, a move to the cloud and security and regulation, carry the market.

Christophe: So compliance, data protection, cloud, lots of very, very heavy trends that we also see in the market. Now, projecting yourself a few years into the future, what do you see in terms of technology? What are the changes that you think you will need to bring to the market to your providers?

Matt: So there's a couple of things that we want to make sure that we carry forward with our providers, and when we think about the managed service providers themselves, to their customers. So the small and medium business moving into the cloud, we're going to end up seeing more and more protection of SaaS applications. A lot of folks seem to think that because they're using O365 or fill in the next SaaS application here, their data is protected.

And the truth is the infrastructure is quite well-protected, but if you delete your data by accident or, frankly, ransom cloud, you can infect O365 just as easily as you can infect a desktop. So we're going to see more and more data protection offerings targeting I think those cloud vendors for sure, because more and more data in the cloud, more and more business, especially on the small and medium business side, more and more business conducted in the cloud.

There'll come a time when just about everybody will end up with ransomware at some point in their life, no matter how hard you try, and you're going to need a way to roll back. Sure, you can prevent it before it gets in if you know the variants and know what to look for. But chances are you can't educate your end user, you can't prevent the attack, and so you have to figure out how to roll back from the attack.

And that's what I think is going to drive us to more and more data protection suites covering cloud applications. Which leads to those same cloud applications needing standardized APIs to be able to allow the extraction of that information in a fairly standard way.

Christophe: Well, cloudy weather ahead then.

Matt: Absolutely.

Christophe: Well, Matt, thank you so much for your time. And I would like to thank our viewers for their time too. Please stay tuned for the next "Data Protection Conversations."