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Christophe: Hello, everyone. I'm Christophe Bertrand. I'm joined today by Vinny Choinski. And we're going to be talking about data protection in this crazy new world we live in. I'd like to focus on the topic of SaaS. So, data protection as a service as well as management of data protection environments as a service. So, think of it as a SaaS control plane.

And also, looking at the SaaS applications that need protection and what's happening, what's needed. So Vinny, let's first start with SaaS as a service for data protection in managing data protection environments with the cloud essentially. What's your take? What are you seeing, what are the solutions out there?

Vinny: Yep, so there's a lot of new solutions coming along. I'm surprised to keep seeing these new companies coming into the data protection space. As we mentioned in a previous blog, we talked about how we're seeing the management piece be kind of separated from the data movement. So if you have a distributed environment with data movement, maybe your management piece is delivered as a service. We're seeing that take off quite a bit because it makes it easier to connect to your control plane from wherever you need to be in the world to manage your data.

You could have a data mover in your primary data center, unmanned right now. You could have one at a remote site, and you could have them in the cloud. So you're seeing the distribution of the data movers and the management kind of consolidated. But there's another second trend to deliver the whole package as a solution, and that's to simplify the policy creation and things like that, and then deliver the as a server-side, pay for what you're going to need to do backups.

And I think we're starting to see that go from just in the control plane or at the management level, down into the data movement, and being able to say, "I need to back up this application, and I want these kind of policies and SLAs and I'll pay for that."

Christophe: Yeah, and we've of course seen a number of vendors either provide data protection as a full service, disaster recovery as a service or options to do so. So clearly, I expect that we're going to see a lot more of that. That market was already doing well, our research shows that it was really exploding, certainly has in the past three, four years, I think we're going to see a lot more of that.

So definitely something to bear in mind. The other question I had for you is now really about applications that are SaaS, for example, collaboration applications for email and office documents, etc. What's your take on where we're at, the state of protection of those environments? Are we really protected?

Vinny: I think that, you know, initially that people thought they were protected because they bought SaaS, the SaaS is in the cloud, right? And they said, "The infrastructure has a guaranteed uptime. My application will always be there." But that doesn't mean that data is always going to be there, Salesforce data, your email data. So you have to go the extra mile to make sure that the data protection policies you put in place meet your SLAs.

There is some level of stuff built into some applications like email and retention and things like that, but the data is really your responsibility, and you really have to take the time to make sure you're protecting your business-critical data.

Christophe: Well, Vinny, thank you so much for your perspective. I think it's absolutely true, we're only seeing more use of SaaS applications. Those applications may not be protected the way they need to be today. They need to be better protected. It is your responsibility as the IT lead or IT administrator in charge of backup and recovery to do so.

And remember, a lot more end users are likely going to end up on these platforms, this trend is only going to accelerate, so therefore, data protection has to follow. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you Vinny, for joining us again today. And we'll see you on our next video blog.