Ari Paul, Clumio | AWS re:Invent 2022

This is texturong TV. Hi everyone. We're back here.

I'm just gonna say live we are live recording this but you're not seeing it live but we are at AWS reinvent. We're at the tech strong media room over at the Wynn Hotel. And our next guest is Ari Paul with clumio Ari welcome.

How are you? Good to you. Nice to meet you.

So Ari, um, well before we even jump into clumio, let's hear about you a little bit. What's your what's your position? What do you do at?

Clumia? What's your background? Yeah.

I had the product marketing function at Columbia. I was at databricks and then cohesity earlier than that and then VMware and nutanix. So I've been in the cloud infrastructure data.

Yeah. I'm almost as long as there's been a cloud infrastructure. Space and then it's not bad.

Yeah. Well, it's probably about I was there when they started all that so it's 15 years anyway. clumio I we've had clumia on text wrong before and but not everyone watches every show unfortunately as much as I'd like them to why don't you?

You know share with our audience give us kind of the clumio kind of level set. What did they do? What do you guys?

Yeah here yeah clumio is building a data protection platform for AWS data. So unlike, you know, most data protection companies that we see like the Legacy companies or you know upstarts such as coercity and rubric. We're hyper focused on protecting data that's already on AWS.

So things like data Lakes machine learning training data application data. Stuff that sits on Amazon S3 or dynamodb or RDS we help customers protect that data and provide resilience to that to their applications and data Lakes. Got it.

Well and that kind of begs my next question, which is the AWS connection and I think you kind of laid it out. But why don't you we make sure just we'll connect the dots here for people definitely. You know, what what I found out at clumio.

Is that there there are a lot of AWS users that are not super well versed on this shared responsibility model and what that states is that AWS is responsible for the durability and availability of the infrastructure, but the data that's it's on top that infrastructure is the customers responsibility. So we have partnered with AWS to create a platform that helps customers simplify their resiliency up that data that's on top of AWS. So we help customers protect against things like accidental deletions ransomware wipe out attacks help them stay in compliance for like long term retention purposes meet.

SLS on and so forth. I love it. All right, so is have you been to reinvent before?

Last year Well virtually actually when I was at Queen City, but have you ever been in person to reinvent? I don't think so. This is my first time actually.

Oh, yeah. Okay, so it's pretty big. It's you know, you were downstairs.

We're not even in the hotel where the conference is sure. And it's it's Zoo down there. It's crazy on floor.

What what what's your impression so far? Well, I have been to several VM worlds. And so it's over similar size.

Yeah, I would say this is about three three and a half times as big this year at least. very very Builder focused which which we which we love, you know vmworld and like the early days of reinvent were where it practitioner focused, but I've seen a lot of That's kind of seen the the average the median profile shift from like the It practitioner to the devops cloud Ops secops kind of persona. I don't think that's just reinvent.

I think that's pretty much the industry where you know what we used to call. So I've been in here longer than you're right, but we used to call the it practitioner has. More sometimes they're an SRE or they're a platform engineer or they're a devops engineer or devops person or you know, something else there it we've seen these roles mature and specialize more you don't see that it guy anymore, right?

And you know it is what it is. It's because I think the world we live in now has a lot more complications and so forth in it, right? But it's also a good thing for clumia, right and in the security has become where security was.

Other right it wasn't the it practitioner said security was the security guy and it was a guy. Yeah, you know 98% of the time but now security or the Security functionality has been built into each of these roles. We're talking about absolutely right and and you still have the security person.

Yep, but you also have security embedded in a lot of that. What does that mean for clonio? Yeah, the first of all it's really a student observation in the sense that like the more things change the more they remain the same, right?

So you used to have an IT guy and now that's like rebranded as Cloud Ops or whatever, okay. I think that from a security standpoint what we're seeing is that every line of business. Or every sort of subunit of it will have its own like security function.

So in our conversations, which we originally started like back in the 2017-2018. We started conversing with customers. That persona.

Which which was like a backup admin or or a cloud. Admin is now like you're you know security engineer or like we've had several conversations of Chief security officers. A lot of large deals that we have closed have started off as Discovery calls with with the csos and cios.

So yeah security is definitely like proliferating across, you know, beat like the engineering org or the resiliency org or the itorg and that has opened up a lot of like kumios now seen as sort of a like we have a horizontal play versus like a narrow like an article play and that I mean not just clumia a lot of tools in the security space, especially you see security companies making tools for Developers. That's right to develop more secure code and for tests. You know in testing and everything, so I think we have seen and that's a great way of thinking about it.

We've seen the the horizontalization if that's a word of security rather than just being in a security vertical totally. Yeah. I think it's evident here it that reinvent.

Oh absolutely like you said. Yeah. There's there's developer security.

There's API security there is cloud security network security. It just goes on and on. However, I will mention that you know, I think Gartner has a prediction that about 99% of cloud security breaches going forward will be user-driven.

So it's not like it'll be malicious actors that just hack into your system but things like accidental deletions Insider threats, that's the kind of stuff that no matter how many security tools you sort of patch together. You can't really protect for yes, you can you can do a little bit to do, you know secure your perimeter, you can do access control you can have like role-based privileges, but there are certain things where unless you have like a protected backed up copy of your data. There's just there's no way to recover.

So who me or companies like Coolio? They're often seen as kind of the last line of defense, which is what makes us the easier to digest when we talk to these different security personas. Yeah, I get it.

You know what let's spend a little time about you know, our audiences out there saying all right, it sounds interesting. I'd like to find more maybe find out more. That's it.

See what it you know, see where it fits a dollar. Scheme, how would what would you recommend to them? Yeah, I think.

a lot of the customers we talk to are hardcore like Engineers right data Engineers Cloud engineers and so on and what we have found is that Teams don't really want to spend too much time building a backup strategy. Like they they want to innovate like today. If you if you saw the keynote itemski's keynote.

It was all about like innovating building, you know, next Generation applications and so on. and we would like to support our customers to do that by taking away the complexity of backups and snapshots and recoveries versions replicas and so on so If you are a an engineering leader or an operations leader in in the cloud space and you have an AWS environment chances are that clumio can can really take away all that complexity not from just the engineering team, but from your Cloud bill as well. We routinely save our customers between 1680 percent of costs that they would have incurred originally and that's just like the operational costs the cap expenses for building backups are also pretty high.

So I think Columbia's can be interpreted as like a One-Stop shop for any backup in recovery or data protection requirements that customers have for data that's sitting on AWS. com clumio. com like everything is on there.

It's I want to say that if you are a if you have a data lake or if you're running, you know machine learning applications off of like an S3 environment or if you're feeding S3 into like a snow pipe or a databricks. You need to protect that data. And if you if you have come to the realization either, you know in like if you read about it, or you have to do it the hard way clumio is Clumio can help you, like protect secure and essentially make that data undelable.

com and yeah good stuff. All right, we're gonna let you get back to reinvent. We're gonna take a break.

I think we have a little bit more here today. And we'll be right back.