AWS re:Invent 2017, Star Wars, and Data Protection
If you’re like me, going to AWS re:Invent is a yearly must do. When I first attended this conference back in 2013, I think maybe there were roughly 8,000 people there. This year, there were 44,000+! Needless to say, it’s grown a ton. As in years past, Andy Jassy’s keynote was very well executed. Kudos to the folks that came up with the keynote format for this year’s conference and tying key themes captured in pop music with what developers desire (or should desire) from their cloud platforms. I won’t do it justice here, so if you don’t already know what I’m talking about, check out the keynote recording here (at the time of this post, that recording already has 54k+ views). Also, consistent with year’s past was the excitement and energy in the expo hall. Literally thousands of vendors all trying to put their best foot forward with innovative booth designs, giveaways, and eye candy. For marketers, events like re:Invent are a testing ground to see how big of an impact we can make, for a given level of investment. For Veritas, we tapped into the pent-up anticipation of the new Star Wars: The Last Jedi movie and wove that theme around a single message for prospects/customers: Protect your data, Save the republic. If you were at #reInvent, you may have seen the lightsaber replicas we were giving away. But, why this message? Because in the world of cloud, data protection is actually one of the areas that are far too often overlooked. According to our Truth in Cloud Research Report, 83% of organizations feel that the cloud provider is taking care of all things data protection (backup) in the cloud. Here’s an excerpt from just one of the major cloud providers’ customer contracts, though all have similar language: “You are responsible for properly configuring and using the Service Offerings and taking your own steps to maintain appropriate security, protection and backup of Your Content, which may include the use of encryption technology to protect Your Content from unauthorized access and routinely archiving Your Content.” As you can see, there’s a two-pronged challenge: 1) educating folks that it is still their (your) responsibility to backup your cloud data – not the cloud provider’s, and 2) in light of that, educating folks on what’s the best way to go about doing that. At Veritas, we have that answer. In fact, I spent a few minutes in our re:Invent booth with one of the product managers responsible for building a new product designed specifically to protect cloud data in the most lightweight, efficient, and cloud-optimized way possible. This new technology is called CloudPoint, but check out the discussion below: Needless to say, the discussions we had at re:Invent were interesting. People started to really get that Veritas is complementing their cloud experience with the type of C.Y.A. technology the cloud does not provide natively. More importantly, that this technology works across all major clouds, not just unique to one. But lest I forget, what do we mean when we say “…Save the republic?” For us, the "republic" had many meanings. It could be your company, your job, your country, your group, IT, your customers, and so on. The point is, data is important and everyone relies on it. Not backing it up is asking for trouble. Now that you know the cloud is NOT responsible for backing up your data, what do you do? You do it yourself of course. Teach you the right way to do this Veritas can, young Padawans. If you’re interested in learning more about Veritas CloudPoint, there’s a free version you can access here. Boom. #TransformYourBiz
