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Sept. 11, 2023

The Unforeseen U-turn: Inside Microsoft 365's Backup Revolution

In this episode of Restore it All, our hosts Curtis and Prasanna delve deep into the recent significant developments in the world of data backups, with a special spotlight on Microsoft 365's about-face on native user backups. They dissect Microsoft's sudden realization of its potential revenue streams and the ramifications of its new direction.

The duo also discusses the intricacies of Microsoft's new backup APIs, sharing insights into the former approaches and the strategic changes aimed at enhancing backup efficiency. They traverse the landscapes of various vendors like AWS and Salesforce, drawing parallels and noting divergences in their backup strategies.

Tune in as Curtis and Prasanna ponder the pros and cons of entrusting your backup with the same vendor, emphasizing the importance of not putting all eggs in one basket. The episode beckons listeners to contemplate crucial questions concerning data storage, protection, and ransomware attacks, urging for a meticulous evaluation of Microsoft's new offerings.

As they navigate these shifts, the hosts can't help but say, "I told you so," emphasizing the dire need for backing up SaaS services. The conversation leaves listeners with pertinent questions and considerations, beckoning them to anticipate the forthcoming nuances in backup offerings from giants like Microsoft and Salesforce.

Join us for an episode packed with expert analysis, predictions, and a little bit of gloating, as the world of data backup takes a turn no one saw coming but was perhaps desperately needed.

Transcript

Speaker:

W. Curtis Preston: There are three types of people in this world.

 

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Those who think you need to back up SaaS services like Microsoft 365.

 

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Those who don't.

 

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And those who still aren't sure.

 

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If, what we talk about in this episode, doesn't persuade you

 

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to back up things like that.

 

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I don't know what will hi.

 

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I'm w Curtis precedent, AKA Mr.

 

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Backup.

 

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If you're not familiar with me, I've been fighting the backup fights since

 

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my first job and it over 30 years ago.

 

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I've also written for O'Reilly books on the topic.

 

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And this episode, you'll hear how Microsoft and Salesforce have both

 

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admitted their services need to be backed up . Then we discuss the all-important

 

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question of whether or not you should use their backup services or a third party.

 

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This is an extremely important episode.

 

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This is backup.

 

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Central's restore it all.

 

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Hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restore All podcast.

 

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I'm your host, w Curtis Preston, a k a, Mr.

 

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Backup, and I have with me my used car consultants Prasanna Malaiyandi.

 

Speaker:

How's it going?

 

Speaker:

Prasanna.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I am good, Curtis, how are you doing?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Well, I can't get rid of my car.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I, I don't know what to say.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think it's one of those love-hate relationships where you sort of fall in

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

love with a car and you think it's amazing and everyone else is like, wait, what?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Well, this is not my first time like buying a new car and then selling

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

my old car, uh, person to person.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It kills me that my current asking price is lower than what

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I sold my wife's Honda Fit at.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Which had a little, a little bit fewer miles, but a Honda Fit and a Toyota

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Prius, those are not equivalent cars.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Prius has a loyal following, but the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

loyalists will buy a Prius.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think a fit has a wider audience of people who would potentially buy a fit.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: So you think that I've lowered my tam,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

is that what you're saying?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And it also doesn't help that the new

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Prius just came out as well.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, well, we'll see.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, somebody will buy the dang thing.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

This is gonna be, I'm gonna enjoy this episode.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You know why I'm gonna enjoy this episode, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Because it's one of your pet peeves.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Well, first off, I, I just say like, like an overarching

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

thing that I have always said.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

All my career is back up all the things, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And throughout my entire career, things pop up and people say,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

this doesn't need to be backed up.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Can you, can you think of some of those things?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

What can you think of, like, over the years people have said that

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

don't, doesn't need to be backed up.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

well, so way back in the day, virtual machines,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Virtual machines?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the, I was, yeah, I was thinking like, I was thinking like raid,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that was the first thing I remember.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Like, they're like, oh, well we haven't done in hard drives.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

We don't need to back it up, we ever done in hard drives.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, how do the redundant hard drives help when you delete a file

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

or drop a table in a database?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, yeah, you're right though.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's like different.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

There, there are different other, um, I think with VMs, people would

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

say like there were a lot of VMs that didn't need to be backed up.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Different types of.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Servers, like you're saying, like file servers.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Well, when you say file servers, do you mean like na,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yes.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: you know, like, like filers?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Uh, yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And, and, and that, that one, you know, that one we can sort of, it's like, the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

question is if you have a NetApp right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And you're using snapshots, you're using Snap Mirror and SnapVault and

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

all these things, and you've, you've got the data, you've got the history.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You've got it replicated in multiple locations.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Is that backup?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I would kind of say yes.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, as long as we've got something to protect from the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

rolling code, uh, problem.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The, the rolling code, disaster problem.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So we got a new version of the new code and it wipes out all the data.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The, the thing that's never happened, but the thing that

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I always worry about, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: If you've got a way to deal with that, then

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I would say that that's backup.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, what, how about, um, like, um, Cassandra and the like,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Oh yeah, those, the databases, the multi-node cluster

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

databases where it's like, yeah, data is replicated, don't need to worry about it.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But like you said, Curtis, it's you drop a table, what are you gonna do?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And I think this is where a lot of people can,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I was gonna say, never underestimate the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

ability of people to do stupid stuff.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

well, and this is like we, we always talk about, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think people confuse availability.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Mm-hmm.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And resiliency for backup.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Right, right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Where you're protecting sort of the system level.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And, and right next to raid would be like, ha.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

We've got Ha.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right, that was the thing.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That was the term back in the day.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

We've got ha, it's highly available.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's replicated to multiple locations.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That's the other one.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Is a replicated system just in general, not necessarily these

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

multi-node databases, but we've got a, a active, active full replication.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And, and what's the why?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Why is that?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Why is that?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Why do I still wanna back that one up?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Because like you said, even if you drop a table

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that gets replicated over because that's what those systems do.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: It, it makes your stupidity more effective.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Or, or a hack, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Or, or, or a cyber attack.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Uh, or, you know, some kind of something that attacks the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

data on a logical basis, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Logical as opposed to physical, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, I'm trying to think what else before we get to the topic at

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah, so the other one, I think the other thing

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that people kind of going along with clustered, uh, databases, Kubernetes,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, that was gonna be my next one too.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They're

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

like, oh

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

it's a, it's ephemeral.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's um, you know, we don't

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

yeah, you probably still need to back that up.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Or yeah, Kubernetes.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The other one I was also thinking is just like public cloud, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Infrastructure.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Write your own applications hosted on the public cloud.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Well, let's, well, let's, let's talk about that one next.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Let's talk about the Kubernetes thing.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The thing with Kubernetes, well, well, Docker right containers.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Like if we just look at containers historically, originally they

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

were meant to be ephemeral.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That they were, they were, they were not meant to, to have data originally.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And I remember being told, When I, you know, whenever I, when when a new

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

thing comes up, my ears perk up and I'm like, how do we back this thing up?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And I remember asking people that knew Docker, uh, how do I back this thing up?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And their answer was, you know, I'm like, well, there's gotta be data.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And basically what they said back then was that if your containers had permanent

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

data in them, you are doing it wrong.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That was, that was what it was back in the day.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That has absolutely changed.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So now, now we need to know two things.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

One, how to back up like doc, the Docker and Kubernetes configuration,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

and then also how to back up the, the, the actual data.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Somebody, I, I think it was actually Steven Manley that we had on the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

show that that said things like that.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's a pretty boring application that doesn't have any data.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

yep.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Does that sound like something Steven would

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

say?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That would be something Steven would say.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Like, like any, any application that is worth anything is

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

gonna have data attached to it.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, and yes, theoretically, I suppose you could have a database

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that's not in, in a container.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Being used by something that's in a container, but,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

and, and that way the database, which is fine, and, but that database would then

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

be protected via whatever mechanisms.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Prasanna Malaiyandi: You still need to back

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: need to protect the configurate, you need

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

to protect the configuration.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Uh, but the, but the one that you just brought up though, the,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Public cloud.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The public cloud.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I, I, I've never been able to, do you say ias?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

What do you say?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I A A Ss, it's not

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I a

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: and it sounds weird.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

so yeah,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

as a service.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yep.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: infrastructure as a service, um, and this is one, this is

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the one to me that's the easiest to.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

To shoot down, if you will, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Because if you talk to anyone at a W Ss, they will go, yes, you

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

absolutely have to back this up.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's unequivocal, it's in the documentation.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They're like, make sure you back it up.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Make sure you put it in another region, put it in another account.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

This is proper backup configuration.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

If you, if you just have an e c two instance, for example, nothing

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

is happening with that host from a backup and recovery perspective.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Unless you do it on purpose.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

There are other things in a w s, such as r d s that has default backups built

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

into it, but even those who need to do something more than the default.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

More than the default, because a hack of the account could

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

delete everything, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Do you agree with the point that that one's relatively easy

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

to shoot down People that think that you don't need to back up the public cloud?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I know it happens a lot,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yes.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I especially, I think, yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And I think people are now realizing that they have to, I think the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

challenge becomes how do you do it?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Because there are a variety of, is, uh, ways you could do

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

it, like you mentioned, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Depending on what a w s service or cloud service you use, maybe it has

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

built-in backup, maybe it has APIs, maybe it doesn't have anything at all.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And so you need to sort of pull data out in other ways and back it up some.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The other thing I was also thinking like if I think about like

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

one of the common things I heard is like, hey, with AWS S3, right, object storage,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

you don't need to back it up, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Because it's sort of, depending on what you pick, it's replicated between multiple

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

availability zones within a region.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You could replicate it out to a separate region as well.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But then that's not good enough, like you said, because you can delete it.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The deletions propagate, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But that's where a W s introduced like versioning.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So you can have versions of objects that you can keep track of, so

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that kind of becomes your backup.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, it, it's basically the cloud version of the NetApp

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

thing that we talked about earlier, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Like, so a lot of people due to both the versioning and the multi-zone

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

replication, um, and also features like, um, right locking are, are, what's the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

actual term that, yeah, object lock.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Thank you.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, that you can.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You can protect yourself against an awful lot with built in S three.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That's why a lot of people, um, don't, most people don't back up the SS three

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

s three doesn't make it easy to back up.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, I, I know 'cause I used to work at a company that was trying to do

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that and it wasn't, it wasn't easy.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, the, um,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Do you wanna throw out our disclaimer?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Throughout our disclaimer.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Uh, so this is an independent podcast.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

This is, uh, Prasanna and I bloviating about backup and

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

recovery and related topics and, uh, the opinions that you hear.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Ours, not our employers.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I mean, they may be not necessarily our employers, I

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

think would be the official term.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And, um, you know, if, if you like us, rate us.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

If you hate us.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I need something that rhymes.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Uh, you know, if you like us, go to, go to your favorite, you know, pod catcher

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

and, uh, give us some stars and comets.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

We love the comets.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Uh, you know, oh, if you hate us, don't rate us.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That's what it is.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

If you hate us, don't rate us.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, and, um, if you, uh, would like to join the conversation,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

we'd love to hear from you.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I am at WC Preston on Twitter.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I am now w Curtis Preston on threads, uh, linkedin.com/in/mr backup.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So, um, or, or w Curtis Preston gmail.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You can reach me any one of those ways and I will, uh, be happy to

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

get you, get you on the podcast.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Uh, but what about the topic at hand that's gonna allow

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

us to say, I told you so?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The one thing that we did not talk about so far is SaaS applications,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So like, Google Workspaces or Microsoft 365.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Or Salesforce.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

All of these applications, which you are putting your data into your, they

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

provide all the infrastructure, the application, and you just use a service.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Unlike the previous things that we talked about, there seems to be, again,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

me, based on having argued the same exact point for the last 30 years,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

but just against different things.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It seems to me that, um, in the case of SaaS, I get much

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

stronger arguments against.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Have you, have you seen that?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's like, oh, they're providing everything.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Why should I care about this?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And I know Curtis, you and I just even looking at consumer.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

SaaS, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

We, you did your experiment right with iCloud Apple's iCloud, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And how do you back it up?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I would say that's a SaaS service, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And yet there weren't many good ways to back it up.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And as we talked about, right, there are issues with keeping all that

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

data there being locked out of your account or just losing the data and

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

how do you actually take a backup

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: yeah, and, and, and with the iCloud, if you

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

have a phone, you have an iPhone.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Oh, you're, hang on.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I didn't hear anything you just said.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I got, I got, um, what, what, what did you just say?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Oh, I was just saying about how with

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

iCloud, right, you basically.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You're responsible for backing it up, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That there, if you get locked out of your account right, you basically

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

lose access to the data and they don't make it easy to back it up.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: A lot of people are moving to SaaS because they don't want to

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

administer, let's say, exchange anymore.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They don't want the hassle of everything that came with administering

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

exchange, one of which was backup.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And so, and they may have been sold a bill of goods somewhere along the way

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

by somebody that said, well, if you, if you go to 365 or whatever, then you

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

don't have to worry about backup either.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

We handle backup, right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Except they don't.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

There's nothing in the, in the, um, terms of service that say backup and restore.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, there are actually occasional parts in the documentation

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that use the word restore.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You can restore files that you've deleted.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You can restore emails that you've deleted, but it's not really a

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

restore, it's really just pulling it out of essentially a recycle bin.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, there there is a slightly fancier recycle bin.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They, they do have this concept of retention lo uh, retention.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Uh, features, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But as we've previously talked in previous episodes, the retention, uh,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

policies, Can actually be as harmful as, uh, you know, not having 'em,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

because there is a story about K P M G accidentally deleting a whole

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

bunch of data using retention policy.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So they're trying to use retention policies to retain data and they actually

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

accidentally deleted data on 150,000 employees and there is no back button.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Uh,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And I think they were under regulatory.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But I think it was under regulatory obligations as well.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, and so given all of that, what Prasanna, what Pray, tell happened

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

in the last week or so that would allow me to say, I told you so?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So I ran across an article by Chris Miller on the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

register called Microsoft User Content Backup for Microsoft 365.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So it looks like Microsoft has finally come around and they are now

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

doing native user content backups.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: My question would be, Prasanna: why does something that

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

doesn't need backup ...need backup?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They've had a change of heart.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Here's what I think happened.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The Microsoft 365 backup market got big enough

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yep.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: and they said, in a meeting someday, " did

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

you know that currently there are a hundred million people?"

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

'cause they will have the data, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They will know exactly how many users are using third party backup and recovery.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And they're like, we have a hundred million users that

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

are using third party backup.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

At an average of, let's say $3 a user that's $300 million a

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

month, that should be ours.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And so they said let's bring the service out.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think the other thing, and I don't know if

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

this is true or not, but I know that with how Microsoft does their

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

APIs, right, that there's usually limitations placed when you're doing.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Backups, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Because you're basically calling the same set of APIs to pull the

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

data out as a backup vendor, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And so there are certain limitations in terms of the number you could do and

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

how quickly, and so maybe they've also decided to sort of centralize a lot of

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that into a single place to make it more efficient for these backup operations.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I kind of go back and think about VM VMware, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

When they're like, Hey, backup teams, why don't you guys just

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

use whatever APIs are out there?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And then they sort of were like, okay, no.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

We need to create the right backup specific APIs for VMware so it can be

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

more optimized and targeted for backup use cases, which is very different

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

than your standard, normal use case.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So maybe Microsoft came around.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: that's a really good point, Prasanna.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I actually hadn't thought about that.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That this release of this, or impending release of backup for Microsoft 365

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

perfectly coincides with the release of the backup APIs, which are now, um, uh,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Available to other

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

vendors, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Because for those that didn't know this, Microsoft didn't have backup APIs.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Basically in order to back up 365, you had to basically pretend to be

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

a person accessing 365 via the O w A, the Outlook web, uh, access.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And a lot of people don't realize that, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

'cause there were no APIs, so the only a p I they had was

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the one that,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

there was no backup specific APIs.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

No backup specific APIs.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The APIs that were available were accessing, uh, outlook

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

and whatnot via the web.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It was called o w a.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And so backup vendors, basically, I don't think reverse engineer

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

might be a strong term,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

were available, but they just weren't optimized.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And so, uh, but within the last year or so, Microsoft has come out

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

with these specific APIs that are designed for backup, and then lo and

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

behold, they said, we think we're gonna get into the backup game.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I can think of a better parallel to this than VMware.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Can you,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Oracle.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: you think of a No?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

No.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Can you think of another cloud vendor that decided to get into the backup business?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

A w s.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yep.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

A w s and their a w s backup

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Now that one's a little bit different in that they don't charge for a w s backup,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

they just charge for what it does, right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But they decided to just sort of make it easier for people to create backups

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

of their services without necessarily having to go to a third party backup.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

In this case, it looks like 365 will be charging for this service.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And I just wanna say I told you so.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That's all I'm saying.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I just wanna say that Microsoft has validated all of us screaming out

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

here in the rain going, Hey, why isn't anybody backing this stuff up?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Now microsoft's "Oh!

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

we can make money at this.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

We're gonna back this stuff up."

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the other parallel to this is what happened with Salesforce.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yep.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Um, and, and this, this story's a lot weirder though, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So Salesforce used to have their, um, their, I forgot what they called it,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

but they had this service that you didn't pay for where they were backing

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

up Salesforce and you only paid for it if you needed to do a restore.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: It was $10,000.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It took like four to six weeks to get your data back.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

there was no

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

guarantee.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

No guarantee.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And they gave you a bunch of CSS fees and at one point they came out

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

and they said, um, you know what?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

This service, this is my, this is my paraphrasing.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Of course, we decided this service is so horrible, we're

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

not gonna offer it anymore.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Like, who would want to pay for that?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The, the, the service level was so low.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It just doesn't match the needs for our customers.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And then what happened was there were a whole bunch of customers that were

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

counting on that they were hoping they never needed it, but they were counting

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

on it and they were telling vendors like, you know, uh, my previous employer

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

to, uh, they say, we don't need, you know, we don't need you because if

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the, you know, feces hits the rotary oscillator, we will just pay this $10,000.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And, um, We know it'll suck, but at least we don't have to pay for something.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

We don't need.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And then they came back and they were like, yep, we're

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

gonna bring it back into business.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They, yes, they brought that back because so many people.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But, but then, but then they actually came out with a service like

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Microsoft 365 is doing with backup.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

My understanding is they release it.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It wasn't very good.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

This is, this is a total paraphrase based on.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Random stuff that I read, and I don't really know how true to life is, but

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

my understanding is they, they came out with it, they unreleased it.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The commercial product that you actually pay for, they released it,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

they unreleased it, and I believe they've released it again so that now

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

there's a service that you can pay Salesforce and Salesforce back up.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yep.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Let me ask you a question, Prasanna.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

What do you think from a generic perspective, this isn't Microsoft or

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Salesforce, what do you think about paying vendor A to back up vendor a.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So I go back and forth on this, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So on the one hand, I'd rather not have all my eggs in one basket.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Right,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It depends on how vendor A is doing the backup.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Like if it's like, okay, you're gonna pull the data out and you'll let me

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

put it into, say, like I could pull it out of Microsoft and write it to

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

an AWS S3 bucket, like that would be a little less concerning, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Rather than, okay, as Microsoft, I'm gonna pull your data out and I'm

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

gonna throw it into Azure Blob and you don't get any control of anything.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So that's where I get a little queasy because it's like, how

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

can you verify, validate that they're not screwing things up?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And at the same time though, the other part of me from a technology side says

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

they're the best people to build this because they can actually work with

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the internal developers, know the secret sauce, optimize it better than

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

anyone else who's trying to reverse engineer things from the outside.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: I'm pretty sure you know that I'm much more the former than

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah, I know.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I'm just gonna say OVH Cloud.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Just keep saying that over, over and over.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And if you don't know what I'm talking about, They were the, this happened

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

a couple years ago and they were, uh, they, they still are, uh, the largest

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

cloud provider headquartered in Europe.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And they had a giant data center fire, and it turns out that the backup

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

system, which people were paying for was stored in the same place

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

as the data that it was protecting.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And so people lost backups and there's a big class action lawsuit.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I don't know what happened to it.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I'm generally not a fan.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I understand.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I understand what you're saying.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Uh, because, so on one hand I'd say, yes, they are the, the best

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

at, let's say, Microsoft 365.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They will know it better than anybody else.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

What they don't necessarily know, and clearly history has proven this right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They don't necessarily know anything about backup, and that's

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the only thing I care about.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So here's another argument I have too, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's for people who aren't backing up today, they now get back up, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Which is better than nothing.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Something is better than nothing.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And I would also say the way that they're doing things, because it

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

looks like they're still allowing you to bring your own third party

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

to back up that data as well.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Mm-hmm.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And so I think if you do want that safety, like I think they

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

have the best of both worlds.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They've provided an API layer.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So if you do wanna bring your own third party backup, you could do that for people

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

who aren't backing things up, now you have a solution that is built into the product.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You don't need to go procure something separately and manage and worry about it.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But I think the one thing we should talk about though, Curtis, is what do you think

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

are the questions that customers should be asking Microsoft to really figure out,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

is this going to meet their needs or not?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: 3, 2, 1, rule man.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

3, 2, 1 rule.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That's all I gotta throw out.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I mean, I, you know, it's been a while since we've said that phrase.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think the, the question is, uh, you know, how is this data being stored?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

How is it being protected against?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Something that would take out whatever data center is hosting

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

my particular, uh, what would you

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

call it, instance of 365.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, how is it protected against a ransomware attack that would

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

directly target my account?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

If somebody gains, I, I think about one worry that I would have is

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

whether or not the backup system is administered by the same.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Administrative console as the 365?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I would hope not because of, you know,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Prasanna Malaiyandi: It probably is though.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Maybe and, but maybe it's based, but maybe it's based on roles.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So maybe they are providing an RBAC system.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Well, I hope they're providing an RBAC system, but you know, at

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the top of the RBAC system is, at the top of that is gonna be like cloud admin or

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

whatever, and you know, if somebody gains access, they can do whatever they want.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Uh, I hope that it's a separate system.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

This is why I go back to how good are they at, you know, backup design.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

How good are they at, at, at compartmentalization?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, Separation of powers and all

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And how good are they gonna be in an ongoing fashion, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Because features are gonna change.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Backup landscape and the threat actors are gonna change as well.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So are they gonna be focused on investing into keeping up with their backup

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

offering, or are they gonna be like, Hey, we have something out there that

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

kind of checks the box, if you will.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And really we're gonna go build out the rest of Microsoft 365.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: I, I hope, um, and we should, we should look into

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

this once it actually comes out.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I hope that it's essentially a completely separate service.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Like, you know, pick your favorite way to back up 365, that it has a separate

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

authentication and authorization system.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You know, um,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I doubt that

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

though.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I doubt that.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I doubt that it'll have a completely separate uh,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: know what?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's gonna be all, it's gonna be all administered by Azure

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

No, not called Azure AD anymore.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: What's it called now?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Entra.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: You know what?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I'm gonna log into X and talk about how stupid, I think renaming things are x.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

My, my man, my man, Elon can make nice car, but I don't know what he is doing

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

over there with that, with that company.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, sorry, I digress,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But hopefully, like you said, when they do, when

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

we do find out more information about what the service offers,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

we will do an updated episode.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think we should do that for that and also for the Salesforce thing.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But the summary statement is, I told you so Microsoft 365, Google Workspace,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Salesforce, pick your favorite product, uh, you know, JIRA, that if, if it's,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

if it is a service that is creating and storing data that your company needs,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that stuff needs to be backed up.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yep.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: The, the only question is how is it being backed up?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

In most cases, there's either no backup at all, like none.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Or um, like in the case of 365, they do have a delayed replicated copy

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

of exchange that will be used if like the O V H fire happens, right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Microsoft purposes.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: For Microsoft's purposes.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And I have verified with them as a Microsoft customer, I have verified

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

with them that we cannot get access to that delayed replicated copy.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So there may be some backups like that that are used.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

If the entire data center is, it goes up in a, you know, conflagration.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But there's nothing that you can use for, let's say, a ransomware attack,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

which is probably much more likely.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

yeah,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: or there's no backup whatsoever.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Like they just back up the configuration, but not your data.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Because the shared responsibility model says

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that the data's your responsibility anyway.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, so just, you know, I'll just, I'll, and I think we'll end here

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

with saying, talk to your vendors.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Talk to them and ask them, how is the data being backed up?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

How would you respond after, let's say a ransomware attack, somebody

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

gains administrative control over your account and deletes all your data.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

How would you get that data back?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That's that, that, that one question.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And, you know, a, a rogue admin gains administrative control over

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

my account and deletes the account.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

How do I get it back?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: The answer to that question should

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

determine what you do next.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yep.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Any debate there?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

No,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Okay.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Sometimes you, sometimes you like to argue with me.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I know I've gotten better.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Have you noticed?

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: At, at arguing, but yeah.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah, sometimes it's annoying.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Just, just, just, you know, just admit I'm right with everything.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And, uh, basically the same thing I tell my wife.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um,

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

our listeners want to hear, Curtis.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: I, you know, if you're out there and you think

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that, that I am off my rocker, uh, I quite possibly may be.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But, um, you know, reach out to me and, um, we'll get you, we'll get

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

you on the thing, but all I wanna say is I was right and I told you so.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But anyway, well, thanks for, uh, thanks for hanging out again, Prasanna.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

As always, and good luck with the car.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

W. Curtis Preston: Thanks.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And uh, yeah, good luck getting rid of that thing.

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Um, and uh, again, thanks to our listeners, be sure to subscribe

 

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

so that you can restore it all.