Divining Requirements out of the Organization

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

I'm your host, W.

Curtis Preston, AKA Mr.

Backup.

And I have with me my vicarious Thinset removal consultant Prasanna.

Malaiyandi, how's it going?

Prasanna?

I'm good Curtis, and I think you had a

really, really great weekend.

Right?

Between,

I did.

between the Padre.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Baby Padres.

You know, it's funny.

Yeah.

Between the Padres and the thinset removal, uh, it was definitely a big

weekend for the Preston household.

Um, yeah, the Padres by the way, that, that game according to, you know, those

guys that talk constantly during the.

And they pull out the stats.

That game is the second biggest upset in the history of Major League baseball.

Uh, if you look at the number of games that, um, LA has won the season and

the number of games the Padres have won the season, and the fact that they beat

them, it's the second largest spread.

The first one is it's, it's a distant second because the first

one, the winning team won 128 games.

Uh, and like that, that's also the highest record of the

number of games one in a season.

Anyway, that was, and what's funny is I'm, as you know, I'm

not even that big of a sports fan.

I, I was actually surprised you were watching

Um, but you know, when the hometown team is playing and

they're in the playoffs, uh, you know, even when they were in the Wild card,

uh, I was watching, and that was great to see them, you know, win that and

then to see them beat the Dodgers.

To see them beat the Dodgers on the road first and then come home to win twice.

Uh, it, it's, it's a big week to be San Diego.

It's, they're apparently, like, they're not even waiting for the World Series.

They're painting the town like yellow and brown right now, which are.

For the record, the worst colors for any major league team of any kind.

I think, um, I don't know, maybe the, maybe the Cleveland

Browns, cuz they're just brown.

You know when you said yellow and brown, you know, the first

thing I was thinking, like pee and poop,

I know that's the first thing that comes to mind

when you think of yellow and brown.

I mean, the Dodgers, they had this beautiful blue and white, you

know, we, we get yellow and brown.

What the hell's up with that?

Anyway, Um, yeah.

And

and then the thin

course, Yeah.

And then the thinset, the removal of, you know, for those of you

following at home, how I've been laying down luxury vinyl tile.

This was when I removed I am, this is way past the point of no return.

I have now removed all of the tile and the, um, the pergo

that was in the dining room.

And now I had somebody come in and chisel down, um, the, the thin set.

And then I, I did, and then I did some scraping after that.

Um, and, uh, so now my, it's just really dirty.

It's like dusty and dirty.

Other than that, it's ready to, uh, and I got like air cleaners

running around the clock.

Yeah, you do not wanna be breathing that stuff in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, so yeah.

So then it'll be done next week.

Yeah, absolutely.

Because it only takes like an hour to lay roughly 500 square feet of, of.

Vinyl tile, so yeah.

Mm-hmm.

, vinyl planking.

Sorry.

Anyway, anyway, enough of that nonsense.

Before we bring our guest on, I'm gonna do the, uh, disclaimer Prasanna.

And I work for different companies.

He works for Zoom, I work for Druva.

This is not, uh, an official podcast of either company.

And, uh, the opinions that you hear are all Prasannas and they.

If you, if you like what you hear or, or see by the way, uh, check out.

We've got a video version of this podcast@backupcentral.com.

Be sure to check that out.

You know, if you're a video person,

And check out Santa's beard

Sa Yeah.

Santa's, Santa's beard.

You, and then we say, you know, if you wanna join the podcast, if you

wanna join the conversation, just reach out to me at WC Preston on

Twitter or w Curtis Preston at gmail.

And someone did that.

They were a fan of, We have a, we have a fan, so one of, you know, there's

another, there's another podcast.

They, the phrase they use is, uh, you know, we have one of our 11 listeners,

uh, there's a, there's a podcast that I listen to that does that.

Uh, so we have one of our 11 listeners on today.

Our guest today has over 25 years experience in it, A lot

of it in the storage space.

He's currently the enterprise architect for Presidio an IT

reseller and consulting company.

You can hear him on their podcast called Digital Decode.

Welcome to the podcast, Eric Burley.

All right.

Thank you.

Uh, and thank

big buildup there.

Yes, , very big buildup.

You know, we don't, we, we, we've only had like, I don't

know, three or four people that.

In the history, you know, we're coming up on 200 episodes and we've, I think

we've had like three or four people out of that that have reached out to us.

It's just like randomly, hey, I'm a fan of the pod and um,

you know, I'd like to come on.

we need more people like that.

need more like that, you know, So if you're sitting out there,

you know, I think the biggest thing, I think people like, Oh, well my story

won't be as interesting or whatever.

You know, what, if it's got anything to do with backup, we're kind of desperate.

You know?

I mean, it's, this is a, this is a, a niche, right?

Uh, if it, if, if we can somehow relate it to backup data protection information

security, information security is very closely related to backup these days.

Um, We should just convert this to a, you know, a ransomware podcast cause

that's all anybody wants to hear about.

Exactly.

Actually what drew me to your podcast, the first time I listened

to it, was your theme song.

Ah,

Hey,

It it, I thought it was great.

There you go, Curtis.

I, Yeah, so, so an interesting story about that theme song.

The theme song predates the podcast.

The podcast got its name from the theme song.

The singer is my daughter.

Uh, I wrote the lyrics.

Uh, there's actually a video.

I dunno if you've seen the video.

There's actually a full video in which I play a, a cameo role.

I'll put a link to it in the, uh, in the show notes.

It's on, it's on YouTube and, you know, you can see me, uh,

dancing in the ocean at one point.

Um,

It is a dated pod or dated

Yeah, it's, it's dated, um, uh, you know, I'm slightly, I have

slightly more hair and slightly less gray.

Um, and, um, Yeah.

It, it was, it was a lot of fun.

And yeah, that's, that's my daughter and she has three

backup singers that are also her.

It, it's kind of funny, we, we had her on the podcast, I should put a link to that.

We had her on the podcast to talk about it, and she created three backup

singers and she gave each of them in her mind a name and a personality.

And then she sang like that personality, She was really all into it.

She's a great singer.

She actually, um, she right now gets paid.

Um, as a cantor for a Catholic church, um, you know, she, so she's

technically a professional singer.

She gets paid a couple hundred bucks a week to, to sing for, uh, for a church

in Carlsbad, go San Diego Co Padres.

Anyway, so, so, I'm glad, I'm glad that that was, uh, that was

actually where we got our name.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, uh, so now, we'll, we'll give you a link to the video so you

can see the, you can see the.

There's actually, like I got, I don't know, what do I have, like seven

or eight, um, parodies that I did.

Oh,

Um, I did that one.

We did a, we did a, um, uh, uh, shoot, help me Prasanna.

We did the, of course, the, the one about virtualization.

McLemore.

Uh, we did a, we did a, uh, you know, the, I'm gonna pop some tag.

Only got 20, so mine was, I'm gonna build VMs, got do 20 guests in my server.

I'm, I'm a virtual getting rid of servers.

VMs are so awesome.

There you go.

So we did that one anyway.

Nobody wants to hear about this.

Let's move on.

Let's talk about, let's talk about stuff.

Um, how's it going over there?

It's going well.

It's going well.

How's it going at, at Presidio?

Why don't you gimme, gimme an overview of what, what you do as a company and,

and then how do you fit into that?

So Presidio is a, uh, solutions, uh,

provider for it, and we have.

Various, uh, capabilities within the industry from, um, hybrid cloud

to public cloud, um, private cloud, uh, communications such as, uh,

unified communications, managed services, um, you know, a lot of,

um, different silos within it.

Um, I like to think of us.

Um, more than a value added reseller because we not only

sell value with the traditional OEM such as Dell, Cisco, and hp.

Um, but we can also provide true consulting and management services

as well across various things.

So, um, lots and lots of capabilities within Presidio itself.

Yeah, I would like to think that every VAR

should be like that, but clearly every VAR is not like that, right?

The i I think they start often.

Having dealt with a number of VARs over my years, um, I think they

often start with what are the three things we sell , and then how do we

shoehorn the three things that we sell into whatever customer comes up.

I think the, the biggest challenge, I think, for a var of any kind

is, okay, so we have to back up.

Have you seen the, um, miracle on 34th?

Uh, a while ago,

classic.

Okay.

Hopefully the original, because the others just stunk.

Anyway, The, you know, there's the thing in there where Santa sends somebody, you

know, a little girl asks for something and he's like, you know, uh, they actually

had, you know, it said at Macy's, and, and, and Santa says, You know, Gimbals

actually has a much better ABC than we do.

Uh, you should go to Gimbals.

And they were not very happy with that.

Um, I think that's the biggest challenge is somebody comes in and

says, you know, we, they articulate to you their requirements and then

your requirements, their requirements don't match well to a product that you.

Right.

E.

Exactly.

And I, I see that a lot in my industry where.

One of our sales leads, um, is tightly coupled, um, with an OEM and wants to sell

that particular solution, whatever it is.

And it, it's like always putting in that square peg into a round hole.

Sometimes it will fit and I've seen it fit.

Um, other times it's not a perfect match because they're not

double checking and triple check.

What the actual business requirements were talking, uh, with the C levels

about what are they trying to achieve in the next year to 18 months to five year

business plan and, and understanding the direction that they wanna go.

Um, you know, one of the primary examples I've heard recently is we wanna move to an

operational expense structure, therefore we need to move to a public cloud.

And that is not always the case.

Um, in terms of the business objective, uh, it, it, it could be, um, that they

want to change the way their, uh, business costs are structured rather than a capital

expense move into an operational expense, but leaving some of their applications on.

Um, and, and Presidio can actually help with that, um, because we can

operationalize what would traditionally be a capital expense, put it into

an operational expense regardless of the, the vendor that's involved.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

One, one of the challenges with us, as you know, techies is we get

interested in a particular technology.

We see something, we see a webinar, we see a, you know, whatever.

I, I'll give you a perfect example and, and I'll, I'll use, I'll.

category that isn't as big as it used to be.

If we go back to sort of the turn of the century, , there was an,

there was a backup type that was everywhere and that was cdp, right?

Continuous data protection.

If you went to storage networking world, shout out to SNW.

Haven't seen you in a long time.

Storage networking world.

There'd be like 10 CDP booths.

. Right.

Um, and, and CDP as a technology sounds amazing.

There are CDP companies that are out that are here now, and

I, I hope they're doing great.

The problem was that there were like three companies, , that, that had business

requirements that map to cdp, right?

And so you had like a dozen companies that were selling CDP solutions.

And you had, it was the classic thing of a problem waiting for,

or product waiting for a problem.

And the problem is, as techies we're like, That sounds amazing.

I can get a zero, an RTO, and an R and an RPO of zero.

That sounds amazing.

Where do I sign?

But if we don't have a business requirement that goes with that,

It seems it might seem wrong.

Oh, but that would be the best, right?

That would we want the best backup system for the company.

No, you want the best backup system that meets your requirements and spending

beyond that is, is a waste of money.

Right?

It's a bit like, um,

Do you want a Bugatti to drive on the

That's exactly where I was going.

Right.

You know, my only job is to drive my granddaughter to school,

and so I'm gonna buy a Bugatti.

Right.

Uh, it would be cool, but, um, you know, I'd be the coolest, you know, grandpa

pulling up the, with my Bugatti, uh, I was gonna go Lamborghini by the way,

Nah.

W. Curtis Preston:

whatever for the record.

W. Curtis Preston:

One of us on this podcast has actually driven a Lamborghini once,

Yeah.

Okay.

You win.

and by the way, it was only from the showroom

floor back to the dealership.

And it was like, keep it under 45, Curtis.

Um, anyway, I digress.

But yeah, that's, I think as technologists we get, we get

excited in a particular technology.

Another thing that happens as technologists and in the backup

space, we get angry at our current backup product, right?

We, we have challenges with our current backup product, and we think

our, what's our immediate idea?

Our immediate idea is to replace the backup product, right?

I, I did 20 plus years of it consulting.

and the, the answer to the problem was almost never

replaced a backup product, right?

It was, you are using it wrong.

, right?

The problem was not software.

The problem was not hardware, the problem was wetware, right?

Uh, and.

You know, it was the whole, like the tape, uh, the, the streaming problem

to get the tape strip that, that was the problem 90% of the time.

Um, anyway, I'm sorry, I digress.

But that, but that, that's the problem is we get, we're techy people.

We see a technical problem, we wanna solve it with a technical solution, right?

Or we see a cool technical thing and we want to just bring it into

the environment, but we have to go back if we're gonna spend money.

have to go back to the business.

Uh, I'm sorry for that really long rant, but it just, I, I, I felt,

I

felt, I dunno, it wasn't even a question,

Eric, so good luck answering.

actually one of the struggles, um, that I have, um, almost

on a weekly basis is, you know, the account manager coming in saying, We're

going to put vendor X into this customer,

Hmm.

Without alligning those business objectives, they could be

perfectly fine with it, but like in the backup products, they're.

The new HTML five interface, they gotta have that new HTML five interface, or

they need to have ransomware protection built in, not realizing that there's

more to ransomware protection than just what's in the backup product.

Um, that's like I have in my ransomware workshop that I,

I provide to our customers.

Ransomware protection is kinda like an.

It's multilayered approach.

Um, and much like an ogre, it gets ugly and green it's, um, so yeah, it,

yeah, and it's like an onion that the more you

look at, you know, the more you dig into it, the more you cry.

Right.

Um,

exactly, and it, it surprises me the number of times

they come in and the customer could be a very happy customer of Veeam.

But they wanna put in the new hyper-converged backup solution because

it has an HTML five interface, and that's what they're selling it on.

Yeah,

So,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

which doesn't quite align.

pretty interface,

Well, I think one of the challenges there too is if

you, like you said, if you don't go to the back to the business and have

those conversations, then even if you do push out this new hyper-converged

solution, right, the business may not be happy with it, and that's gonna

look bad to you who had recommended picking a certain technology, right?

They're like, Oh, we just gave you a bunch of money, and

what did it really do for us?

Not much, and it caused all these problems, or it had

all these gaps, et cetera.

Right?

or they complain about the performance of their backup

solution when they bought a brand new production array, production servers,

and reestablish those older servers as their backup servers because they

want more longevity out of it, and then complain about the performance.

Does performance matter in a

Only on restores,

That is very, very true.

You know, and, and, and to, to go back, you know, and that really is

the only thing that matters, right?

I often say on the podcast, right, no one cares if you can back up.

They only care if you can restore and.

The challenge we had back in the day was the only solution to the

tape problem that any of the backup vendors had, uh, for the most part was

multiplexing right to, to interleave multiple backup jobs together into

one faster backup job that would.

Hopefully make the tape drive happy and, and, and allow it to stream and

not be shoe shining all the time.

And the problem with that is that it totally screwed over restores, right?

You had to read the 20 different backup jobs and throw away 19 of them for the

one that you needed, which meant your restore performance was crap, right?

That's the one thing I do not miss, um, from the, the backup days.

But let, let's talk.

. Um, how, how do we get, what, what's it like?

You, you, I'm sure you've had some conversations where, in your head,

what you're trying to get to as an RTO and an rpo, you know, but as you said

that, that's too, too deep for many of the conversations that you're having.

What questions are you asking, uh, to get to that question?

So I, I ask, uh, more open-ended questions, and the

more the business leader talks, the, the more information I get.

Um, so I will ask a question like, you know, what would

happen if Cerner disappeared?

You know, what, what, what would you do?

Um, and that gets into their business continuity.

What

do they do?

Um, doctors and nurses that use the Cerner application, they

could go back to pen and paper.

That is a legitimate, you know, uh, business continuity plan.

It's not a long term plan.

So what's the next phase on the recovery process?

And that gets into the disaster recovery portion of the business continuity plan.

Um, How long can they function on pen and paper?

Okay.

If they can continue to function for another hour or two, that helps

me to develop those service level objectives around do we need to create

the application more highly available with no single points of failures.

Um, with a potential zero RTO rpo, um, which I have created and can create,

but you still have to have multiple recovery points because in, in a

ransomware attack, for example, both copies of your data set are now corrupted.

So you still have to be able to recover back in.

Um, so I, I get into those discussions at a, a higher level as well.

What exactly does that mean?

Um, what would happen if they lost five minutes of patient records?

Well, many times it's like, well, five minutes.

That could be life or death, depending on the situation.

It may not be cuz they could roll back to the pen and paper.

Um, or the, the doctor will remember what he.

that's interesting.

I, I, I immediately started thinking about, so currently

I, so I'm a poll worker, right?

Uh, for the upcoming election, I have been for like, the last four elections.

And in San Diego.

San Diego, based on, you know, some pushes from.

California basically has updated to, you know, an electronic system

from beginning to end your check.

You know, we have an electronic poll book.

We have an electronic, um, you know, system.

The, the, the ballot marking devices, electronic.

It produces a paper ballot, but it is an electronic system that you're,

that you're voting on, um, the.

That it's an electronic system that produces a paper ballot, right?

Uh, and then all of that communicates through a single point of failure.

which is a cradle point router, right?

That, that, um, that provides an encrypted communication channel back

to the, the registrar of voters.

And.

Being the type of person I started asking, you know, it's not really a business,

but business continuity questions, right?

Because.

You know, a business, the big problem is if you're down, the customer

might go somewhere else, right?

That's not really a choice in an election, right?

The, the, if, if the business is down, you get disenfranchisement of voters, which

is the number one thing you don't want.

So I was very, I was very pleased to see that they had included that, uh,

both for the, the easy answer for.

If a, if a site is down, is the nearest site is two miles that way, Right?

You know, we are dead.

We have a, if they don't wanna do that, we have a backup plan for that.

But the, the nearest site is two miles that way.

And that's not a big deal.

And that's something that I don't think an average business might, it

might not have that in its tool chest.

Uh, but we do.

Emergency ballots.

We have a big stack of emergency ballots, and this is in the case

of, um, catastrophic system-wide.

The registrar of voters goes down, We get attacked by a ransomware attack

on, on one of the election days.

We actually have up to 11 days of, of in person voting.

And, uh, we have paper ballots.

Uh, so just like those doctors, we can go back to pen and paper.

It is a giant pain in the ass because you actually have to write, they're not

pre-printed ballots like the old days with, with the names of the candidates.

You actually have to write the name of the candidate you want and then, and

then check, you know, and then check the

But there's a mechanism for

But there is a mechanism, right?

And what matters for us, what matters for those businesses is it fits in, This is

why I brought it up, is that it fits into the purpose of that, that organization.

Right.

And, and, and what, Like if the system, if the systems go down in

a hospital, for the most part, most patients are not going to immediate.

Uh, die.

Right?

Some, some patients might, right?

The, there are, there are systems that must be highly

available in a hospital, right?

Uh, and those systems, I'm guessing have redundancy after redundancy

after redundancy, because you can't, like the, the, a ventilator or a,

um, what, what do they call it?

The, when they put you on a, when they talk about pulling

the plug, whatever that,

It's a ventilator.

Yeah.

not not just a ventilator, but well, whatever.

It doesn't matter.

Clearly, I am not a doctor and please don't take any medical advice from me.

, you, you.

That's another, that's another thing is also that you can have multiple

SLAs within your business, right?

For different applications.

You wanna talk about that a little bit?

right.

So, um, yeah, I, when I describe, um, what a service level objective is to

the business leaders, I describe various cases of business continuity and, you

know, if it's just a simple I need to file restored, for example, that would have.

Potentially a five minute sla if I need to restore an entire virtual

machine, that could be a 30 minute sla.

Um, and you know, if I have to restore an entire data center,

we're looking at multiple day sla.

If that is not sufficient for the business leader, it's like, well, in

order to achieve this, we're gonna have to create a new system that can get there.

And that's when I started designing.

Uh, the IT infrastructure to meet their objectives.

Yeah.

And typically that probably comes with a cost though, right?

Exactly.

But if they desire it, I'm giving them the cost to achieve it and

then they can back off on it.

Um, if I tell, if I just point blank, ask them the question, So what's your RTO?

And rpo, if they understand what that acronym is, immediately they're

gonna come back and say, Zero.

Zero.

then

Exactly.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah, we say that a lot.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yep.

and it's like, well, in order to achieve that, I'm going

to need to sell you and construct this new highly available solution.

It's, you know, one point x billion dollars and my sales

person's gonna be extremely happy and they're gonna come back.

I don't have a billion dollars to spend.

It's like, Okay, well let's talk about what you can do.

And as Curtis was mentioning earlier, different, um, applications within the

infrastructure will have a different sla, therefore tiered approach on recovery.

And you could create a highly available solution for 1% of your applications.

much less than, you know, a zero RTR PO for a hundred

percent of your applications.

So

can, Yeah, we can get you that RPO and RTO of Zero for just

that one application for $200,000 instead of $1 billion, and they're like sold.

e.

E, exactly.

Um, and you know, along with that one application, it's dependencies

that come along with it and understanding what they are so that

they get recovered in the same.

Point.

Um, I actually had one customer that was leveraging, uh, a, uh, particular

backup set and they were recovering into, um, a recovery data center.

I don't wanna get into specifics about the vendors to be

disparaging of any of the of them.

The customer had valid backup sets.

Okay.

They were a hundred percent valid backups their.

test with is we're gonna sever communications from production

Or.

and we are going to recover just from that backup set

into the bare metal servers that this provider was providing up.

They couldn't authenticate to their backup set because the

active directory was not there.

Yeah, that's the same problem that we had with

the, with this, this guy that, that recovered after a hurricane.

He, he, they had to, they had to authenticate back to the mainland, uh, cuz

they were on an island and they had, and they couldn't, they couldn't get there.

But, Well, but let me ask you a question.

So what.

The failure there to me would be in the system, the initial system design, right?

A backup system needs to be a DR.

System, needs to be kind of self-sustaining, right?

It should.

And as I, um, talk through the scenario with my customers about how to test it,

developing a test plan, um, I go through, Well, how's it gonna authenticate?

Well, active directory is how we authenticate.

Okay, great.

So do you have a synchronous copy of your active directory at the DR site and it's

like, it, it, it's, Oh yeah, we need that.

Right?

Yeah, we need that.

Um, and you know, one of the things that comes up frequently

is certificate authorities.

You know, how, how do we make sure that our certificate authorities

are valid, um, at the DR.

Site.

Hmm.

How do we recover that if it, it's uh, you know, we lose our

certificate chain, Um, because now you get invalid SSL certificates as an example

when you're trying to authenticate.

So, um, I go through how that functions and how to protect

that and how to restore that.

Because, But here's a question is.

Who are the right folks to talk to in this case?

Because if you talk, like going back to the Cerner example, right?

If you talk to the Cerner developer, right, they would know, okay, for

Cerner, the application, here are the components that are required.

If you talk to the IT admin, they may not know everything for Cerner,

but they may know, Okay, here's the things I need for SSL certificate

authorities and for active directory.

do you just basically get both those folks in a room and be like, Hey, let's walk

through what this looks like end to end, and what are all the app dependencies?

Or do you basically try to connect the pieces together?

Uh, many times, uh, Presidio as a whole, um,

will have multiple conversations.

Um, and sometimes where we're getting conflicting information, we will

bring both teams into the room.

Um, that happens quite a bit with my ransomware workshop where security

is saying one thing, the, the.

Network engineers are saying another thing.

Um, and the backup data center engineers are saying a completely different

thing and they're not in alignment.

So with my ransomware workshop that Presidio has free to

our customers, by the way.

Um, sit in the room typically with a C level who's just there

to listen and provide input where he or she needs that input.

Um, but it's like, so how are you detecting ransomware?

How are you able to recover from ransomware?

And it really brings more of a camaraderie because many times these IT organizations

are siloed and they're not talking.

We help to develop that conversation.

Yeah, that, that siloed business, you know, the, the departmental

silos is definitely a huge problem.

I, um, now I'm gonna, I'm gonna preface my following statement with, uh, to a hammer.

Everything looks like a nail.

When I was hearing, when I was hearing your, all of the problems that you have

with authenticating all of that and bringing things up in a, in a, um, you

know, in a DR environment, my immediately thought, We wouldn't have that problem.

Right.

Um, you know, having a cloud service, I think this is one of those things I think

that makes a strong argument for a cloud service and against an on-prem system.

It's not that you can't do it, right, It's not that an on-prem system can't do it.

Uh, it's that you will have challenges that you wouldn't have otherwise.

I would, I would challenge you on that though, Curtis.

What's that?

Go ahead.

Challenge

uh, that just given how the technology works at

the company you work at, Right.

Um, if you are using some components like the on-Premises active directory

component used for authentication, you as a company would have to be aware of

that and make sure that gets replicated.

you could have, you could, you could create problems.

You could create problems.

Yes, that

could create problems.

Well, but again, I'm, I'm back to the same thing as well.

First off, don't do that.

Don't authenticate your backup system to active directory.

Done.

Don't do it.

Okay.

So, so, yes.

If, if, if you do that, in my opinion, really dumb thing.

Yes.

You could bring an on-prem problem into the cloud,

Right.

I, I

if I, Yeah.

on that.

Um, and not only the backup infrastructure should be in its own authentication

domain, but the entire IT infrastructure should be in a separate authentication

domain from the user domain.

One way trusted, but not in the same

Yeah.

I, I wanna do like the football guys goal

Yeah, I, I, I've had conversations where it's like, we just

finished consolidating all of our active directories down into one forest, and

I'm telling them to break it up again.

Right, right.

I mean, it, it sounds great until you start to think about cybersecurity, right?

And when you think about, especially, and again, you know, I hope it

doesn't sound like I'm picking on, but especially if you are running a

Windows based backup system, right?

You know, your active directory gets hacked, this gets compromised, and

then boom, they just slide right on over into the backup server and

then do bad, bad things, right?

So I, so you're right, you're right.

Persona.

We could bring on-prem problems into the cloud.

yeah, but that's why it's, You should be aware of what you're

bringing because if you had just gone and replaced your backup product, right,

you might still have had the same issue.

So it's, I think it's like what Eric said.

Think about the entire application, the dependencies, everything else, right?

Because you might fix one problem, but you might still have exposure in another.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, so talk to someone.

Uh, and the thing is for, for those of you listening at home, we actually have

no idea how long we're running today because we've had technical problems

with our recording system that has broken this up into three separate recordings.

It's been a lot of fun.

But I'm gonna, I'm gonna sort of round us out here because I think

we're somewhere in the neighborhood of our usual recording time.

Um, and dammit, I had a, I had, I was going some.

, What were we talking about?

I was just saying like, don't look at everything

holistically, like don't just look at one component and replace

it because you might still have exposure and gaps in the other parts.

Got it.

And I'm gonna say find the Eric at your vendor.

Right.

Um, you know, we could, we could pick on sales guys all day long, right?

But.

The reality is their goal is to sell product.

And the, the Eric at your company, the, the vendor that you're working,

makes sure, you know, you can't, you can't dismiss either side.

You need the techie side and you need the business side.

And, and, and Eric is, you're, you're not unique Eric, but

you're definitely a, you're.

You're an endangered species.

People that can talk both the, the business side and the technical side.

I was gonna say hot commodity, but

Yeah, hot That's, that's uh, what do you call it?

Uh, better than endangered species.

yeah.

So talk to the Eric at your company.

Uh, do you have any, do you have any final thoughts for us, Eric?

Um, so I, if you're interested in my company,

um, you know, you can find out more about us@presidio.com.

However, we've got a great website that tells you everything about us.

Um, we also have a podcast, uh, that you can listen to called The

Digital Decode that gets into more about what Presidio can offer, um, in

terms of our products and solutions.

right, sounds good.

And persona, have you had a good time today with all our, all

I

fun?

It has been interesting and I'm really

curious why it's been behaving the way it's been behaving.

But yes, other than that, it's been fun.

Thanks, Eric.

Yeah.

All right,

And, um, we hope that you enjoyed this episode.

I just want you to know this one was really hard.

. If that matters to you, be sure to subscribe so that you can restore it all.