Trilio has announced a new ‘Continuous Restore’ capability within TrilioVault for Kubernetes, which can send one single source of truth to multiple clouds or storage environments simultaneously. The ability for continuous replication accelerates RTO from a disaster recovery perspective. While in some public cloud instances hyperscalers may just provide cluster recovery, not application and data recovery with Trilio, you have the ability to stage that data and have that failover instantaneously. The product will be made generally available in Q3 2022.

“You may want to have data somewhere and the application somewhere, but I also want to empower you to have it everywhere. And I think that’s evolutionary and revolutionary,” says David Safaii, CEO at Trilio.

• One of the key use cases for Trilio is with testing with production data. Safaii explains that often people create data, and if they are dealing with compliance or regulatory things, they want to obfuscate that data. He explains how with Trilio people can pre-position data, but move data as required.
• With the Continuous Restore capability, you can reach out to the edge, curate the data, and do more with it since you have that one single layer. Safaii goes into detail with the use case of edge cloud and how Trilio can help.
• With people starting their Kubernetes journey, building their applications and getting ready to deploy these applications, they need to have backup and disaster recovery. Safaii explains how Trilio helps solve these challenges, helping with migrating workloads between clusters and different clouds.
• Some organizations have to repatriate workloads back to on-premises. Safaii discusses how Trilio can help organizations manage their costs by enabling them to move the application and data to any cloud, and to scale down if they choose to.
• As ransomware attacks can happen, having a backup and disaster recovery are a necessity. Safaii discusses how serious the risk to data protection is in the cloud compared to traditional IT. He explains what organizations can do to protect themselves and how Trilio is helping.
• Security is not just a product or process, it is a culture. Safaii explains why the cultural aspect is so important to an organization and the benefit it brings.

Connect with David Safaii (LinkedIn, Twitter)

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.

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Here is the automated and unedited transcript of the recording. Please note that the transcript has not been edited or reviewed. 

Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is Swapnil Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of TFiR Let’s talk here at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Valencia, Spain. And today we have with us, once again, David Safali, CEO of Trilio. David, it’s great to have you back on the show.

David Safaii: Great to see you. Good to be here.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Yeah. And it’s exciting to be able to see each other in person after two or three years. We have been-

David Safaii: Right.

Swapnil Bhartiya:-doing so many Zoom. So I hope this will become a new norm. Not that we’ll go back because meeting in person has its own different vibe all together, which brings me to the first question, which is that you are here at KubeCon. You have been to keynotes, sessions. You have seen the whole booth area. What kind of energy have you seen? What has been your experience so far?

David Safaii: So if you can hear it from my voice, I’ve already lost my voice. Excuse me.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Which is a good thing.

David Safaii: Oh, I’ve also for a good reason. There is so much excitement here and we’ve had so many conversations at our booth. We already hit our goal for the whole conference on day one. That’s the level of excitement, the number of people that are here, and the, and the great conversations that have been taking place. So I want to apologize for losing my voice ahead of this conversation.

Swapnil Bhartiya: We have been covering Trilio for years, so I don’t want to get into the introduction of Trilio, but what I do want to know is that since you are here, in addition to lead generation, what else are you doing here? Any announcements?

David Safaii: Well, it’s actually a big announcement. So at the show we’re showing a technical preview. Actually, it’s been unveiled in Microsoft’s booth today at 3:30 in the Azure booth. And it’s around our Continuous Restore product. The Continuous Restore product, we’re accustomed to in the traditional IT sense, asynchronous replication. This doesn’t exist in the Cloud Native world. So what we’ve created and have patented and we’re going GA with next quarter is the ability to send one single source of truth, to multiple clouds, multiple storage environments, simultaneously. And so you get to pre-position data. And now, so if you think about it this way, I guess at one point in time, continuously, and have a production cloud in Amazon, a DR cloud in Azure, a Test Dev cloud in GCP, or back on premise, all using one source of truth, and that in itself, and having that continuous replication, regardless of what the underlying infrastructure is massive. And what it does though, it accelerates RTO from a DR perspective.

It gives you test data to work with because a lot of the pain points in the market around testing is how do I test with production data. A lot of times people create data, and of course if you’re dealing with compliance or regulatory things, you want to obfuscate that data, in what you can do. And then, you have also now the ability to not just pre-position data, but move data as required, which is powerful. So what Continuous Restore becomes at the end of the day is, while we’ve talked about multi-cloud and I think a conversation you and I had had in the past. I think tomorrow we talk about Cross Cloud and Trilio becomes that fabric because you can have. You may want to have data somewhere and the application somewhere, but I also want to empower you to have it everywhere. And I think that’s evolutionary and revolutionary.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Right. Since you mentioned Cross Cloud, we talk cross clusters, cross teams. So first of all, can you also talk about why? What is important because most of the things that you folks do is based on where the market is heading, where the users are, where the customers are. Let’s talk about the importance of worrying or caring about cloud cross clusters, cross teams, cross cloud.

David Safaii: Yeah, it’s interesting because it becomes this intersection of a number of roles, a number of responsibilities, and a number of instances where people are in their journey. So as an example, people early in their journeys may be very Dev Ops heavy to create the culture around Kubernetes and build their applications and get ready to deploy those applications. And then what we’re seeing now is IY OPS raising their hands and have the need to provide backup and DR. And we’re seeing a lot of DR requests, which is interesting. And what goes hand in hand with both is the migration capability. So whether you’re migrating between clusters or between clouds from non-prod to prod. It’s this intersection, and one of the beauties of Trilio is that wherever you may be in this journey, you may have started to one distribution of Kubernetes. You may have a team that’s using another distribution of Kubernetes. One of our superpowers is that we are completely agnostic in the most flexible solution. So you may be using upstream. I may be using OpenShift and you may have a tenant that cares about both of these applications. We give you one pane of glass to manage both, to move both if need be, to migrate both. And it becomes a powerful story.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Excellent. Thanks for taking this question and also explaining that I’ll go back to the previous point that you talked about, Continuous Restore.

David Safaii: Yeah.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Which is being demo at the Microsoft booth. Can you talk about once again, what are some of the use cases that led to it or which is driving it?

David Safaii: Yeah. So if you look at the use cases again driving RTO. Right, when people are asking about disaster recovery and they’re adopting public cloud, as an example, to achieve the RTOs that the companies require. Because in some public cloud instances, hyperscalers, may provide just cluster recovery. Cluster recovery is not application and data recovery, right? So we give the ability to stage that data and have it as that failover instantaneously. If you think about some of the use cases around Test Dev, as I mentioned before, but let’s also talk about Edge Cloud. What Continuous Restore provides is a mesh network for yourself. So now I have the ability to reach out to my edge, curate the data I require, pull it in and do more with it, right? You may require to compute at the edge. You may require to pull that data in for additional needs. At least you may have teams now that require that data for different departments. And then now you have that one single layer. So it’s again, I can’t pound the table harder. We are very excited. We think that Continuous Restore starts to change the game around data management.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Right. One more thing is that how much awareness are you seeing because people were initially more excited about moving to cloud? But when you learn on the cloud, that’s when day two, or day three or day 10, whatever problem is, which is come with a loss of data or data production, or being able to disaster recovery or data recovery. And also you folks have come a long way all the way from open stack days. So you have seen the market. I mean, openness stack, big giant, in the [inaudible 00:08:39] versus here. Also it’s massive. So talk about how you have seen the market evolve especially in the cloud community space.

David Safaii: Yeah. It’s in a really interesting spot now because you have a number of people who have been either born in the cloud. You have people that have organizations that have different departments, that have different projects, and they don’t even realize how many instances of public cloud that they may actually have or different hyperscalers that they’re actually using. And then we’re also seeing other folks that want to repatriate things back on premises again, and some of those folks want to manage their costs. What Continuous Restore can actually do is help you manage those costs. You can now move your application, your data, to any cloud that you want and scale one cloud down if you so choose to. So it becomes a really interesting thing. So again, people are in this really interesting spot right now where they’re trying to standardize perhaps on one distribution. They’re trying to understand how many clouds that they’re actually working with. They’re trying to put policy and governance in place, because now they’re.moving to production. This show has clearly shown us that we’re seeing the conversation far more mature than ever before.

And we want to help. If we can be that guidepost to help people migrate to where they want to be, or if we can be there so that they have that assurance that if things go bump in the night, they can recover.

Swapnil Bhartiya: One more thing is that when we do talk about data protection, data recovery, we do have to talk about the security aspect of it. This year, and even last year, even from the federal government, we have been hearing a lot about it. A lot of attacks are happening and especially with the cloud. Even there was a ransomware, if I’m not wrong in the Azure service as well was found. So things, low hanging features are there as that option is growing. So first of all, tell me a bit about how serious is the threat in the cloud native era versus the traditional era and what folks can do to protect themselves.

David Safaii: Yeah. So, I’d say that most ransomware attacks are still very much focused on Windows and Veon based environments. But I think where the Cloud Native world is today and where it’s going, it’s become at the forefront of the conversation, not an afterthought. So we’re finding a lot of the conversations that people want to talk about it, to check the box, right? And we’ve actually heard firsthand of actual ransomware attacks and because of that, it’s become an edict in the company to have backup and disaster recovery in place regardless. And our approach to this has been adhering to the NIST framework of a zero trust architecture. We allow you to bring your own keys. So we don’t want to do the key management, whatsoever. We will encrypt from, not at the storage, we’ll encrypt from the application all the way down. Multifactor authentication, immutability of the storage environment.

A lot of what the people are announcing now, we announced in the fall, is peace of mind. And actually one of the interesting things is that our point in time captures are their Linux based formats. Their [inaudible 00:12:27] two images. So they allow you to work with any third party scanners you want to work with. So a lot of security organizations have their best of breed tooling that they want to work with. Traditional data protection folks have proprietary schemas. And so we’ve removed that. We want to empower security teams to forensically. Because most security attacks already happened without you knowing it, right? 75, 90 days, a hundred days earlier. And so we give you the ability to comb through your backups. Check the box, have clean bill of health to get to your best last known state if need be.

Right, and even from state lists environments, we’ve had conversations with CISOs who said, “Look, I know what my intended state was. I worried about drift and what’s my runtime state.” So at Trilio you can capture that runtime state, compare your YAML’s and forensically look to see if anything’s changed, right? Because people are trying to sneak things in or not even just from a security aspect. People will monkey around with configurations because they can. A lot of QA testing is press that button. Why? Because it’s there, right? That’s what happens. And that’s how you get to fat finger things and misconfigured things often. So we think that our approach to security lends itself very well to this world. And now again, with Continuous Restore, peace of mind that all your environments are protected, but security, there’s a holistic approach. It’s a team sport. It’s my job. It’s your job. It’s everyone in the organization to do what they’re supposed to be doing from a people process and technology perspective. So we will do our part.

Swapnil Bhartiya: All right. First of all, security is not a product, it’s a process. Second thing is that when you say that security is everybody’s problem, the thing that happens is when it becomes everybody’s problem, it ends up being nobody’s problem. Because if somebody thinks “Hey, somebody is doing,” but the fact is that actually it works in a bit different way. There are processes in place. So no matter what you’re doing you went through that process, but it doesn’t matter whether you care about security or not. That process will ensure that you did your bit correctly so that’s what it means by everybody’s. So can you just go a bit deeper and define, how would you explain that?

David Safaii: Yeah, so it’s kind of like the army, right? Everyone’s got a role or like in the supply chain. You’ve got a role to further things down the line. From a security aspect, it’s everything from managing your passwords correctly. It’s as simple as those things, but the process is in place but it’s not process, but it’s also culture, right? It’s a team culture to rally around. We’re going to do this in a secure manner because problems happen. It’s not if, it’s kind of when they happen. Right? And how do we, it’s like a lot of things in life. How are you going to respond to these things? But at least you can put processes in place.

Swapnil Bhartiya: David, once again, thank you so much for joining me today in person and talk about, of course not only that, but you share some insights, which are helpful to a lot of folks there. So thanks for sharing those insights. And as usual, I would love to have you back on the show, whether in person or remote, doesn’t matter, but it’s incredible to talk to you again. Thank you.

David Safaii: Oh, thank you for having me. It’s always good to chat with you and hopefully I’ll have my voice next time. But like I said, this was a good thing. It’s been a great show. So thank you.

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