In this episode, Chris chats to Mat Keep (Senior Director of Product at MongoDB) about the proliferation of managed database solutions. Specifically, the conversation covers options for MongoDB, including Atlas. Managed databases provide a way for customers to gain rapid access to a development or production platform, paying for usage either on a time or transactional basis. This choice increases value for the customer, while ceding greater management control to the vendor. Whilst the database administrators may not have as many “nerd knobs” to vary, the time to value is hugely increased when database endpoints can be provisioned in a matter of minutes.

Mat explains how MongoDB has developed Atlas, an online portal for databases on-demand. This consumption model enables developers test code and for businesses and organisations, such as the UK’s HMRC, to rapidly put new applications in place.

You can learn more about Atlas and MongoDB at https://www.mongodb.com/

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In this episode, Chris talks to HYCU CEO Simon Taylor and SVP of Products Subbiah Sundaram about the announcement of HYCU R-Cloud. R-Cloud is a new solution for protecting SaaS applications, of which there are around 17,000 in the US alone. Traditionally, SaaS vendors need backup vendors to develop support for the backup APIs the SaaS vendor provides. This results in each vendor doing custom work to write to the specifics of each API. The consequence if this process means backup vendors will choose to support SaaS platforms with the greatest volume of customer data. Smaller SaaS vendors can easily get squeezed out and find it difficult to be onboarded.

R-Cloud inverts the process, providing an API and low-code environment where SaaS vendors can build integration in as little as three days. Through the use of single sign-on, a customer can quickly visualise all data in a view called R-Graph, which focuses on the data, rather than infrastructure view.

You can read more about R-Cloud in our related blog post – https://www.architecting.it/blog/hycu-rcloud-launch/ or visit https://www.hycu.com/ for more details.

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In this recording, Chris talks with David Ngo (CTO for Metallic) and Indu Peddibhotla (VP Products at Commvault) on how Commvault and the Metallic platform implement secure SaaS data protection. Customers depend on Metallic to recover from ransomware and other data loss scenarios. This puts more pressure on SaaS backup to be secure, protected and impregnable from assault. Commvault uses a set of design principles in its approach with Metallic that include; Security built-in, Certification, Air-gapped security, audit trails, multi-factor authentication, zero-trust methodology and early threat detection to achieve secure status.

In the conversation, David and Indu take us through exactly what each of these concepts means and how they are used to develop a secure SaaS data protection solution. Naturally, some of the processes are trade secrets, but we can see from certifications including FedRAMP, FIPS 140-02, CJIS compliance, GDPR compliance, HIPAA and more, that the service is secured to a high degree of competence.

During the conversation, we reference Cloud Field Day 13 – here’s the link to Commvault’s presentations – https://techfieldday.com/appearance/metallic-presents-at-cloud-field-day-13/

We also quote the great Donald Rumsfeld about “known unknowns” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns

Here are two previous pieces of content on vendor guarantees:

Here’s a link to Metallic Recovery Reserve, mentioned by Indu – https://metallic.io/metallic-cloud-storage

Here’s the link to Metallic ThreatWise – https://metallic.io/threatwise-cyber-deception

Finally, here’s a link to the Trust Centre mentioned by Indu – https://metallic.io/trust

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In this live recording from AWS:Reinvent in December 2022, Chris catches up with HYCU CEO Simon Taylor to discuss data management, security and protection. These three aspects are becoming increasingly intertwined as challenges such as ransomware continue to affect more companies than ever before. Electronic data is critical to every business and any breach affects not just the commercial world, but other areas such as healthcare. As the conversation continues, Simon highlights the challenges around protecting SaaS applications. There are around 16,000 currently active in the US, while a typical company operates around 175 data silos. There’s lots of work to do as we see greater use of the public cloud, especially with respect to software-as-a-service.

In this podcast episode, Simon mentions https://getrscore.org/, which we covered in this blog post back in September 2021.

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In this episode of Data Unpacked, we talk to Subbiah Sundaram (Senior VP of Products) and Andy Fernandez (Director of Product Marketing) from HYCU. The company recently announced a free tier of the HYCU Protégé service for developers working in Amazon Web Services. Users can quickly get started and protect data, with the option to upgrade later to paid features.

Why is the company doing this and what problem is it solving? It turns out that many developers don’t realise that data protection isn’t turned on by default in the public cloud. The Shared Responsibility Model means AWS takes care of hardware management, but data becomes the customer’s resource to protect. HYCU enables developers to install a free version then try advanced features for a limited time before choosing to buy (or not).

To learn more, follow https://www.hycu.com/protege/aws and scroll down to the free trial offer.

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With data dispersed across many locations that today could include on-premises, the public cloud, edge and co-location facilities, how can businesses ensure that data is in the right place at the right time, without the issue of creating multiple copies? In this episode, Chris talks to Floyd Christofferson, VP of Product Marketing at Hammerspace to learn how the company has abstracted the file system and associated metadata to address the problems of mobility and consistency. One interesting aspect of the Hammerspace approach is that it enables metadata to be extended and inherited in a way that provides workflow and other data management capabilities. These features can then be automated using policies or objectives in Hammerspace terms.

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In the first of a new series of podcasts, Chris Evans is in discussion with Colin Gallagher (VP of Product Marketing) and Joel Kaufman (Senior Technical Marketing Manager), both with data management start-up Weka. Weka recently announced Weka 4, a major upgrade to the technology offered by the company. At the same time, the distributed file system that was WekaFS is now being marketed as a “data platform”. We wanted to get into the details of how a file system and a platform can be defined and how specific features and functionality separate the two.

The conversation takes us through understanding the Weka technology, looking at aspects such as data variety, user experience, data mobility, data efficiency and dynamic scalability that all form part of the requirements of a platform.

For more details on Weka, check out the company website at https://www.weka.io/ or our blog content at https://www.architecting.it/blog/category/vendors/weka/.

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