Druva's No Hardware Required

On this podcast, we are joined by Jatin Thaker, Vice President User Experience at Druva. Jatin first explains what you must do before designing a UI, which starts with understanding the role the user will play, and therefore the type of experience they expect (e.g. VMware Administrator, Oracle DBA, etc.). He then explains the building blocks of creating a user interface, including interaction, visual elements, motion and rendering, accessibility, extensibility, internationalization, responsiveness, and more. We finish up talking about how you use these components to build composites that the user sees. Check out this interesting podcast that talks about why and how you build a good user interface.

Stephen Manley and W. Curtis Preston discuss whether or not data protection is the silver bullet to stop all ransomware. Short answer: no, it’s not. We start by discussing another podcast that suggested backup vendors think we are the solution to ransomware. We don’t. Then we delve into why we do think backup and DR are an important part of defending against ransomware. We also discuss whether we think they are more important than some of the other tools. We then cover some of the things Druva has done to specifically target ransomware. We also talk about ransomware attacks where backup can’t help, as well as discussing other tools you should have. We conclude with a “last dollar” question: if you only had $1 left; do you spend it on backup or user training? I’ll bet you know how both hosts answered.

This week we discuss the growing trend of calling something "SaaS" – when it's really nothing of the kind. We discuss what makes something SaaS (or not) and give some modern examples of things that are (and are not) SaaS. We also explain why this actually matters.

Stephen and Curtis discuss the Microsoft Azure CosmosDB vulnerability that was announced this week, and what it means to anyone using that service. (Druva is powered by AWS, so it does not use CosmosDB.) We talk about Microsoft's response and offer some guidance to anyone who might have data stored there. We also give some suggestions about how to talk to your SaaS vendors about whether or not they use this database, and what kind of data they store there.

Celeste Kinswood, Druva's Senior Product Marketing Manager for Cyber Resilience, returns to the podcast to talk about how the typical Druva customer responds during a ransomware attack. We cover how Druva integrates with SIEM and SOAR tools to make the process easier, as well has how Druva's architecture ensures that you always have an uninfected version of your data to restore. She also explains how Druva can also detect a ransomware infection and automatically respond to it.

Stephen Manley and W. Curtis Preston discuss the news that Druva was selected by Gartner as a visionary in the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup & Recovery Software Solutions. This is exciting news for Druva and the SaaS industry.

Celeste Kinswood joins us on this episode of No Hardware Required to talk about why and how to protect your backups from ransomware. We talk about the challenges of traditional data protection offerings, especially on-premises backup systems based on Windows. We then talk about how Druva addresses those challenges with a unique architecture that offers at truly air-gapped solution.

This week Stephen Manley and W. Curtis Preston interview David Gildea, VP of Product at Druva. David found CloudRanger, which was acquired by Druva, which specializes in native data protection of cloud resources. He's been working exclusively in the cloud world for many years, so we thought his perspective would be a valuable one. We talk about how he feels that cloud the cloud has (or has not) lived up to its reputation, including areas where the cloud has gotten better – and even a few where it has gotten worse. We talk about how people's roles have changed, as the cloud is quite different than a datacenter. Finally, we round out the conversation talking about how companies can help their people transition to a world that is become increasingly cloud-centric.

This week we talk to David Gildea, founder of CloudRanger, who is now Director of Product at Druva. We discuss what it's like to back up AWS workloads at scale. We start with a high-level overview of Druva's AWS backup offering, and morph that into a discussion of what it's like to do things without it. We draw an analogy to Dave Hitz's comment that he used to make about NetApp, "I liked my first filer; I loved my tenth, and I hated the 100th." David thinks managing AWS backup by yourself is a lot like that. It'll get you so far, but at some point you're going to want some help. The good news is Druva is there to fill in the gap with centralized, mulit-account, cross-account, and cross-region backup that is simple to set up and run.

Preethi Srinivasan joins us again on the podcast to discuss what she sees as the current trends in computing, as well as one trend she thinks is still in the future. We talk about Kubernetes, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Quantum Computing, and where all of them should fit into a company's innovation strategy.