W. Curtis Preston: There are three types of people in this world.
Speaker:Those who think you need to back up SaaS services like Microsoft 365.
Speaker:Those who don't.
Speaker:And those who still aren't sure.
Speaker:If, what we talk about in this episode, doesn't persuade you
Speaker:to back up things like that.
Speaker:I don't know what will hi.
Speaker:I'm w Curtis precedent, AKA Mr.
Speaker:Backup.
Speaker:If you're not familiar with me, I've been fighting the backup fights since
Speaker:my first job and it over 30 years ago.
Speaker:I've also written for O'Reilly books on the topic.
Speaker:And this episode, you'll hear how Microsoft and Salesforce have both
Speaker:admitted their services need to be backed up . Then we discuss the all-important
Speaker:question of whether or not you should use their backup services or a third party.
Speaker:This is an extremely important episode.
Speaker:This is backup.
Speaker:Central's restore it all.
Speaker:Hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restore All podcast.
Speaker:I'm your host, w Curtis Preston, a k a, Mr.
Speaker: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.