EPISODE
191

Backups Don't Equal Recovery

July 31, 2025
1hr 25mins

They had backups. The storm didn’t care.

When a major client demanded proof of uptime and recovery, a Florida-based marketing company realized their DR plan was just a plan, not a solution.

In this episode, Max Clark sits down with Keith Lukes from UbiStor to break down how backup confidence can quickly turn into recovery chaos. From untested runbooks to budget-busting HA demands, they dive into what actually works and what blows up  when disaster hits. This is a real conversation about recovery time, immutable storage, cloud myths, and the human pressure of getting it all back online.

This one’s not about tech. It’s about survival. Hit play.

Transcript

Max Clark: So Keith, we're, we can't name the company by name, but gimme a little background, size, suite, whatever.

Keith Lukes: Yeah, for sure. So this is, they're, they, they call themselves a multi-channel marketing company, so they do print. Ad they do online marketing. Um, they actually provide like, um, online coupons for a couple national chains. Um, but their offices were in Florida and one of their larger customers was pushing them to say, okay, um, you run your operations out of your, um, office in Florida, um, that's prone to hurricanes after they've seen like the last two years of the devastation in the state.

And we really wanna see what your backup and, and Dr plan looks like.

Max Clark: How, how, how big was the company?

Keith Lukes: Oh, they were about a hundred employees. So they're a good sized marketing agency. Um, like I said, they work with some national, um, national chains, so, um, they've got some, some programs that they run that are pretty critical to those [00:01:00] businesses.

Max Clark: It's a hundred employees so agency, creative work, is their web infrastructure powering these or are they

Keith Lukes: Yes.

Max Clark: materials?

Keith Lukes: Yes. Yep. The web, they, they provide the content that's being pushed into, like as you go on an app for some of these, um, national chains or even like a, a website for them, they'll have coupons running on the top and they're controlling and managing to those, those con that content.

Max Clark: is their platform actually delivering the, the,

Keith Lukes: Yeah. They're,

Max Clark: running and they were running this out of their

Keith Lukes: yep.

They want the infrastructure local because they want the design teams next to the content that they're creating.

Max Clark: Okay. So as like a, you know, recovering, um, uh, web architect. I

Keith Lukes: Yep.

Max Clark: already like, gives me shivers because,

Keith Lukes: Yes.

And we, you know, it was interesting to talk through that. And they were really wanting, I mean, they're maturing some of their infrastructure out. They've got a part of this was, they have a new IT director,

and, and like I said, it's some content creation. The new IT director, I think is looking to evolve that [00:02:00] strategy. I don't 

Yeah,

going to stay there. Part of the reason they engaged with us was us being able to fix their problems today,

Max Clark: yeah, yeah.

Keith Lukes: with their strategy.

Max Clark: I mean, this isn't an argument for cloud versus something else. It's just like I. You know, the like infrastructure that you have to have that people don't realize. It's like, okay, uh, how, how long does it take you to upgrade your network links,

Keith Lukes: Right.

Max Clark: you know, how many network links do you have? Are they really redundant?

Do you have backups? What does your UPS look like? Oh, you, you have a, even if you have a big UPS, it's like, how was your run time? Oh, okay. Run time's 15, 20, 30 minutes. Okay, great. You have an incredibly large UPS. How much diesel fuel do you have in generators? Do you have generators who's taking care of your generators?

It's, it's like, you know, we've done this for hospitals and you're like. You're like, there is a perfectly fine tier four data center within a 10 minute drive. And, and, and you're, and it's like, and, and the cost differential to me. Now, now hospitals are different 'cause you've got, you know, your [00:03:00] EMR, you know, and all the different stuff.

And you can, we can get a, we can get a different, anyways. I don't like, again, like I'm, I'm here to get all spun up about this. Let's, let's keep going.

Keith Lukes: I thought about that as the example, right? Because it is, it, it's interesting, right? And that, that was sort of the, the, what drove the conversation was one of their larger customers was like, Hey, your infrastructure's in Florida. What are you doing about this?

Max Clark: So, okay. I've seen, look, we get this all the time with supply chain, right? I would say supply chain issues, right? We're now. You know, the, the larger customer is becoming aware and sensitive to the impact of their operations from their, their vendors, right? And then they're starting, we're, you know, so we see this a lot in security.

You know, what's your security posture? What do you have? Um, and, and to your point right now, people are, I mean, I'm fascinated. I mean, it, it must be really interesting actually, if you're a large. Customer and you realize like, Hey, a portion of my web infrastructure is now dependent on you, on this company.

And, and you guys are all on [00:04:00] premise. Like I would feel like crossed it, you know? Um, but okay, so, okay, so they're so existing customer, new customer probably actually doesn't matter. Comes to them and says, you're in Florida. Hurricanes happen

Keith Lukes: Yep.

Max Clark: consistently. Like this isn't like a theoretical issue like.

Keith Lukes: yep.

Max Clark: All that really is, you know, is just whether or not the, the hurricane hits you head on, or if it veers away at the last minute.

Right. Which is the only thing with hurricanes and, and, and told them probably pretty bluntly, right? Like, do this or don't do business with us.

Keith Lukes: Okay. That was part of it. And, and, you know, they came back, they, they initially wanted like five, nine uptime on this infrastructure, you know, 

Max Clark: customer did.

Keith Lukes: customer did.

Max Clark: Okay.

Keith Lukes: whole discussion on. What that looks like from a cost perspective. And that's when we started to get into cloud infrastructure.

We're like, you, you need to operate differently. That's a high availability strategy. We're not talking about dr [00:05:00] at that point, we're talking about ha. And, so we kind of changed the narrative, went to some of our near real time replicated technologies and, and showed them what sub one hour RPOs would look like in RTOs.

And, and so, and then they got the, the price tag on that. And they were like, um, yeah, that's not what we want either. Um, and so that's part of the, the discussion we have with our customers and why our partners like working with us. It's like, it's part education too. I mean, I think we, we always talk about, you know, as you get closer to point of failure, um, at left or right, boom, however you want to describe that, um, cost goes up and it goes up exponentially.

And as you get closer and closer to it, it, it increases. And so let's talk about the reality of what that looks like. Then you start talking about ransomware, we've even started to stop using recover time objectives. We're talking about mean time to recover. We're like, there's so many variables that now add to that length of time that it's, it's not just like [00:06:00] pushing a button with like replication technology, like Zerto.

When you have those systems spun up, you've gotta understand the condition they're in. If you're in a, a, a ransomware on what that really looks like, ,

Max Clark: I've, I've noticed this trend within it, purchasing in general.

Keith Lukes: Yep.

Max Clark: It feels like it's really exacerbated in, hopefully I pronounced that right. It's, it's really, you know, within, in backup and recovery, I feel like it takes on this, like, the very extreme of it where people start down these projects of saying, you know, we need a dr, we need a, you know, we need a business continuity plan, right?

So what's our disaster recovery plan? Or, you know, how does that, you know, apply to backup and recovery, right? Like, all these terms mean different things, but have all kind of merged into like, you know, like one soup and, um. And, and people start down this path of like, oh, of course we want, you know, instantaneous replication to our offsite with like, you know, and then you, and you break it down and you start getting into it and it's horrendously expensive, you know, for, and, and this is a [00:07:00] maturity thing I've noticed as well.

And I'm curious, you know, to get, I'm gonna, I'm gonna set you up here a little bit, but I'm curious to get your feedback on this because. You can tell where people are in the maturity of actually deploying and operating these systems. Because when they start, they start from this place of, I want instantaneous replication.

It's business critical. We can't afford any downtime whatsoever. And then they get the price tag with it and they decide, oh, it's too expensive. We can't do anything at all. And you're like, well, where are you actually in the maturity of understanding and deploying this to protect your business because you thought you needed everything instant and you decided to do nothing?

Keith Lukes: And, and so we have a discussion. What we like is, is the technologies we bring to the table have. recovery resource is adjacent to the backup

Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

Keith Lukes: So the cloud storage is adjacent to recovery resources in everything we do. And so that's really where the discussion therein lies. Is that, okay, let's talk about what kind of technology and recover points you need.

Let's talk about the reality of it and, and that's what happened with this customer and that. We [00:08:00] gave 'em the, I think it was a $20,000 option for, you know, near realtime replication until we needed live to live. We're like, you're building a secondary data center even for one hour RPOs. I mean, to spin up, um, reserved resources in that time isn't even practical if you want to compress that time down. so that's where we evolved to a second. Technology, our, our, our arons cloud, which we can get like four hour RPOs and RTOs and, and it's like we can even shrink those, um, recover points a little bit, but it's like we can get you up in about, you know, two to four hours. Um, it might be quicker, but that gives them a little, and, and the price difference was, you know, 40% of 20 k. So it, it significantly changed the price point and didn't, you know, massively alter. they were really looking at, you know, you're, you're bringing it from one hour to four hours and

Max Clark: But recovery's only like actually recovery. I mean, let, let's, let me, let's, let's break this down.

Keith Lukes: Yeah.

Max Clark: Okay. You have [00:09:00] data, we'll, just, I'm, I'm trying to make this really simplistic, right? You have data on a server. Right. You know, there's an application running on some sort of infrastructure, some sort of server with data on it.

So now you've identified you wanna back this data up, right? So, so take me through like that decision all the way into, um, you know, your infrastructure, right? So there's, there's pieces of it, it's like a identification and then there's technology to use to actually effectuate the backup and then where it goes and then, and then recovery.

Like, let's talk about this end to end. Because I have a,

Keith Lukes: so.

Max Clark: I have a ton of questions I wanna ask you.

Keith Lukes: Well, and so, so like I said, it started off with like our hypervisor level replication with Zerto. Right. That was the 20 K model. Right. And that was, um,

Max Clark: This is a month, a year?

Keith Lukes: a, a month,

Max Clark: Yeah.

Keith Lukes: Monthly. It was, you know, they had a ton of systems. It was active,

Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

Keith Lukes: And it was, um, really a, a, a decision that they made to, to have that infrastructure come up right away.

So it was into our data center. Um. [00:10:00] VMware environment. They wanted, you know, they, they were kind of very specific about We want VMware, we want all these things. And then like you said, it got the price tag and it was like, okay, well let's, let's sit down and evaluate. Right. It was just not just the storage that they had there, and they wanted all these recovery points.

And I'm like, you're, you're, you're really asking for, for a significant amount of infrastructure to be able to handle the critical. Systems that you had. And so we parsed the, you know, and they wanted the whole environment, right? Like it's

Max Clark: Hmm.

Keith Lukes: we need, everything we need right away. And we're like, okay, let's really sit down and evaluate on the presale side and talk about what you really need.

And so then we isolated to, um, you know, I think about 40% of the environment and then we,

Max Clark: Big change.

Keith Lukes: yeah, it changed, right? Well, everything does. And that, those discussions. And so then we really looked at. Those critical systems. Um, the nice thing about our Arons platform is it handles everything intuitively in the platform, and that's one of the reasons we like it in that it's cloud-based [00:11:00] backup, it's encrypted and immutable storage, which is always critical when you start talking about security.

And, and that's the, the kind of the new piece that we we're bringing to the table and, and stressing to our customers is that, you know, you want those cloud backups immutable because. That's going to be what you eventually use to recover from a cyber attack. You know, we're, I'm thinking of hurricanes right now, but we can come back to that, um, discussion on the, on the storage itself, but those images of those systems that are in the cloud to our compute resources, and that's available and you can, the nice thing about the Arons platform is I can back up all that infrastructure, but then we can select a, a subset of those systems for DR and

Max Clark: Uh,

Keith Lukes: recovery servers so they can be available. At time of time of event.

Max Clark: I wanna come, I wanna come back to tool, but I wanna talk about like, okay, so you've. Figure it out. You're not gonna re, you know, you're gonna, in this case, 40% of their infrastructure, right? Then you have to, you know, then a part of that is tool selection, and then it becomes the actual backup process, right?

So [00:12:00] now you've got data that has to go somewhere, and in this case, it's going into your infrastructure. Um, the, the part that I feel like it's missed a lot with this conversation is the, oh, we lost something. Something's happened. Now we need to do something and take recovery on it. Right?

Keith Lukes: Yep.

Max Clark: And, but this is, this is a big blind spot for a lot of organizations.

That recovery process.

Keith Lukes: Yes. so I think that's where I think the MSP component of what we do becomes so critical and

Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

Keith Lukes: not only do we sit down and determine what machines are critical, but then we talk about how they want that protected and then align the technology and basically, you know, hit the switches and define the processes to match the business expectation of what's gonna happen. Because a lot of times, like you said, these engineers. Don't use the backup software every day.

Max Clark: [00:13:00] Yeah.

Keith Lukes: a new platform, they're hitting KB articles and educating themselves. And I mean, you, you can, even the most mature engineering teams, you know, might be learning a product for the first time if they're deploying it.

And so bring our, you know, years of experience, right. And, and especially our in depth experience of these technologies. We've been doing, you know, STO and Commvault for almost 20 years. We've been doing Arons for over a decade. Um. And you bring that level of expertise and, have the conversation, because our engineers talk about lining that with the outcome like this, this customer in particular aligned up with our, what they liked was our advanced, we call 'em our Advanced Disaster recovery services, where we do run book creation and we do. An assessment of the, the production and recovery environment and kind of talk through, okay, what do these systems look like? What are the RPOs and RTOs? And then we help them with the configuration or configure the backup jobs and the retentions to align with that. So when they start backing up that [00:14:00] data and they start backing up those systems, it is ready to go at the time of failure in the expectation that they have because it was backed up every four hours.

So they're not losing. infrastructure and they can, you know, start that recovery time and recovery process as quickly as possible. And that's again, the advantage you have with us in that we do this all the time, all day long, whether it's test or production. Um, our guys are, are managing to these types of processes daily.

So you've got an engineer that you can lean on 24 by seven to help you. You know, we talk about being there at the most critical moment. So you're not running KB articles or running into a problem or, you know, um, searching Google and getting on Reddit and trying to figure out an issue that you're having, right?

Like you're not in that mode of kind of struggling in the recovery. And that's where I see a lot of shortcomings in internal teams is that when, when you don't do this all the time. You know, and if you're lucky, you've never done it. [00:15:00] Um, when you have an actual event, it's really important to have experts and, and, and, and processes in place that are, are familiar and, um, known.

So you're not trying to make this up and figure it out at the time of disaster because that's just that, that never works out well for the, for the customer.

Max Clark: Uh, there's the, in the unfortunate reality for me, right? With companies and backup and recovery, it's like there's two buckets. People fit in. People that have experienced data loss, people that have not yet experienced data loss. Right. But it's not, and I, and I say not yet experienced data loss, like very specifically because they, it just hasn't happened yet.

Like it's, it's coming.

Keith Lukes: Yes.

Max Clark: and, and it's, it's really, I don't wanna say it's frustrating, it's, the frustration's not the right word. It's like, um, what's, what's the expression I'm looking for? It's like you feel, um. You feel impotent when you get into a conversation with [00:16:00] somebody and you're like, oh, you weren't backing up in the first place.

It's like, what do you, what are we supposed to do? How do I mean, I can't, you can't recover from nothing. Right? So there's, it's like you weren't backing up or you were backing up, but you weren't backing up what you actually needed to back up, or you never tested your backups.

Keith Lukes: Yeah.

Max Clark: You know, or, or you implemented the system a year ago, you never tested and your platform changed and you forgot to like actually back the other stuff up and then recover it, right?

And, and like, these aren't, these aren't like hypo, you know, hypothetical situations, right? You know, like,

Keith Lukes: Yeah.

Max Clark: if you've been exposed to this at all, like you've experienced all these conversations, you're like, oh, well I'm sorry that you just lost your ERP platform, but you know what? You weren't backing it up

Keith Lukes: Right.

Max Clark: like.

Keith Lukes: Well, and and that's one of the things like with the advanced services, like we monitor the backup jobs, right?

Max Clark: Yeah,

Keith Lukes: customer, you know, like what's tangible when you start looking at these things, right? Well, it's a documented plan, but it's also like, Hey, my expectation is I. To have these systems back up.

I, [00:17:00] I even looked at their performance before I jumped on the call and it was like, we're probably doing about 200 or so backup jobs for them daily.

Max Clark: that's a lot of backup shops.

Keith Lukes: a lot of backup. I mean, they've got some four hour RPO, so like there's jobs running all day long. Um, so say 200, uh, 200, 250 a day, one maybe 1500 a week. Um, and I looked and they had, you know, six failures, two and two alerts. So we're talking less than 1%. Failure rates on a weekly basis. And that's, that's, and we, if you don't, if it's not backed up, you can't recover it.

Max Clark: Yeah,

Keith Lukes: just, that's like backup 1 0 1. And like

Max Clark: well. 

Keith Lukes: I've so many customers we're like, well, we're running at 50, 60%. And

Max Clark: Oof.

Keith Lukes: been a backup admin, right? Like you've been, you've been an IT admin that those re like when that comes in, in the morning and you've had to manage two backups. And I, I, I remember doing this firsthand. Like you read it, you start to look at it, and then fire pops up and then a fire pops up. And it falls to the bottom of the barrel and then [00:18:00] it, you, you don't notice it. And then it's four days later, five days later, and you haven't had that backup. And you know, that's invariably when that department calls and says, Hey, I need, you know, we need files back from Monday. And you're like, oh, we haven't backed it up in a week. It's gonna be

Max Clark: Oh

Keith Lukes: those are the, those are the conversations you, we want to avoid in. What we do on the front end is to make sure we have it configured so you're not having that conversation. 'cause we've had 'em. Right. And

Max Clark: yeah.

Keith Lukes: the customer and, and like you said, it's twofold. I think you have the cust I think customers are getting better, at least what I'm seeing is like, think a lot of the customers that have not had it happen, have heard enough stories that are like, starting to be like, we really need to figure this out.

Max Clark: Yeah, we don't want to, we don't want to. We don't.

Keith Lukes: that

Max Clark: Yeah. I, I, my neighbor just had this happen to me. I don't want to, I don't wanna go through this kind of thing. My, my friend of the club. Yeah,

Keith Lukes: Yeah.

Max Clark: it's, um. This is another thing that I, I find a couple of different pressures get pushed on. Right. And you know, there's the first one, which as you see, and again, it's a [00:19:00] maturity issue, I think, you know, the maturity of the IT team and the IT team wanting to be responsible in control of everything and do it in house and do it like, like, like we own it completely.

Then there's like pressures from an, from an organization, from the company of like, we don't want to bring in a, a third party to do this because of cost. We wanna do this all in-house. We wanna manage it ourselves. And the problem with both of those becomes, you know, it's not just, it's not just like expertise in a skills gap.

It's like, who's actually paying attention to it?

Keith Lukes: Yes.

Max Clark: And, you know, there's, there's this great saying, right? If you tell three people to feed a dog, like, what happens? Right? It's like, well, the dog doesn't get fed, right? Like, if there's not, you know, and, and. You know, like modern, like IT teams, when I say modern, like today's world, the IT team is doing so much already just to keep the organization moving forward.

They're like, oh, every morning you need to log in and you need to check up all your backup jobs and make sure every single one went correctly. And you have to schedule your test restores and you have to go through your [00:20:00] infrastructure and make sure that everything's backing up. And you haven't added a server that you didn't forget about backing up.

And like, it's, it's not even, um. It's just stuff happens. People can't keep up with this.

Keith Lukes: That's exactly it. And that's, um, we talk about that. We make that, that mundane, those mundane things a priority, right?

Max Clark: Right.

Keith Lukes: the, we're monitoring the backup jobs. Um, we're opening tickets, we're troubleshooting them, giving them the alerts so that way like they have somebody looking over their shoulder, making sure either, either we're fixing it or making sure that they're. Doing what needs to happen at the, maybe it's a system level, like even something as simple as restarting the service, right? Like those are things that, that they're managing too. But part of what we include in our advanced DR services too, is the same thing. It's like we meet quarterly to talk about changes in infrastructure, and we look at what those changes were against, what the plan is and what the, um, what the backups are.

Like, did you just add a new system that's not being protected? And, and they're, you know, and [00:21:00] invariably in, you know, unless it's like on a hypervisor that. As automatic adding, which we can help them set up. Like you can miss those things. Um, and it's the same thing with the documentation, right? Like your plan is only as good as the last test and we make sure that they test annually at minimum. Um, but then we're also, as they add that infrastructure, well, we have to at least redocument the plan and make sure that it's being reviewed and changed. It may not be tested, but at least you're not running off of a runbook. That isn't aligned with what your infrastructure is, at least from making that kind of change into the, the, the, the documentation.

So it's current. So you're not running from something that's, um, six to nine months old. You know, if you have a, a failure in nine months, I don't know many it infrastructures that stay static.

Max Clark: No.

Keith Lukes: to be, you have to be ready for that change. And so, um, I think it's, it's. It's all things, and as you know, as a former admin, it's like, I know that [00:22:00] this stuff gets missed.

I know that it's not a priority, and so let the experts like us be the experts at it, make sure that it gets maintained and, and, and updated and

Max Clark: Yeah.

Keith Lukes: is current. And then that everything's running and operating right,

Max Clark: Yeah, it's not, it's not like, it's not negligence. It's like, and it's not really neglect. It's kind of like, it's, it's like neglect just because you just don't have the time. Right. Or there's, you know, it's, it's, and that's what's, what's sad about it. Um. The, and, and that's also, I mean, we're talking about this in this case, in this marketing agency around like on-premise infrastructure and what you do it, but there's like the second part of it, which is so many enterprises are now cloud infrastructure.

And I mean, cloud infrastructure really means different things to different people, right? There's your collaboration cloud infrastructure, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and then there's like, um, compute cloud infrastructure, you know, AWS, Azure, et cetera. But now the problem with people that are gone cloud, cloud native is like, oh, the cloud's [00:23:00] taking care of it.

We don't have to back the stuff up anymore. Right.

Keith Lukes: Yeah.

Max Clark: And you're like, surprise. That's not really the case.

Keith Lukes: right. We've had that. We have this discussion quite a bit. I had a, a, a really good conversation with like a company that, that, well, an unfortunate conversation where

Max Clark: Yeah.

Keith Lukes: all their infrastructure, they, they didn't use Microsoft 365, they built their own SharePoint infrastructure. They wanted everything. Um, they were using it a little bit differently. They wanted in an enhanced version of that, and they put it all out there and somebody deleted all the thing, you know,

Max Clark: Oh,

Keith Lukes: And they were like, where'd all of our data go? And we're like, you didn't back it up like. You, just because it's in the cloud doesn't mean it's protected.

Max Clark: well that's. Delete. Delete is a valid operation on all infrastructure. Right. That's, that's, that's like the fundamental thing that's like so basic where it's like, oh, everything was deleted, but like there's no protection against delete because of delete is a valid, is valid operation.

Keith Lukes: Well, and, and I think that's what we see. It's like, [00:24:00] you know, I. Uh, when I have conversations with customers that are going to like AWS and Azure, I'm like, you're, that's an infrastructure

Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

Keith Lukes: around high availability and elasticity like that gives you a lot of flexibility that you don't have when you build this yourself. it still doesn't change the fact that that needs protection. Whether it's just traditional backup, you know, we see more and more customers like building the availability, right? And, and some of their DR plan into the infrastructure, you know, whether they're replicating it, you know, between different regions or doing something with the infrastructure to make it available.

That's great, that still doesn't protect you from ransomware attacks and it still doesn't protect you from compliance audits and it, and it really doesn't protect you from. Data loss or deletion, right. However that happens. Um, and data corruption. And so we're like, you still need some kind of external backup for that and that, and because delete is a valid operation, that's part of where we see like from a, at least from a ransomware and cyber [00:25:00] perspective, having that data in a. Container that is not part of the, the production environment that is immutable is critical because, you know, credential hijack is still one of the major attack vectors and what we're seeing more and more, um, we had this discussion with, with one of our partners and, and their sales teams, and we were talking about how the attack vectors not just the production data, now it's, you know, they're deleting backup data first and then encrypting, and then you're left at the mercy of the, the cyber threat because. You have nothing at that point. And so, you know, stressing immutability and every, every technology we bring to the table from a backup perspective is using, you know, either air gap, uh, or some kind of immutable storage. And, and that way the only way it can be deleted is by the retention policies of the platform. And that's really critical because you're going to. When you have a cyber attack and they encrypt your data, your, your, your recovery option is your da your backups. That's gonna be what saves your business. So they have to be [00:26:00] protected and they have to be available. And so I think that's the, the thing with the lead operation, whether it's malicious or, or, or not, um, or, you know, human error, which happens as well. Um, those are things that you have to be ready to, to recover from, and I think that's where, you know, cloud does a great job of, of giving you high availability and, and, and elasticity, but it doesn't do a great job of protecting your infrastructure from, from those types of threats.

Max Clark: Um, what's, um. Let's, let's dip back into tools for a little bit, right? Because there is Zerto, Veeam, Arons, Rubrik, you know, like, you know, I come from like the Veritas days, right? You know, like it's, it's, there's, there's lots of different options in the market, right? And. For a company evaluating, again, I'll just say backup and recovery, right?

As like our, [00:27:00] our giant umbrella. You, you know, you start, a lot of times it starts with like, oh, what tool am I going to use?

Keith Lukes: Yep.

Max Clark: And I feel like that's a backwards approach of taking this, and I'd really like to understand how, you know, how you look at it and how UbiStore takes this and walks somebody through this, right?

Because the tools. The tool gets you to what objective or outcome you really want at the end of the day, not the other way around.

Keith Lukes: Well, and that's where we start. Like, that's like a, we've seen a lot of like MSPs that are out there that are like single technology focused. Um, so they have a few different services that

Use or a single service that they use to provide the technology. And we use in our mix of, of, you know, different tool sets as Commvault, OnPrem, Commvault, cloud, Cronus, Datto. Zerto, we have our own cloud infrastructure and then we also have, um, and work with customers that are in AWS and Azure. And so what we try to do is, is exactly what you said is like the outcome. What [00:28:00] do you want from an availability perspective? What do you want from a recovery time and a recovery point objective? And what's your budget? And then we start to mix and match those technologies into what needs to happen for the customer. Just to continue the tool set question I think is, is really, it really starts at a discussion, like you said, I think outcome is a great word that's underused sometimes, and it really is, is the, the driving force and the decisions we make on what technology needs to be put in place.

Like what do you want this to look and feel like, and, and how does this operate for your business? Um, and so we try to have a lot of flexibility, whether it's, like I said, customers that wanna bring their own AWS or Azure infrastructure, we can support that. If you want to use our cloud or want to have a disparate data center, or you need VMware or isolated infrastructure or want, you know, want a VMware environment instead of, uh, something like AWS or Azure, we can support that. Or if you want to turnkey holistic solution, um, we can do that as well where [00:29:00] it's, you know, like, like an Aron as an example. That's. functional, all, you know, all enclosed backup and DR platform. Um, but we see like a lot of traction like with, with conva Cloud and what they're doing with Gap Protect clouded, um, or Air Gap protected cloud storage.

And they've got integrations now. They're built in Azure, so they've got a lot of elasticity. If you're an Azure customer, I can actually protect it. Recover it and avoid egress charges if you're in the same region. So I think the tools are getting smarter too, around what they see in the space and what customers are trying to achieve.

So I think it's, it comes back to really defining what they want. service to look like and, and what they want the backup and recovery strategy to feel like and what their budget is. Right? Like we just, we talked about that and expectation because, um, like you said, uh, we have these conversations all the time where everything's gotta be up right away.

And it's like, the reality is, is it's not, it's not that simple. And so, um, how do we, how do [00:30:00] we that conversation with the customer?

Max Clark: How different. You, you, you list a lot of examples there, but from a, from an outcome standpoint, like how, how much variety or how much variation really is there from an outcome, right? Because you're talking about

Keith Lukes: Yeah.

Max Clark: my data backed up and then I wanna be able to access it. Right? But I mean, when you start looking at like, infrastructure protection or Dr.

Or ha or, or, you know, ransomware or, you know, accidental or malicious acts or deletes, you know, how, how different does. You know, does these, these roads actually take you, you know, um, to different selections?

Keith Lukes: yeah, I think, you know, I look at something like, like, I like to look what CommonWell Cloud is doing, right? Like I said, they've, they've like now added air gap. Um, immutable storage is native as part of all their. Storage targets. Um, they're adding clean room recovery, right? Which is key when you're in an event and, and everybody's [00:31:00] adding tool sets into, um, they're adding ransomware of discovery tools inside of that analyzing the, the data as it's being protected.

You know, that's the one thing that's interesting about backup and the technology is it's a technology that touches your data every day. So it's going to see changes and, um, the AI tools around each of these services is getting smarter and smarter all the time. So the alerting is like, Hey. seeing changes in your data that appears to be a pattern that matches, uh, other tasks.

So that's the smart things that backup technologies are doing. I mean, you look at some of it's like tool sets, right? Like what are you, what kind of infrastructure do you have? What kind of, are you running Oracle? Are you running SAP. That may define what tools I have, because certain platforms don't have agents or backup tools for that, right?

They're focused on, um, they don't have quite, like Commvault's a great example of having a massive, uh, support tool set. Um, they're doing things like SQL and, and like Azure, [00:32:00] SQL and AWS sql, like, and, and these headless instances that don't have an agent. Some of the tools out there can't really support that or backing up, you know, S3 or Azure Blob storage natively. In a platform, if you're making those business decisions, you are impacting, you know, that was a great discussion I had with a customer. They're like, well, how am I supposed to recover sql? I'm running Azure sql. I'm like, you're only recovering back into Azure sql. Like you've made a technology choice that limits your backup and recovery technologies and where you can recover to. I mean, we can, if you want it automated or simple, it's going to have to go back in Azure if you want Dr. I'm like, we're gonna have to spin up a SQL server, load up that BAK file. Reconfigure your entire SQL infrastructure to be able to run that SQL database you've put in a headless instance like,

Cheap and it's easy to manage, but guess what?

You've completely constricted your options from a backup and DR perspective. Right? So those are conversations that I'm having, or like I'm using Azure. I'm using Azure. [00:33:00] Enter id. Okay. Do you want to back up, enter id? Well guess what? That totally have shrunk. The pool of services that I can protect that data with. I use, you talked about like SaaS, applications and cloud, like M 365. Okay. I can do that with, you know, I've got five arrows in my quiver of, of being able to protect that data. Do you want search capabilities? You know, do you want, um, eDiscovery and some other advanced capabilities? Well, are the outcomes.

Like we just moved one customer from one M 365 platform to, to Commvault because they wanted the e-discovery and, and some of the advanced tools, they're a healthcare company. Um, so. made a decision on technology based on some of the compliance pieces as well. So those are all the, that's like the conversation and, and, and that, you know, these guys don't know what they don't know.

And so having somebody to navigate those type of, of of pieces, it's like, what are you trying to do? Um, what is the, the decision you're making as a business and how can we best align [00:34:00] that with some of the features, you know? And, and so, um. That's where we've seen, like I said, you know, some customers with, with certain tools or applications that really drive that discussion or it's budget and flexibility and, you know, some, some maybe, um, feature, you know, less features and less tools, less kind of capabilities inside the platform, but it's a much more cost effective platform, so that drives that decision as well.

Max Clark: I tell new clients all the time, even when you think you're in a greenfield, nine outta 10 times, you've already made the decision. You just don't realize it, you know? So my job becomes understanding the rest of your infrastructure and what you're doing as a business, right? Because, you know, compliance, we, we, we, you know, compliance comes back around, but certain businesses are on a compliance pathway, they just don't understand yet.

At some point, you're gonna have a demand put on the business that you have to achieve, and. Or you're gonna be in a supply chain requirement. Again, compliance, you know, compliance for me [00:35:00] now is just like external, something external that forces you to do something. Right. 

Keith Lukes: Yep.

Max Clark: And um, and I was, I was smiling as you were answering with this because it's like so many times it's like, oh, we've already made the decision.

You just don't understand the decision that you made. And that decision might have been made like years ago by somebody else. And, and you just haven't even got, you haven't dug deep enough to really understand it, or you just don't have experience with it yet, you know, and, and. Um, you know, a lot of this, you know, so part of it becomes like platform, you know, there's outcome and then there's what decisions you've already made if you're aware of them or not.

Right? And then there becomes, um, you know, you come back to budget and, uh, you know, it's like, it's like fast, good, cheap, right? You know, you kinda get into this like thing and, um. I'm curious in your experience with this, when it with budget, because you've got a couple of really big levers that you can pull when you start talking about the backup, right?

The one that you mentioned already was, [00:36:00] was features, right? What features of the platform do you actually need? Do you need e-discovery? Do you need search? Do you need these different things? Do you, you know, immutable backups are gonna become table stakes at some point for everybody. It's,

Keith Lukes: it

Max Clark: yeah.

Keith Lukes: like, I'm trying to think of a platform that doesn't offer that option

Max Clark: Yeah, it's, it's no longer gonna be like an add-on.

It's just gonna be baked in. Right. You know, this is a good thing about tech is eventually all these things become just like integrate, you know, like, like core features, but so you've got features and then you've got intervals,

Keith Lukes: Mm-hmm.

Max Clark: right? As like major levers that can be pulled that affect budget and cost. Um, what features do you need or how frequently do you do your backup?

Keith Lukes: Right.

Max Clark: And, and the reality is, is when you talk to somebody new about this and you ask them how, you know. How, how frequent, you know, what, what's your backup interval need to be like, oh, it's instantaneous. We need, we need real time. You're like, and you, and you get deeper and deeper into it, and I, I want your feedback on this as well from your seat, but like in my seat, the deeper you get in this conversation, the faster it becomes.

[00:37:00] Like, it doesn't need to be instant. It can be four hours or eight hours, or 12 hours, or 24 hours or 36 hours. All of a sudden you're like, well, wait a minute. You know, it's like if we lo if we really lost this. You know, what would it, you know, then you have to ask a whole different set of questions about the recovery process.

Keith Lukes: Yep. Well, and that's where I think. all goes back to level of maturity. Like you touched on, like some companies really understand what they're doing and

Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

Keith Lukes: I think the immature organizations answer, like you described, it's like I need everything right away. Like they don't

Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

Keith Lukes: everything and, and so some of the expertise I. That we provide is like, well, let's really sit down, like you said, and, and kind of discuss what these options are, what the servers actually really need to do, how do they interact, you know, what's that sequence look like? How long can you be down? That was even the conversation we had taking back to the customer we're talking about is it was like, okay, talking about digital marketing coupons on your website, if those [00:38:00] are down for four hours, is that. You know, operationally, how big of an impact is that to both your organization and, and the customer? And is that something you can tolerate? And I think most organizations would understand if it's a hurricane that's going through Florida and you're trying to, and you're recovering into your, your DR environment, like most businesses can tolerate that from an operational level.

You

Max Clark: okay, let me, let me, let me play, let's, let's spitball this one. 'cause I'm gonna, I'm gonna play the other side of the seat, right, which is, in this case, um, you're producing digital coupons as part of an acquisition or ad campaign to drive revenue on an e-commerce platform. Probably like, that's my, my, my mom always told me not to make assumptions, but that's where I would go with that immediately.

Just from experience, there is a practical impact to. Coupons being unavailable or not being able to deliver the ad, or, you know, and, and if you've had experience with e-commerce platforms, you know, a lot of them will actually be able to record and, [00:39:00] and show revenue daily or hourly. You know, we, I I've been involved with plenty organizations that knew hour by hour, you know, what revenue should be.

And it was a very, it was a very interesting, um, it's a very interesting KPI proxy for a lot of other things. It's like, oh, the revenue's off. You know, you don't really need to dig into like, what's your server, CPU? It's like, oh, revenue's down or revenue's up. You know, like, but now when you start looking at that and you say, okay, what's the actual impact of the business?

This is such a big point that we haven't touched on yet, which is can you quantify business impact? Right.

Keith Lukes: Right.

Max Clark: Can you quantify business impact? Right? Not like, and, and, and again, maturity. I used to do this. It's like, oh, well, you know, we have a hundred employees and they can't work and we're gonna be down for three days, and their average salary is this.

The impact of the business is this, and loss productivity is y and so therefore, you know, our theoretical impact of the business is Z. But that's different than if you're in a, in some sort of transaction process where you can, you know, can, so it's like, can you actually quantify impact of [00:40:00] business if you don't have this?

Keith Lukes: Yeah. And well, and I think that's something we talk about too, is, is looking at, that, was the evaluation, right? That cost impact to the business went from a a $6,000 a month service to a $20,000 a month. Is that $18,000 or, or

Max Clark: 14.

Keith Lukes: $14,000 additional cost monthly gonna translate into lost revenue. Like, where's that go?

Right? Like that's the, that's the cost risk every conversation we have, and that's really it. It's, it's business impact. Of every single technology. Right. And, and we do the same thing. Like you can do those kind of back, back of the napkin calculations, but you don't see some of that, right? Like, it's also, well, so my employees are down, are down, but I'm also not taking works.

I'm also not shipping. I'm also like, what's the revenue loss and revenue impact? You know, I mean, I remember, um, when I was working for, I worked for Life Fitness for a lot of years, and there was like, you know. Critical printers in the, in the production line and critical printers in the, [00:41:00] um, the shipping department.

That had to be up. Like, you know, that, that's not quite dr, but like, if you're not printing out the pick lists and sending these things out, you are not making revenue.

Max Clark: Not, you're not making revenue and you're creating a backlog, which then creates other operational issues to you. When you come to catch up. It's like if you don't, if you don't ship orders for three days, it's not like miraculously like you, you know? It's like everything. It just gets worse and worse and worse for you.

Keith Lukes: And, and that's, that's really the thing. We, you know, I always think about that when we look at

Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

Keith Lukes: Like something as simple as a a a dot matrix printer and a, a factory warehouse could be really business critical. And so what's driving that application to print that ticket, right? And then you start to kind of navigate backwards and, and start doing these things, we're like, okay. application that runs that printer, like not only is your employees down, but you're also not shipping. So now you've lost, that's revenue loss.

Um, there's a, there's a really good graph that I have where it kind of shows how like, cost to the business [00:42:00] goes one direction and cost to recover goes this direction.

And you have to find that, like, where

Max Clark: Yeah.

Keith Lukes: two converge in that? How much am I willing to spend? You know, and as I spend these different, as my spend increases. does that cross against the cost impact to the business

Max Clark: There's, and there's another, there's another axe on this as well, right? So it's cost in the business, you know, recovery, cost, revenue, you know, lost revenue. But then you have, um, uh, you know, you have, you have a. Contractual risk. And what I mean by that is not even like are, are, do you have contractual obligations to your customer if you're offline, but it's, at what point do you lose the customer?

You have relationship risk. Right.

Keith Lukes: right.

Max Clark: you know,

Keith Lukes: I.

Max Clark: if you've got a situation where you, you know, a hurricane could happen once a year, right? Like once a year, you could lose operations for two or three [00:43:00] days that maybe is okay and acceptable. You know, it's, it's a major event, right? Oh, you know, like a hurricane definition of force majeure, you know, you should plan for it, right?

But, um, but you know, where maybe it's acceptable to have a one day or two day or three days of outage for, you know, your customer will tolerate that. They're probably not gonna tolerate two weeks or three weeks. There, there is some line, and it's not like it's, it's not like, like a, a smooth line. There is some point where you like hit, hit the wall and fall off the cliff, right?

Keith Lukes: Yeah. Well, and I think that's where, that's where how, like these, the businesses that aren't spending the time on this are the ones that put themselves at risk for this. Right. I think that's the, the whole thing I keep thinking in my head is that these, they're not evaluating all this, like the mature ones are like, they understand like all of the, the way these things work and [00:44:00] can have a real conversation with you about. How quickly things need to come up, what that impact is to the business, how they need to operate collectively, um, to avoid those, those conversations with the customer. Right. And the expectation. And so, um, I think that I, I we're starting to see more of that too, like in the supply chain kind of conversation.

And that much like this customer, Hey, your, your operations is critical to my business. How do I.

Max Clark: Protect myself from you.

Keith Lukes: right?

have a conver and, and then be able to, like, that was a conversation we had. Like, know, they, they wanted, you know, five nines and we went, you know, to a four hour and they're like, okay, but this is how we're gonna do it.

This is where the recovery times are. Um, you know, and I'm seeing just organizationally, these conversations are changing and that used to be the IT teams and now it's like I see CFOs, and CEOs and, and more operation and risk. People managing to risk are wanting to understand these pieces. And, [00:45:00] um, there's more of a requirement and a reality to it I think they're seeing, you know, the CFO's doing like financial risk analysis all the time.

So he's got some of these numbers in his head, and understanding business impact both and externally. And so I think they're coming to the table now with this information in their head, being able to provide some guidance to it that wasn't always there. Like it guys were kind of shooting in the dark saying, okay, it's, you know,

Max Clark: I don't know. Yeah,

Keith Lukes: well, like they come, they want everything right away, right?

They're

Max Clark: yeah. Yeah.

Keith Lukes: like, or they're like, well, I can't afford that. I'm gonna do 24 hours. You know? But then when we start getting involved, sometimes we've seen where we bring in like, kind of the, the, um, relevant parties into the conversation to make sure we're business aligned. It's like, well, what do you mean?

And we're gonna be down for 24 hours. And, and, and, and there's some, there's some surprises that happened in that conversation, I think, and that's where.

Max Clark: And that when the business can actually decide what's, what's acceptable to the business, you know, [00:46:00] it's so, it's so, and here's the other thing. It's not all or nothing.

Keith Lukes: Mm-hmm.

Max Clark: You can have some stuff go at, at one interval, you know, like you can have different, I. Things happening. Like, like you're just like, take, take five sec.

You know, like take a little bit and say like, this has to be real time. This can be once a day.

Keith Lukes: yeah.

Max Clark: this never comes back online, it's gonna be annoying, but it's okay. You know? Like, it's like, like I,

Keith Lukes: Uh, no, and that's, I think that's the conversation. Um, that's where having kind of a, an external like us coming through

Max Clark: yeah.

Keith Lukes: like, I don't know how many times we've gotten RV tools and everything says like, you know. Less than one hour. It's like 90% of the environment. And then it's like the other rest is 24.

And we're like, really? What are these? Like, and then you just say like, well, tell me what this does and tell me how

Max Clark: Yeah.

Keith Lukes: and you know, let's talk about some of the way these systems interact. And then we start really breaking down the environment. I mean, that's what happened with this customer. It's like, okay, what, what? Know some of this stuff can come up really fast. You know, some of the things like we can do, it's like, um. [00:47:00] Maybe your SQL infrastructure is super critical. Like we had a, an energy company that had SQL infrastructure that was massively important to them,

Max Clark: Well, sure. Probably 'cause it was billing data, right? You can't lose that data. Like if you lose that data, you can't bill, you lose revenue, but you've, you've spent the money, so you're co you know, like all that's, that's an inversion that you can't deal with. Like, if you're in a situation where you have an inversion of cost to versus revenue, like that's business ending, you know?

Keith Lukes: we're building a, you know, a, a multi-site. Sql, um, cluster for them. Like, so it's operating in three different data centers like that, that just never goes down. Um, plus it's backed up, plus it's protected, like it's there. And they, they were ready to write the check for that because that, that was so critical to everything that they did, both bringing that data in and, you know, sending that data out.

And so it's like is a decision they make, but they understood the impact of the business by losing that data. So, and, and so I think, you know, that's [00:48:00] where not all the customers have made that evaluation and, and, and, and have that realization. But I think, I think the important thing is when you see executives get involved is that when they're tying their understanding of cost and risk. Giving that information to it. They start making much, much better decisions about what they want to do with their backup and DR strategy and like you said, tier, that approach. We talk about tiering technologies all the time. Like a lot of our Zerto customers are running a another, you know, adjacent technology to it for backup and and recovery.

We're like, we're doing, you know, it's usually falls somewhere between, we see like 20 to 30% of the infrastructure. That is really they need right away. I. so we can build that plan in place for those systems and it's gonna be at a much different cost. But then the remaining systems are gonna come up, you know, 24 to 72 hours, sometimes longer.

Sometimes it's that best effort. It's like, and that [00:49:00] there, you also have to weigh that against. What kind of disaster are you having? You know, is it, is it a power outage that they're telling you it's gonna be three or four days? Well, operationally to spin all that infrastructure up and then also have, you know, the other thing I think a lot of organizations can forget about that we talk about is like, what is your return to operation look like after you have this event, you know, whether it's ransomware or anything else, like how do you get operated back to your normal, your, your

Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

Keith Lukes: and those decisions impact. You do, you know, are you losing, have you lost one? You know, one of your virtual hosts, right? Like, it's not even a full failure, it's a fraction of your environment. What, what gets recovered from that system? And what kind of decisions are you making at that point? so, you know, can we move some of that to your local

Max Clark: Yeah,

Keith Lukes: before we fail over?

Like there, there's all these decisions that have to take place. And so I think, you know, those are. Those are things you have to understand your disaster [00:50:00] before you start really making, pulling those levers.

Max Clark: that's such, it's such a good point. And it's something that

even inside of a data center like, like again, tier four facility, my. Concern is less the natural disaster that's happening external to the data center and more about what could be a disaster inside fire. 100% top thing that's in my head always in a data center is fire and then water suppression going off.

Right? And, and you hear, you know, there's, there's, there's plenty of stories of like, you know, bust duck risers exploding in, in buildings. You know, there's, there's two data centers. I can take it off the top of my head where, you know, a 5,000 amp riser blew up and caught on fire. And that took it, you know, took the fac, you know, that took the entire building with however many facilities offline.

And, you know, so there's like, like there's all these like, you know, drunk drivers, seeing telephone poles, taking telephone, you know, taking infrastructure down, crashing into the substation, substation blowing up. You know, like there was a data center where an 18 wheeler was entangled in the transmission lines and they're, they're [00:51:00] running on generators.

Their backup plan worked and the fire department was like, we gotta cut the, this. We, we have to turn, not only do we have to turn power off, you have to turn your generators off because you're energizing line going backfilled. And, and we need to cut somebody out of a, a cab right now. Like, figure that out for your DR policy, right?

Like, oh, we, everything worked, but guess what? You know, the authorities told us we had to do this and, and you're not gonna say no. You can't say no. Right? It just happens. Um. You know, hurricane Sandy, you know, um, generators were not, you know, were, were above ground, but the diesel storage was below ground, or more importantly, the pumps were below ground.

So like, there's no way to pump, you know, like there's all these weird things that happens in dr, but the, the, the, the, the phrase that you made is like, what kind of disaster? And, and, and what's your recovery? And something I always ask people, it's like, are you protect, you know, if, if your hypothetical [00:52:00] occurs.

How do your employees actually work?

Keith Lukes: Right,

Max Clark: You know, if we're talking about, you know, the Cat six hurricane, there are no roads like, like, like there's no internet connectivity for anybody at their homes. Not only are they not driving to your office, they're not working from home because they're like worried about their family.

Like, what, what kind of disaster are you recovering from?

Keith Lukes: Well, we had a, we were working with a customer outta Texas, and it was the same thing. They were in Houston, their DR facility was in Tulsa. Everything was in place. like, okay. IT teams like get up to Tulsa. And they're like, uh, I'm not leaving until I know my family is safe, and then I'll go. And that's, that was some reality for them. It's like, no, there's, there's a, a human component to this that you have to be like, rationalize as well,

Max Clark: Which is. A good argument for having elasticity with a service provider who can do this for you. That's has people in different locations. 

Keith Lukes: Right. Well, and not only that, I think the other [00:53:00] thing, when you talk about when this happens, um, especially if you've never been through it, I don't think teams understand demand that is put on the operations during an event.

Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

Keith Lukes: by seven operation and these IT teams, even for mid-size organizations, a lot of times are three, four guys. Like operating in a 24 by seven scenario, um, is gonna wipe your team out. So having, you know, like a, again, an elastic and, and resources like us that are 24 by seven, that have on-call managers and escalation points and relationships with the vendors, like we can do things that they can't on their own. Um, I think that's really what people forget is like when this happens, like it is a all hands on deck, everybody focusing in on this.

And

Max Clark: Well, and the pressure cook is really intense too at the time. It's not just that you're gone a 24 7 cycle, it's like, okay, you've gotta get this back, or the business is done and everybody's out of a job. Right? Like it's,

Keith Lukes: right. And you've got a room, you've got a whole organization looking at you guys like, [00:54:00] okay, how are you gonna fix this?

Max Clark: yeah.

Keith Lukes: And, and you're the ones, um, and so I think, you know, so we talk about those things too. It's like a part of our DR plan is communication. I. Who gets called, who's responsible.

I mean, we've got, you know, we've got spouses on these escalation lists because you've gotta get ahold of people

Max Clark: Yeah.

Keith Lukes: critical. And so I

Max Clark: Yeah.

Keith Lukes: that's, that's, you know, having these kind of things worked out ahead of time, I. It makes it so much smoother, right? And, and, and allows you to operate and think clearly instead of under the pressure of that decision, because that's when bad choices get made, right?

And that's where you can, you can, um, head down a path that's not where you want to go.

Max Clark: You, you made the point about, you know, going from real time to then go, you know, going from five nines to four nines, which doesn't seem like a lot, but it's huge money. I mean, you, you know, like the difference between those pretty major. Um, and a and a pretty significant cost differential, you know, going from real time to then in four hours for, for [00:55:00] critical infrastructure, for somebody watching and listening.

Like how, how linear does this line up? You know, at four hours you're doing six backups a day. If you cut that number from four hours to 12 hours and do two a day or go to one hour, which is one a day, right? Like, you know, the costs just track almost exactly with the amount of, you know, increments.

Keith Lukes: I, it's hard. is always a conversation we struggle with too, because you never know what change rate is. You never know what, what kind of volumes change.

Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

Keith Lukes: What I think happens more so is that when you start getting to those numbers, it really starts, around the infrastructure you have to have in place to be able to hit those numbers and have it available and turn it on right away. it's not so much the storage, I think, 'cause that's really where the component comes in. Like you're, you're, you're trying to align storage. Um, I, I think that's fractional. When you start really looking at those shorter times, it's more about the infrastructure you have in place to be able to replicate that data. To hit it on [00:56:00] both sides and then being able to, um, turn on that infrastructure at the moment of dr. Right? So you're not paying for, otherwise, you're building two data centers, you know, that are totally equal, which is not cost effective in any way. And so I think that the, the, those backup numbers have a minor impact on your cost.

I think. Um, it, it definitely goes up, I think where we see the cost different really get impact is the recover time. Objective because that's changes the infrastructure you need in place to be able to hit those numbers. It goes from a sort of, um, it's a, you know, like kind of having, when you get those short numbers, like that infrastructure almost has to be warm or hot on the other end.

And that's when the cost goes up as opposed to like where we talk about cold infrastructure, where, um, I'll enable that at point of disaster. And that's usually shared. usually a little bit more flexible and, and you have a little bit different environment and that's where the costs go [00:57:00] down. Um, but that's where the recover time goes up and that's kind of the balance I see.

It's not so much the, the cost I see on the storage, because that's really where your cover points come. It's your storage, the how much you're keeping. Um, it's really more around the, the recover time. And that's where I see more, um, where the costs balloon because you need more infrastructure. Uh, more infrastructure at the ready, um, as you reduce that and shrink that time.

Max Clark: Not a lot of people think about. It this way. Backup and recovery is an exercise in data movement. It's, you're in, you're in a data business, right? And on the one hand it's how much data do you have to back up and then what intervals are you doing? Or you know, you said change rate. I love that. Right. Um, because I wanna come back to that, but how much data are you backing up?

Where are you sending it? How do you store it? Right? So immutable backups are great, but you know, they make changes to what your storage is and how that actually applies. Um, good news is, is [00:58:00] every day storage gets cheaper. We just decide to store more, you know, so it's like, but, but the missing piece of this, I find so many times is people do not think about how long it takes to move the data back into something on the recovery side.

And until you've done a recovery, which is why, you know, I mean, I don't know how many times you sit at this point, like you have to do tests, right? I wanna talk about these tests. Let's, let's, you know, that's a good segue into test is it's like all of a sudden you start to do the re restore and you're like, wait a minute, this restore is gonna take how long? 

Keith Lukes: Right. 

Max Clark: And, and you're like, okay, that's not, I mean, like that's a wake up call, right?

Keith Lukes: Well, I think that, like we've seen some, like some technologies where you can use like object storage and it's cheap and it's cold, you know, it's like cool storage and, and that's great and it's immutable. And then you have an event and you start pulling out from that and all of a sudden it's that that number hits and it's like, oh. That's not how long I thought this was gonna take. I mean, [00:59:00] there's physics to it, right? You can only push so much data through a pipe at, at, at whatever very, you know, however you have that set. If it's a one gig connection or a 500 med connection, there's only so much data you can push through that pipe, you know?

And that some of that goes back to technology choices, right? Can I do multi-threaded backups? Is the performance on the disk? On the backend? And we talk about that too. When we architect our, our backup infrastructure, some backups go to. High, you know, spinning disc and some go to object storage.

That's longer term retention, that's more compliance. Like, I'm not going to wait for that data to come off of that. You know, and we've seen customers like that have thrown stuff into glacier that I'm like,

Max Clark: Oh.

Keith Lukes: is gonna take you. Like, they don't even understand that until, like you said, they're operating to it. And I think those are the decisions that you make on, again, I, when you look at recover point and recover time, it's that it's what kind of infrastructure do you need to hit those numbers, right? To be really ready to be able to spin those [01:00:00] systems up. And that's, it's, it's the storage and compute that becomes critical because you need a different type of disc.

And that, that, you know, we just had a, a conversation with a customer, kind of that in their head had their backup and DR. Operations completely separate in their head. They were, they were using, like, they used Commvault for, they were using Commvault for their backups existing, you know, new customer that has an existing Commvault environment. And they were moving off, they were doing SRM themselves to their own infrastructure and their data center, their DR data center infrastructure was, um, into life and they're like, we don't want to do this anymore. Um, they were looking for a partner to be able to help them. We were looking at Zerto and, and. They were really like in their, it was an RFP response. Everything was focused on DA and everything else. And we were like, one of the few vendors that came to 'em were like, well, you really need to align, backup and DR. Together. Like you can be smarter and tier this. Like, if that replication doesn't work and you have your [01:01:00] backup technologies disparate from your DR environment, how are you gonna get that data over there?

Exactly like what you're talking about. Like, so that's great that it's in, in, you know, air gap

Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

Keith Lukes: cloud. I have no mechanism now because that, that zerto replication that you've got, you know, 30 days worth of, of replicated images. Well guess what? The ran, you know, the, the, the has been in there for 33 and so now what are you gonna do?

And so it's, it's important to have those sort of conversations around the two, because I think it's important, like, and that's the thing we walked through too, talking about tiered approach and recover time. It's like, okay, I can do. These 20 systems with Zerto, and they're gonna come up within an hour to four hours. And then depending on the size and shape of those servers, like I have to egress that data from your backup. Like, how fast do you want that, that could be 24 hours. I can do some multi-threaded backups, but like I have to still pull [01:02:00] 50 terabytes off of your backup data and that, that a time to that that I can't change. Like unless you. Want to increase the network and pay for a high speed, you know, high, high spinning disc, which is your production disc. They're like, no, I don't wanna spend, you

Max Clark: Yeah.

Keith Lukes: terabyte. Like I that it. So, I think, like you said, you know, kind of going back to your, to your point is that those recover points, it really comes down, I think what balloons the cost is the, the infrastructure you want to have in place to meet the recover times that you're trying to achieve.

Because that's where it gets, where the, the time it takes to this data. Um, can get shrunk based on the type of technologies you put in place to be able to extract that data from wherever it is.

Max Clark: Something I love about technology is we manage to, um, reinvent the same problem. On new, on new systems I 20, 20 ish years ago. Right. What was, what was, you know, change rate? Okay, this goes back to change rate. And I was chuckling when [01:03:00] you said it right, because I wanted to come back to this, you know, 20, 25 years ago.

Uh, we were backing up to tape some, some type of tape and, um, and then you had. You know, at some point you were doing incremental based backups because you had to, based on your, you know, backup windows and, and then we were, you know, you would use something like an Iron Mountain to like send the tapes offsite.

Right. And, and then, and everything seems great until you're like, well, we need something. Right? And then you realize, well, it's gonna take, depending if we call it the exact right time, we can get the tape back tomorrow. But chances are it's in two days. We get the tape back and then like, oh shoot. It's an incremental backup.

So we have to figure out where our full was and then what kinda layers of incrementals we have to apply. And you find scenarios where all of a sudden you're like. Uh, yeah. Okay.

Keith Lukes: Yeah.

Max Clark: Like, like, whoops. You know, and, and, you know, and, and so now, you know, we just, we've, we've just replaced for [01:04:00] most people, um, incremental backups onto tape with, you know, offsite storage with object storage and cold storage.

And you, and it's just, it's just the same problem expressed in a different place.

Keith Lukes: right It, right it just because it's there doesn't mean it, it's ready to be recovered like that. That's the whole thing. It's like, and so, um, it, it is kind of that. That the similar problem like you described, I mean, I remember doing the same thing, you know, o operating tape libraries and, and, and inventory and, and being able to get, you know, having the box waiting for, um, you know, iron Mountain and then the tapes that come back that can be returned into inventory and, and, and that whole operational process. Like, it's nice that that's been eliminated, but it doesn't adjust the problem because you still have to worry about egress time and, and the time it takes to pull that. Like I said, we, we've seen some, you know, operations that are just, you know, taking [01:05:00] days to recover data. Um

Max Clark: Well, I mean, I mean by by design, they tell you right up, right up front. Like, okay, it's cheap, but guess what? When you need it, it's gonna take a long time before we make it available to you. You know?

Keith Lukes: right. Well, 'cause they're running tape on the back end there. I mean. You know that, so, so I think that's what people forget is like some of those operations are running on, you know, it's not spinning disc, it's actual tape operations back on that side too. So

Max Clark: Yeah.

Keith Lukes: that's where you see it,

Max Clark: It has to go from tape storage back into what looks like warm storage. You're back on a disc somewhere. Yeah.

Keith Lukes: Yeah.

Max Clark: Um, ransomware. Let's talk about ransomware a little bit. Uh, now there's a stat that I keep track of that, um, is dwell time, and you've mentioned this earlier.

Keith Lukes: Yep.

Max Clark: A couple years ago, dwell time was very long.

260 days, you know, push dwell time was pushing up to a year. Right. So you had some threat actor on your network for, you know, upwards of almost a year before whatever happened happened. Right. And now we're seeing dwell [01:06:00] time counting down really short almost into, you know, I think it's a 10 days right now.

And you know, I mean there, there seems to be this giant yo-yo, you know, it's gonna go up and down and up and down. So depending on, you know, when you watch this right, it's gonna be somewhere different. Like all, that's all that's really consistent right now is 12 time. I don't know for me, what is the scarier number?

I don't know if it's the long term is scarier 'cause of what it implies or if it's the short term. Because of course in order to have a short dwell time, it really kind of connotates that the. Threat actor has figured out how to monetize an attack against you faster,

Keith Lukes: Right.

Max Clark: which also means that they understand how to create maximum leverage against you in order to monetize that attack faster.

So backups, they know how to take control of your backups and eradicate backups, right? If, if I launch a ransomware attack on you, what do I want? I don't want your you to have viable backups because if you do now, um. You mentioned a few different things. You talk about toolings getting smarter and ai, you know, being able to [01:07:00] understand what's being backed up and change set and the change rate,

Keith Lukes: Yep.

Max Clark: um, also immutability.

But, um, I'd, I'd love to hear your take on this of backup as part of your resilience to cybersecurity and ransomware. Because again, right, fundamentally in a lot of these cyber attacks, you get back to, can you get, again, it's a data game. Can you get to your data?

Keith Lukes: Well, and I, I think, oh. We've been putting together a program with a, with with s Sure. It's a cyber insurance company and it, it, that, that was one of the criteria that they want now, I mean, and we're seeing this more and more, is that the insurance organizations want immutable backups and a documented and tested, plan, right?

Like that those are now becoming table stakes to get. Insured for cyber insurance. And I think those two the foundational pieces that have to be protected because ultimately that's what saves you. You can put all the moat and castle you want in place. You can have Edge, you can have firewall, you can do Sass e you can have [01:08:00] your, you know, you can be monitoring your sim and have, you know, managed sock and, and you can minimize impact, but you're not going to eliminate it. Um, and ultimately what they're going to do is exactly what you described. They're gonna try to go after the backups. That's going to be what saves your business 95% of the time, I, I've seen that it's going to be some sort of recovery. as long as you have that protected, um, I think that's where, um, the organization's gonna be like saved.

Right? And so if you're operating that successfully, and I think it goes back to maturity, is that we don't see a lot of stories around businesses being impacted because they have mature operations around data recovery that's saving them. Um, and they're mini, like, it doesn't matter dwell time because they have in place to be able to minimize that.

And I think the sh I think the shorter times like you're describing, I think are these quick hits and they're, they're finding vulnerable companies that don't think they need this. And so it's easy. They hit the backup, they hit that, and it's [01:09:00] like, I'm gonna make this quick. You pay me X, you know, what's your insurance policy?

Alright, that's what you're gonna pay me. And. You know, you're covered. I'm gonna get paid. I'm gonna give you your keys back, and you better be smarter the next time. You know, and I think that's, that's what's making these short, it's, it's like, just like, you know, they're operating like businesses now and, and they're looking for no different than a, you know, a, a typical business looking for small and mid-sized customers, right?

Like they, they're, they're. Easy targets. They're, they're, once they get in and they see that it's not protected, that's what they go after and they make it simple. so they allows them to also be, they've reduced their sales cycle, right? They've, even, they, that dwell time has reduced their, um, time to work on that customer, it's easier for them to monetize it.

And they're getting more, it's more profitable because they're not spending trying to infiltrate this customer. They're spending 10 days. know, and so they're maybe not [01:10:00] making as high of a revenue number on these customers, but they're hitting more of 'em more rapidly and, and, and really, um, using that to kind of be a, a, a, a shorter sales cycle to be able to do the, you know, make the money that they need off that customer.

Max Clark: A lot of times right now with incident response. You know, they're looking towards tools like, um, you know, an endpoint or the sim to actually try to understand the, the, um, the vector of the exploit,

Keith Lukes: Yep.

Max Clark: you know, where it came from, but more importantly, what, when it happened, right? Because if you can clearly identify this was it, and it happened at this time, right?

Then you have an idea of. You know how far back you have to go, you know, you know what your good state is. It's like, okay, if it was, if it was nine days ago, I know if I go 10 days back in time, I have clean data that I can recover from that doesn't have this, this thing on it. And then we can, we can patch and we, you know, we can do what we need to do.

[01:11:00] Um, how do you see that, uh, you, we, you, you, you touched on this briefly, but. How much of this is gonna maintain or, or stay within the realm of the, the cyber estate, cybersecurity estate versus merging into, um, the backup and recovery estate.

Keith Lukes: Yeah, I, I think well like. The technologies, you know, that we use too, have also scans on the recovery side, right? So they're also now scanning your backup after a lot of times these signatures update is that when you try to restore, it's looking for any kind of, um, variability also on the recovery process. But I think, you know, when you look at all of this collectively, I think having. Uh, incident response. A lot of times now what we're seeing anyways is coming from like the insurance carrier, right? So insurance wants to check and make sure all the things you said you were doing, you're doing, um, and they're mitigating that risk and they're pulling it together.

And we've [01:12:00] seen on multiple occasions where like we're sitting at the ready to hit recover, waiting for I, you know, incident response to be able to tell us when and how and, and what that operation looks

Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

Keith Lukes: so I think that incident response is, is really. Um, like you said, it, that's kind of the line in the sand.

And then a lot of what we're seeing too is like clean room recovery and things of that nature, and that, you know, if we know where the attack vector is and they've isolated and understood how it's gotten in and where it was. Can we recover data around that? Can we recover that server and clean it and bring it into production and not even lose that 10 days?

Can I lose, can I use that, that backup from um, when we shut everything down? 'cause that's typically what happens. Either it's encrypted or we, you know. To reduce the tack, the attack surface, things are getting shut down. Can I take that last backup of that system and recover it in a way that I don't lose data and ensure that I'm not reinfecting?

Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

Keith Lukes: clean rooms come in and things of that [01:13:00] nature too. So that's where like I see like incident response operations start to meld into recovery and that I'm usually recovering in a space that incident response can scan and. Check that system before it gets moved back into production. And so there's a lot more, I think, movement between incident response and, and recovery now. Um, because it's the way the tools integrate and some of the things that technology is providing to give you the flexibility to do that. And that's where like having elastic infrastructure like ours or um, test areas, things like that where we can do that in an isolated way before it moves into, into either production recovery or back into. You're on-prem or you're your, you know, your actual traditional operations, you know, 'cause sometimes in a, in a DR scenario around cyber, um, it's not always back. You know, sometimes it's not going into dr. Sometimes it's cleaning in and moving it back into production, and you just go back into operations because there's,

Max Clark: You get it back?

Keith Lukes: out what's happening [01:14:00] first. 

Max Clark: the gold standard, you know, for backup for a long time was expressed in the 3, 2, 1 rule, right? Three copies of your data, two different medium, one offsite.

Keith Lukes: Yep.

Max Clark: Um, it's a simple thing to re to remember and to tell people, right? 3, 2, 1, right? What does that mean? Oh, okay. And you need to have this monic

Keith Lukes: Yeah.

Max Clark: that you remember.

Keith Lukes: Yep.

Max Clark: How has that changed? Like what is the right gold standard now?

Keith Lukes: I, I think that for us it's, that one's gotta be an immutable copy offsite, like external, like it's gotta be in a controlled state that can't be altered or touched. Um, because that's what we've seen with the credential hijacking. That's what they're doing. I mean, it, it, it's invariably an attack against the backup data and then the production data and.

If you are at their mercy, if that happens, and we've, you know, we've been lucky that, you know, customer, our customers have not gone through that because of the configurations we have. But talking to the, you know, a lot of times coming to us, that's what they're looking for. Um, and I think [01:15:00] immutability, that's the same thing.

Like we seen with our, with the, the, the cyber insurance partner we work with, it's like, that's what they're asking for. Like, that's their criteria now. They're, I mean, having, you know, soc and. Two factor authentication. Those are all table stakes now. Like, okay, I need that. But they're seeing in the recovery scenarios that once somebody gets in, what's saving the day is, is the backup data. And so 3, 2, 1 is definitely, um, you know, an operation you want to follow. Like I look at that on that kind of two, copying that number two that you put there. Um, on-prem is like, that's for rapid recovery for traditional data deletion or. System failure, right? Like that's that copy, that one copy now has become sort of the thing that's gonna save your business.

And so it's gotta be in a state that cannot be altered, and that is what you're going to go to wherever that is. That's gotta [01:16:00] be a critical part of your DR strategy or because that's gonna save the business. Invariably, that's what is going to be used to recover and operate your business after an event.

Max Clark: Uh, and I mean, immutability is a fancy word for the platform doesn't allow you to delete, right? Like, it's just, I mean, you know, going back to that, like deletes a valid operation for most of these systems. You know, immutability is, makes, oh, there is no delete anymore. Like it's, you know. Um, okay. Fi, final, final, final question for you here.

Last thought here. Um,

for, I, I would put this into, you know, people that haven't dipped their toes into backup, but I'm actually gonna ask it for, let's, let's put it into people that think they have it covered, right? This is one of those, this is actually a really a scary concept that you run into a lot. Oh, we've got it covered.

And it's like, do you really Right. For the people that, that, that think they have it covered, what's one thing that you wish more of them would? Wouldn't know or would understand about, you know, backup [01:17:00] recovery, Dr. Business continuity, that, that they are missing, you know, that's, that's being glossed over.

Keith Lukes: I, I think, I think the conversation for us and, and what I've seen recently is that, I think. If it's always been recover time or recover point objectives has been kind of the narrative of, of backup and DR. Operations. And I think now that you've injected cyber resilience into that conversation, that mean time to recover is sort of the new concept that you have to have in your head. I think the expectation is, is that if I put these tools in place, that I'm gonna be up in four hours and. know, or one hour or whatever I put in place. And the reality is much and, and significantly different than what you think's going to happen, especially if you haven't been through it. So you have to really think about, um, the preparedness that you put in on the front end is going to significantly impact that [01:18:00] mean time to recover. And so things like you have it covered and really having it covered a lot of times are two different things. Like the questions we like to ask is, okay. So, you know, if, the CEO deleted his OneDrive right, accidentally,

Max Clark: Never happened before.

Keith Lukes: right? Right.

Max Clark: I.

Keith Lukes: How quickly could you get his data back and see what they say, you know, or tell, and then I go, I, then I'll take the next question is, is, okay, what happens if your most critical business application that the infrastructure that it's running on went down?

What does that look like for you to operate? let them tell you the story of how they're gonna bring that up and then ask them, okay. If that impact was the entire data center, whether it's, like you said, fire, I think sometimes under, under, or often overlooked is water and fire. Right? I've been impacted by both, um, with, with different businesses.

Max Clark: The fire doesn't scare me. It's the water that scares me, so

Keith Lukes: right?

Max Clark: yeah.

Keith Lukes: or ransomware, right? How are you gonna [01:19:00] operate the business if something like, like that happens? And, and what do you think that really looks like? And how do you see that operating like, and, and have them talk you through like, well, this is how we're gonna respond to the incident, and then we're gonna, you know, after you through containment and isolation and understanding it, then what does that look like? And. All the things you do on the preparedness side, making sure your backup's finished every day. Make sure you, um, have a, a documented process that's been tested and that you have a backup that you know you can recover from that's going to take that meantime to recover and significantly shrink that down. Right? And having tools in place to do all of that. And so if they can tell you a narrative about that, that's where we see some maturity. What I, the, the more, more often it's like, I know I have to do all this stuff and I just don't have the time to do it. That's more the conversation I'm seeing now. It's like, I know what's out there.

I, understand that this could be very protracted type of recovery event if I don't do this stuff. So help me [01:20:00] do this stuff and, and, and contain it. And I think that's where, um. The customer that tells you you got it covered is usually the one that has the most gaps and is really the one not doing it. And so I think those, I like those three questions because it really forces them to tell you how they would do it. And if they don't have a really good narrative on how that would happen, like if you built those things that rolls right off your top right, it's like, well, I'll do this. We've got backups here.

I back up, you know, three times a day on M 365 and, and they'll tell you all the things. Um, and then that becomes, you know. The challenge is, as a sales team, is that that's maybe not the customer for you, right? Like, because they're, they're operating, they're, they've got it covered. It's the guy that says, I've got it covered.

And then you start to poke holes in everything that they're doing, and then you can see that it breaks down. And, and then you can start talking about, let me help you achieve the outcomes you want, and do it in a very cost effective way that aligns with what you're trying to, what you're trying to do as a business.

Max Clark: There's two, there's two sayings that, that keep rattling through my head with this one. [01:21:00] Right. And the, and the, I think the obvious one is, um, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But it's, that's not, that's kind of true. But the one that's I think more appropriate is you don't rise to the occasion, you fail to the level of your preparedness.

And it's, it's really, you know, going back to like circling all the way around and talking about, and putting this, putting this into like an example, you could back up every four hours, but if it takes you 24 hours to recover. You're not in alignment and what's the point, right? Like, you've so great, you've got these four hour interval backups, but it still takes you 24 hours to get back to it.

So like, did you invest your energy into solving the right problem or did you, you know, did you just like pull, you know, like put blinders on to a certain degree? Right. And um, and I, you know, I, I think my simple question when we get into this is when was, [01:22:00] what was the result of your last test, restore? And then you find out really quickly, you know, what's actually going on or not, because I don't think, um, that is something that always gets pushed off, you know,

Keith Lukes: Yep. Well, and I, I remember like one of, I remember being in an event where. we test, we restored test data, never restored because we didn't want to do, go through an ad. Like we were

Max Clark: oh.

Keith Lukes: to deal with that on, in a DR scenario. And like we went to, we had a, a full, it was just, it was a hardware problem.

We lost all the, it was a, a, a large, um, VMware environment and lost the entire raid. Raid controller failed and we lost everything. And we had the data on the tapes and we went to restore ad and AD wouldn't recover. And, and, and there's, and, and it's one of those things where this was back in, in, you know, I'm going way back in my, you know, [01:23:00] 19 hundreds probably when, when this was happening.

But, um, I think, but I always go back to that, is like, we didn't test it because we were hesitant because, and, and you know, that probably delayed our recovery time for that environment probably by 12 hours because we had to build ad from scratch.

Max Clark: Oh.

Keith Lukes: Reconfigure all this and then restore this data and align, you know, it was, you know, the whole environment, the two SQL servers, an exchange environment, you know, again, back in the days when everything was on prem. And so it, that is always a, that, that, that question too is very critical because, you know, a lot of backups don't get, a lot of organizations are not doing regular recovery testing. And that's, I think the, the piece we always make sure that gets done regularly. Like you said, checking to make sure the backups are completing and making sure the data can be recovered. like backup 1 0 1. And so many organizations just don't have the, the bandwidth to be [01:24:00] able to, to focus on that.

Max Clark: Uh, unless you have somebody whose sole and only job is doing this,

Keith Lukes: Yep.

Max Clark: it's not happening.

Keith Lukes: Right. And no organization, it teams are just too thin. Like they're, they're, they're operating and that. That doesn't provide a ton of value. I think we, we talk about backup operations. I, in my opinion, have two modes, right? It's the least important thing on your job, or it's the most important thing like that.

That's it. Like you operate in two modes with backup and Dr because and, and, and if, you don't have somebody like, like you said, you know, mining the store. They're busy, you know, trying to help the organization, you know, and, and, and work on the platforms that are critical to generating revenue backup.

And DR doesn't generate revenue, but if you don't have it, it significantly impacts your revenue, like we talked about. So that's where I think you, you've, you've gotta find a balance and, and, and using like outsourced components who are experts at it, um, you know, is, [01:25:00] is, is so significantly important.

Max Clark: Yeah. Keith, thank you very much. It's, uh, always, always a pleasure chatting.

Keith Lukes: always chatting. Always great chatting with you, Maxon.

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