How to Fall in Love with Backup: Get Hit by Ransomware

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Rick Vanover handles product strategy at VEEAM, a backup and replication services firm. In this segment, learn about the service most companies hope they’ll never need. But Vanover says a good backup service is the best thing ever after a data breach or failed IT system. He shares a story about an emergency flight he took to South America to save digital data. And he tells how he found the woman of his dreams. Vanover — aka Rickatron, who is active on Twitter @rickvanover –– sees backup as a safety net every enterprise cannot live without.

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Meet Rick Vanover, the Batman of Backup

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Transcript:

Rick Vanover:
I got this call, literally they told me go to the airport. This was 15 years ago. I literally flew to Venezuela to get an INI file off of a system that was on its last leg, going to die and this parcel freight operator in that country would have lost everything if I didn’t do this.

I’m Rick Vanover senior director of product strategy at Veeam. I joined Veeam because I fell in love with this thing called backup. We want backup to be easy and just work, but then have flexibility when something goes wrong or is not going as planned. Why would I have to fly to Venezuela to get an INI file?

“Well, why don’t I just dial in?”
“Well, they sold the modem.”
I’m like, “What? Why would they sell the modem?”
“They sold the spare server.”
“Oh, we lost that too.”
“Right.”
So it’s like compound failure after compound failure. “Oh, where’s the tape drive?” “We don’t know.”

They had a driver picked me up and we went straight in because of the dire situation. Right. It’s like it just like, it’s crazy. And now granted the customers was great, total pleasure to work with. But here I am this squirty kid with a lot of hair coming in there trying to fix their problem. Saved the day, you know, made them happy. Right. But the data is what they cared about.

Born and raised in the Midwest of the United States. I’ve lived in Ohio for most of my life. It was my wife that made me get into technology. Whatever year college it was, my junior year, it’s like, I fell in love with this wonderful woman. Because we go on a date and she’s like making me pay. And so, okay, let’s go get a job. So I wouldn’t say I was born a geek. I find myself inspired by technology. I mean, heck even right there, my nickname is Rickatron.

I sent an email to the editor of a website. I said, man, this, this blog is crap. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The editor came back and said, “Can you write?”

And I’m like, okay, it’s like that. That was my moment. That was the Dawn of Rickatron. And then from there, the blogs, the Twitters, social, the webinaring and the white paper. And I love what I do.

When I get customers who have beat ransomware with backup they’re happy when it saves their job, they love it. When it saves their business, they love it. When it gets them out of a jam, they love it. Otherwise, you’re looking at basically an end of day situation. So I talked to our tech support team about this often and I sent one of the managers a text I’m like, hey, do you have any latest ransomware advice? Cause I love getting their advice because they deal with it every day.

He said, just education, just know about these threats and what not to do and things like that. He went on to say, I recommend going so far as to have mortal fear installed in both IT administrators and end users.

I’m like, whoa, that’s deep. We’re never going to be done with it but ransomware is that overarching threat that could end at all.

We call it the three, two, one rule: three different copies of your data on two different media with one of them being offsite. And the beautiful thing about that is that it doesn’t prescribe any specific technology. Doesn’t prescribe any specific transport method. And it can really address nearly any failure scenario.

People were focused on tape. Well, and then they want a cloud. And then they were focused on new hypervisor platforms and they were focused on cloud platforms. And then they were focused on form factors and consumption models. What I call a solution stack. It’s basically a summer fashion show. You know, we’re going into the spring and it’s like every season, we’re going to have some things that are in season and you know, there’s kind of dujour things that the market wants. But the other thing I can say is that what we’ve seen also varies a bit by region, by segment, by customer type and beams getting to be a big backup player.

No, no. I don’t think people are flying down to Latin America to get an INI file anymore or other exaggerated stories. But the reality is the data drives everything we do and you got to have control over it. And you don’t want to get it out of control because you’re going to be at an end of day situation otherwise. Avoiding that, that’s enough to make you fall in love with backup.

Jason Lopez:
Rick van over is the senior director of product strategy at Veeam, spelled V E E A M, the company which provides backup and replication services as well as cloud data management. This is the Tech Barometer podcast. Tech Barometer is produced by the forecast and you can find more tech podcasts and written stories at theforecastbynutanix.com.