Welcome to Ask the Experts, brought to you by CloudServicesUniversity.com. In this video, Intelisys’ SVP Cloud Transformation Andrew Pryfogle talks BCDR solutions with EvolveIP’s CTO Scott Kinka. Find out more about how to solve your customers’ BCDR concerns from Scott and the EvolveIP team here: http://evolveip.cloudservicesuniversity.com/
| Andrew: | All right. Time for another Ask the Experts session. I’ve asked Scott Kinka, CTO of EvolveIP, one of our long time esteemed colleagues here, and part of the faculty at the University. Scott welcome back to the studio, man. |
| Scott: | I’m thrilled to be here. |
| Andrew: | All right. Another Ask the Experts session with the big brain in Philly. Hey, Scott, I want to talk to you more about BCDR and as I’m designing a business continuity, disaster recovery solution. I have lots of different options available to me. I could do it completely premise based. I could do it completely cloud based. Maybe some hybrid mix of that. I wanted to get your sense of what are the solutions. Predominately, the cloud based solutions that you guys have provided and others that people really ought to be taking a serious look at when considering BCDR. |
| Scott: | Certainly. I think there’s … I said this in a previous session and certainly many times at various Intelisys types of events. One of the principle tenants of cloud is the built-in nature of disaster recovery. By that, when we say that, we generally mean, it’s some place else. |
| Andrew: | Sure. |
| Scott: | If the building burns down, I can still get phone calls. I still have my data elsewhere. That’s great and to many businesses that’s a sufficient model for business continuity in disaster recovery. I think with the emergents I think in particularly of some compliance regulations and then certainly things that have gone on from a weather perspective and geopolitical kinds of things. People are taking a much deeper look at business disaster or DR and BC, in terms of how they build that into their business and their technology plan. What are the categories though? First, obviously, is certainly on the communication side. There’s a different implication to DR and BC as it relates to putting a PBX or putting a call center in a cloud. Right? |
| Andrew: | Yep. |
| Scott: | It’s not here. I don’t have the same geographic scenario. I think what I would say to the partners is certainly make sure you understand what it is that you’re buying. Right? Has my solution negatively failed between multiple geographies? Is it going to work if I’m not in the office or there’s an issue with a specific area or a provider that happens to be in that area? There’s also the plan that goes along with that. If we had a physical problem in our site, what am I expecting my employees to do? |
| Andrew: | Yeah. |
| Scott: | Do I then go and forward it to myself or am I scrambling around trying to figure out what to do with the technology I already have? |
| Andrew: | Yep. |
| Scott: | Certainly you have that there. I think where we’re really seeing a lot of increase now is on the use of cloud infrastructure as the home for the DR and the business continuity on the computing side of the house. Right? So, historically the conversation that we were having around cloud were for people who were, you know, I have this infrastructure and I want to move this infrastructure someplace else. |
| Andrew: | Right. |
| Scott: | I have physical boxes. It’s time for me to virtualize, but I’m going to virtualize to the cloud. The emergence of new product lines from EvolveIP and other service providers around DR is the service has really been … That’s pretty recent. Over the last couple of years. |
| Andrew: | Yeah. |
| Scott: | I think what’s changed is when we would have the discussion about moving infrastructure to the cloud, even as much as two years ago, as recent as two years ago, I should say, it was about the customers deciding do I need to take everything I have here and move it up to the cloud? Am I ready to do that? In a lot of the cases the answer was no. In cases where they had a screaming need. The servers were bad. I needed a new infrastructure. My data center wouldn’t work. They wouldn’t be willing to have that conversation. But at that time too, you would ask, are you virtualized today locally? The answer often was no, so it was a physical to virtual/slash cloud move. Today you have a really good chance that you run into a midsize business and asked them about their data center, they’re going to say, “Well I used VMware, I used Hyper-V, I’m already virtualized”. They’ve taken advantages of the better scale of going physical to virtual, but they have yet to move it out of their data center. |
| Andrew: | Interesting. |
| Scott: | What we’ve developed is a line of products that are Hypervisor based. It enables us to plug directly into their local VMware, directly into their local Hyper-V, and consume resources on our side for replication. |
| Andrew: | Got it. |
| Scott: | Basically, they’re running, and many of them control the back up solution, from inside the local control plane of their virtualization stack. |
| Andrew: | Yep. |
| Scott: | They’re just deciding within this server, I want to grab these folders. I want to grab the whole machine. I want to grab every minute and replicate it. This one, I’m just going to grab every 6 hours. They work transparently in the backgrounds to Hypervisor moves data up to the cloud. |
| Andrew: | Right. |
| Scott: | What that enables them to do is get their BCDR. It also gives them a nice path because frankly sometimes we use the DR products to migrate people to the cloud. It’s a replication methodology. You can keep it in sync. When they’re ready to cut, they cut. |
| Andrew: | Beautiful. |
| Scott: | If you were leveraging your local infrastructure and using the remote data center with EvolveIP as your DR site, if you did happen to move there, you’re not moving back. |
| Andrew: | Right. |
| Scott: | Then you just convert that into living there in a cloud instance and deciding do I want to replicate it to another EvolveIP data center? Or do I want to replicate it to Amazon? Or do I want to replicate |
| Andrew: | Very cool. Excellent. I love it man. That’s an important conversation to be having and always great to get your insight on this stuff man. It seems like there’s big opportunities that to be one in the DRaaS space. Am I right? |
| Scott: | Yeah no question. Our customers don’t know. This is one of those areas where they don’t know what they should be spending. |
| Andrew: | Yeah. |
| Scott: | But, he CEOs are asking them. What we should be doing and our partners is taking advantage of the hype right now. |
| Andrew: | Yeah. |
| Scott: | As I said previously, it’s all hype until you need it. |
| Andrew: | Yeah. |
| Scott: | Right? |
| Andrew: | Right. Right. |
| Scott: | Then you save their behind. |
| Andrew: | Right. There you go. |
| Scott: | Which is even better. That’s a position our Partners want to be in. |
| Andrew: | Excellent. Well there you go. Guys, that’s Scott Kinka. Thanks man. Thanks for jumping in. |
| Scott: | Absolutely. |
| Andrew: | Good deal. Scott Kinka, CTO of EvolveIP. Make sure you go deep guys on the EvolveIP learning center. It’s got great information that our partners are using to get smarter about how to sell cloud. We’ve got some big, big successes with EvolveIP. You can too. Good selling guys. |
