Transcripts
a few minutes into recording this week's episode, our guests use the
Speaker:phrase, a culture of recovery, and then he talked about how to foster
Speaker:that culture in your organization.
Speaker:I really latched onto this idea.
Speaker:There's a lot.
Speaker:In this episode, we talk about generative AI.
Speaker:We also talk about a bunch of great stories from a guy that's been in the
Speaker:it industry even longer than I have.
Speaker:It's a great episode.
W. Curtis Preston:Hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restored all podcast,
W. Curtis Preston:army host w Curtis Preston, a k a, Mr.
W. Curtis Preston:Backup, and with me, I have.
W. Curtis Preston:I can't even say it.
W. Curtis Preston:My senior Tesla consultant.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm so excited.
W. Curtis Preston:Prasanna.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I, oh my gosh.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh my God.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh my God, Curtis, I know you're very, very excited.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Congratulations, by the way, by the way, you should probably actually say
Prasanna Malaiyandi:my name since you haven't actually
W. Curtis Preston:Did I say Prasanna?
W. Curtis Preston:Malli?
W. Curtis Preston:Yes.
W. Curtis Preston:Say my name.
W. Curtis Preston:What do you Walter White.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, yeah, so I am now the proud owner.
W. Curtis Preston:Of a, uh, Tesla model, three blue, beautiful blue.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I've now given it as first full charge, and then today we will go on a
W. Curtis Preston:leisurely drive down to La Jolla, uh, for an afternoon lunch with someone.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And now I think the biggest thing, like I was surprised
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you actually bought it because I know we went back and forth for a while, and then
Prasanna Malaiyandi:yesterday I think I just get the text.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm like, here's what it says.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I haven't been now, or I have an order number.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I was like, wait, what?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And it showed up like six hours later, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No negotiation, no
W. Curtis Preston:part, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:It was, um, basically, I mean, you, you know, the thing I was
W. Curtis Preston:waiting for, I was waiting for the approval from the cfo, right?
W. Curtis Preston:The CFO basically said, uh, we can make this happen.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and that there's some special stuff, uh, as to, as to
W. Curtis Preston:how I was able to pull it off.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, and then once she said, uh, you know, you know, it makes sense given
W. Curtis Preston:all of the unique situation, you know, the circumstances of our situation.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, I basically, I was like, before she changes her mind, I'm gonna put in an
W. Curtis Preston:order and, um, and I ordered it and.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, and you, you just literally, you're like, yeah, I'll take that one.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I chose from existing stock, so it said, uh, you can
W. Curtis Preston:have it by, this was yesterday.
W. Curtis Preston:You can have it by Thursday.
W. Curtis Preston:And I go, wow.
W. Curtis Preston:By Thursday.
W. Curtis Preston:That's great.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay, Thursday it is.
W. Curtis Preston:And then about a half hour later I get a call, um, about a half hour later I
W. Curtis Preston:get a call and actually I'm just gonna.
W. Curtis Preston:Pause there for about a half hour later, I get a call and it's Tesla.
W. Curtis Preston:And they're saying, well, um, we can deliver it now if you want.
W. Curtis Preston:And I'm like, O okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You're like, I'm not gonna say no,
W. Curtis Preston:I'm not gonna say no.
W. Curtis Preston:And then they said, your, your delivery is 12, your delivery window is 12 to four.
W. Curtis Preston:, I mean, what, what, what can I say?
W. Curtis Preston:But Sure.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And so they, they gave me a window of 12 to four and um, but
W. Curtis Preston:they gave me that at like 1230.
W. Curtis Preston:So I was like, so I immediately figured it would be towards the end of the
W. Curtis Preston:window and they said that they would text me, uh, 15 minutes out and then,
W. Curtis Preston:Four o'clock came and went with no text.
W. Curtis Preston:I was like, dang it, don't gimme a window if you're not gonna, you know what I mean?
W. Curtis Preston:Don't get me all excited.
W. Curtis Preston:I was fine waiting till Thursday, but now I want my car.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, it, I, I texted, I got a text at like four 15.
W. Curtis Preston:And then the car just literally showed up at my house.
W. Curtis Preston:I never saw a person, it just showed up outside my, my house, because the way
W. Curtis Preston:the Tesla works, for those of you that don't know, your phone is your key.
W. Curtis Preston:And so they're like, please finalize the delivery in your phone, and
W. Curtis Preston:then your phone becomes your key.
W. Curtis Preston:And I'm like, how amazing is that?
W. Curtis Preston:So, because no one had to hand me keys or anything.
W. Curtis Preston:And then I, but yeah, so basically I sat here in this desk and I ordered a car.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and paid.
W. Curtis Preston:I never spoke to a person.
W. Curtis Preston:I paid the down payment in the app and then that car magically appeared
W. Curtis Preston:about 50 feet from where I'm sitting outside my house five hours later.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's so, it's so much better than having to walk into
Prasanna Malaiyandi:a car dealership haggle with someone.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Sit there while they're like three hours later.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:We're going back and forth with paperwork.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think when they say we're going back to the, to work on your paperwork, I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:think they just like throw it on a desk.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:They go have some drinks or coffee or dinner or whatever else it
Prasanna Malaiyandi:is just to make you wait it out
W. Curtis Preston:speaking as a former car salesman, you're kind of right.
W. Curtis Preston:It, it's just a giant thing that just jerk you around and it just, it just stinks.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, which is why my previous cars, I bought them at CarMax,
W. Curtis Preston:which is a similar experience.
W. Curtis Preston:No haggling, you know, this is the price, you know, uh,
W. Curtis Preston:and you, you get what you get.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but yeah, that was, that was very, very nice.
W. Curtis Preston:But, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Well, congratulations
W. Curtis Preston:you go.
W. Curtis Preston:So I have my Tesla.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, thanks.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, um, now I just have to, you know, figure out what it's gonna
W. Curtis Preston:be like to, to drive this thing.
W. Curtis Preston:I'll throw out our usual disclaimer, this podcast is an independent podcast
W. Curtis Preston:and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of our employers or people
W. Curtis Preston:that we've contracted with either, you know, any of those things.
W. Curtis Preston:Be sure to, um, to, uh, check us out and, uh, rate us on your favorite pod catcher.
W. Curtis Preston:It helps people find us.
W. Curtis Preston:That's very helpful to us.
W. Curtis Preston:And also, if you want to join the conversation, I am w Curtis Preston on
W. Curtis Preston:gmail, and I am WC Preston on Twitter and linkedin.com/in/m backup, uh, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:contact me via any one of those things and we'll get you as a guest on the podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, uh, we've had a few interesting problems with our recording platform
W. Curtis Preston:today, so I hope everything's all right.
W. Curtis Preston:But I want to bring on our guest.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, he has a, a, a very diverse background that includes IT consulting
W. Curtis Preston:for a while with Ernst and Young and Fujitsu Consulting, uh, to his most
W. Curtis Preston:recent role as the CIO and Chief Content Officer for IT World Canada,
W. Curtis Preston:which is Canada's leading it publisher.
W. Curtis Preston:Welcome to the podcast, Jim, love.
Jim Love:Hey, welcome Curtis.
Jim Love:Great, great to meet you, Prasanna It's great.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Hey, Jim.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Nice to have you on the podcast, and I'm sorry, all those technical
Prasanna Malaiyandi:difficulties were my fault, so,
Jim Love:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:we blame, we
Jim Love:it's technology's our business.
Jim Love:It's not our skill, you know?
Jim Love:Yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, it is what it is.
W. Curtis Preston:So why don't you tell us a little bit about it World Canada, uh, for
W. Curtis Preston:those of us who live, uh, south of the border, um, you know that we
W. Curtis Preston:that don't know very much about it.
Jim Love:It World Canada is, has been around for 40 years.
Jim Love:It was, it was a, it was a publishing company that, that my partner Fawn
Jim Love:and I bought, uh, about 10, well, five to 70 years ago, but it had
Jim Love:been around for about 40 years.
Jim Love:Been through one transformation going from, we used to publish magazines
Jim Love:and we would, and, and you know, CIO Magazine and all that sort of stuff.
Jim Love:And we would, you know, people would get them.
Jim Love:And then this thing, the internet.
Jim Love:It that it's gonna catch on any day now, but, you know, but you
Jim Love:know, and, and it, uh, it just decimated the publishing industry.
Jim Love:Of course, magazines like ours.
Jim Love:So we became a digital publisher and that was, that was our big,
Jim Love:our, our big move in there.
Jim Love:So we've been through at least one in our, we're gonna middle of our second digital
Jim Love:transformation cuz uh, and the one thing that, that ai, after we just got lived
Jim Love:through, that AI is gonna come through and wipe out pub publishing publishing.
Jim Love:But we, we are, uh, we are still here.
Jim Love:So that's, that's the one thing we, we have survived and we've survived largely
Jim Love:by, um, I think by trying to get ahead of, of transformations when they happen.
Jim Love:So it's been a, it's been an interesting journey at that point.
Jim Love:And um, I know I don't look at people going like, how could a guy have this
Jim Love:much experience to look this young, but.
Jim Love:But I'm, I'm actually way past retirement.
Jim Love:Um, and, and I, this was my, my second career was, was being part of a publisher.
Jim Love:So that was, that was it.
Jim Love:So, and as you pointed out, I have two titles.
Jim Love:One is I'm head of content and, and I'm also the, the ccio.
Jim Love:Uh, I don't know about you when you guys started.
Jim Love:I was a musician.
Jim Love:I knew nothing about computers.
Jim Love:I just needed a job.
Jim Love:Uh, and, and, and somewhere where I could work and still play in clubs
Jim Love:and working overnight in, you know, in, in a computer room was perfect.
Jim Love:And, you know, and I tore paper off the printers and all that sort of stuff and
Jim Love:I, I sort of like, I dunno if you, if anybody still remembers the, the HMS PIF
Jim Love:four, you know, stick close to your desk and never go to see and you'll be the
Jim Love:captain of the Queen's Navy is the thing.
Jim Love:That's what happened to me.
Jim Love:I was the world's worst programmer, so they made me a project manager,
Jim Love:sucked at project management, so they made me a director.
Jim Love:Really didn't degrade at that.
Jim Love:So I became a cio.
Jim Love:Now the.
Jim Love:Maybe not quite like that, but, but I managed to, I've managed to, to stumble
Jim Love:through this and, uh, and I, and I, I got a degree featuring some computer
Jim Love:science courses along the way just, and have kept educated, and this is
Jim Love:the point where I taught at one of Canada's leading tech universities, but
Jim Love:it was, it was a question of, of learn.
Jim Love:I did it all, learned it on the job.
Jim Love:And, uh, and so I stumbled into this publishing role
Jim Love:and that's where I am today.
Jim Love:I have my own podcast and that's where we met.
Jim Love:Uh, you gotta call Mr.
Jim Love:Backup for a podcast interview.
Jim Love:We in there.
Jim Love:So I have my own podcast, hashtag trending that I do the daily news, but we also,
Jim Love:we're, we're in the states, so we have IT World Publishing here, Canadian
Jim Love:cio, a couple of publications, but Tech Newsday goes into the us that's a solid
Jim Love:US and my podcast hashtag trending and cybersecurity today, uh, which is one
Jim Love:of the number one podcasts in the us believe it or not, on cybersecurity.
Jim Love:So, yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:believe it.
W. Curtis Preston:I believe it.
Jim Love:yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I, I had a question for you, Jim, since you brought it up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Um, earlier you talked about sort of AI is going to destroy publishing, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Could, and could you talk a little bit about that?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I know AI is very hot right now and everyone, and I see it every once in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:a while in like Twitter and Reddit and all the rest are like, Hey, yeah,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:all these sort of like, providing content is just gonna be like AI
Prasanna Malaiyandi:just gonna generate that stuff and publishers are gonna go by the wayside.
Jim Love:It's, yeah, it's, it's, it's more complex than that.
Jim Love:I, I, but it, but it's also gonna happen faster.
Jim Love:I told everybody the internet took seven years to, to really, from, from
Jim Love:what it really caught on, from, from websites were really there before it
Jim Love:really had an impact on publishing.
Jim Love:And, and it hit us, but it also happened overnight.
Jim Love:Like we, we were coasting along, we were making money off websites.
Jim Love:We had our publications.
Jim Love:All of a sudden people stopped buying ads
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Hmm.
Jim Love:and it, it almost happened over like two months in there that we, we,
Jim Love:we just noticed that that's seven years.
Jim Love:This is gonna happen in seven months.
Jim Love:When you think about generative ai, what is generative ai, uh,
Jim Love:doing better than anything else?
Jim Love:Creating and curating content and you know, so, so that, that piece.
Jim Love:So creating content, we will have an explosion of content.
Jim Love:And this is crazy if anybody's old enough listening to this.
Jim Love:Remember we, we, we had the 500 channel universe that was gonna be the internet.
Jim Love:And where would we ever get all the content?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Jim Love:had plenty.
Jim Love:Now we have an absolute surplus of content.
Jim Love:I have been through and, and tracked this stuff.
Jim Love:I marketing material in particular.
Jim Love:Um, I'm sorry, I'm, like I said, my degree is in English.
Jim Love:I'm quite a good writer.
Jim Love:It writes better marketing material than I do if you know how to do it.
Jim Love:There's just, there's no no sands or butts about that as far as just
Jim Love:straight press release journalism.
Jim Love:And there's a lot of that.
Jim Love:As a matter of fact, there's there, there's very few investigative
Jim Love:reporters, especially going down.
Jim Love:But if you have, take a look in the us, the Washington Post, the
Jim Love:New York Times, probably, I think it's that San Francisco Chronicle.
Jim Love:There's, there's about two or three or four major places.
Jim Love:You've got Buzzfeed, which now I think is dying or dead.
Jim Love:Uh, but you know, and and dozen other publishers out there, everybody
Jim Love:else is curating their content.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Jim Love:else is republishing their stories.
Jim Love:When you are a republish you, like you, and you know, if you're a
Jim Love:writer, that, that gets wiped out.
Jim Love:Um, and so what do we do differently?
Jim Love:And that's, we're now reinventing ourselves yet again,
Jim Love:uh, to, to cope with that.
Jim Love:And, you know, and it's like, I'm not one of these guys who says, oh,
Jim Love:this is gonna, you know, You doom and gloom and all that sort of stuff.
Jim Love:But if we hadn't done the work we've done both all along the way, we would be
Jim Love:out of business end of end of sentence.
Jim Love:And I'm not saying that I'm a, that I'm the great visionary or anything
Jim Love:like that, but we're always working thinking, how do you disrupt yourself?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Mm-hmm.
Jim Love:And, you know, and in, in there that, that's, I think has been
Jim Love:the, the secret for us at least, knock on wood, you know, surviving this far.
Jim Love:But anybody who thinks that, that, that, here's the classic things I hear.
Jim Love:AI makes mistakes.
Jim Love:Oh, and I don't like, you know, uh, AI's never going to replace us because
Jim Love:it's, it's never going to, it is never gonna write better than we can.
Jim Love:Nonsense.
Jim Love:Absolute nonsense.
Jim Love:It's read every book that exists.
Jim Love:It's Read Hemingway, it's Read f Scott Fitzgerald, it's
Jim Love:read the Greek philosophers.
Jim Love:The so, so that's what it's got to to work on.
Jim Love:And what have you got to work on the 30 books?
Jim Love:You, you, you remember, or you know, the influences of even an entire lifetime.
Jim Love:So, so there's, there's no doubt about the fact that it's going to have an impact
Jim Love:on the publishing industry, by the way.
Jim Love:It's gonna have an impact on other industries as well.
Jim Love:But, but, but you know, that's generative ai.
Jim Love:It's, which is really good at text and all that, you know, and, and
Jim Love:dealing with, with those things.
Jim Love:Um, and, and what they call it generative cuz it can create
Jim Love:now the next thing happens.
Jim Love:Can it create something new and better?
Jim Love:And the answer is yes.
Jim Love:If you take, if you take a look at the stuff that's happening with
Jim Love:Tree of Thought, um, and, and there, there, everybody say, well, it
Jim Love:can't come up with anything new.
Jim Love:Of course it can, but people don't come up with new things.
Jim Love:There's seven, there's seven stories in life.
Jim Love:Man meets girl, you know, or whatever person meets person, whatever, you know,
Jim Love:man versus society, we learn this stuff.
Jim Love:There's seven stories and we've been working them to, to, to death, you
Jim Love:know, from, you know, and you know, the, the Beatles had some something in the
Jim Love:way she moves George Harrison, right?
Jim Love:Oh, James Taylor had a song, something in the Way, oh geez, we,
Jim Love:we influence each other, you know?
Jim Love:And I won't even get into, he's so fine.
Jim Love:My sweet Lord, you know, we're, we're playing the same tunes.
Jim Love:Over and over again in there.
Jim Love:Now this stuff can also create visuals and music and all that.
Jim Love:So we are, we're in a different world, and you can do one of two things.
Jim Love:You can, you can, you can, you can do what was Mark Twain said?
Jim Love:Denial's not a river in Egypt.
Jim Love:You know, you can be in denial.
Jim Love:And I've heard it from my writers, oh, it'll never write better
Jim Love:than me, or I'll go nonsense.
Jim Love:You know?
Jim Love:Or you can be in fear and say, well, the, you know, like, we,
Jim Love:we don't, we, what can we do?
Jim Love:Well, what can you do?
Jim Love:Figure out what makes you unique.
Jim Love:You know, one of the things I, I'm doing a lot of podcasting myself, why this
Jim Love:can't be done by ai, the, the yet, you know, like you can, you can have avatars
Jim Love:and they can say things, but you can't, you can't tell jokes and you can't get
Jim Love:to know people and you can't, there's just things that you can't do right now,
W. Curtis Preston:so I can, I can, for example, we're using the editor
W. Curtis Preston:that I use, I can actually put in text and it will read it back as me, for
Jim Love:Oh yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Jim Love:Somebody, somebody did that to me.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I can, I actually use it to edit my podcast and I use it when I, when
W. Curtis Preston:I say a word wrong, I can replace that word when I, when I'm editing and it
W. Curtis Preston:will fill it in, in context and Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Which is great.
W. Curtis Preston:But if you give it a paragraph to read, I sound dead.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and,
Jim Love:not, not yet.
Jim Love:There.
Jim Love:There are good ones out there.
Jim Love:There's good, there's good ones out there.
Jim Love:I think it's code, is it 11?
Jim Love:11 steps or 11?
Jim Love:Uh, anyway, but, but somebody did a.
Jim Love:Takeoff on my podcast and it started, it did the same intro.
Jim Love:It read the script.
Jim Love:I could not tell the difference until it started to say things like, and then Jim
Jim Love:talks poo poo the whole, and it, then he, it just, it was, it was hysterical.
Jim Love:So this guy did a whole takeoff of my podcast and, and then just started
Jim Love:making me potty mouth and crazy.
Jim Love:Um, I tracked him down and set it back.
Jim Love:Said, I said, I hope, I hope that you had fun too.
Jim Love:That Cause it was the funniest thing I'd heard.
W. Curtis Preston:The concern that I, or the belief, and you've talked
W. Curtis Preston:about it already, um, you know, I, I'm not sure if I a hundred percent
W. Curtis Preston:agree with your comment of like, you know, there's nothing new.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, although, you know that that's been said before, it's
W. Curtis Preston:been said before that there's
Jim Love:Yep.
Jim Love:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:But, um, but be, because when, when we do new things
W. Curtis Preston:in technology, we have to explain why we're doing this thing right?
W. Curtis Preston:And why this new way of doing something is better than the
W. Curtis Preston:old way of doing something.
W. Curtis Preston:And that, that often requires a unique tack, which I don't think
W. Curtis Preston:yet, um, AI is ready to do, um, once that tack has been decided.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:So, uh, for example, uh, should we back up sas?
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, I'm sure that I can go to Chachi, bt or you know, your favorite l l m and
W. Curtis Preston:I can write both articles of, uh, uh, arguing both sides, because both sides,
W. Curtis Preston:there's plenty, like you said, there's plenty of content out there on both sides.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but, uh, in fact, I recently, uh, there's a, there's a guy that I know
W. Curtis Preston:that, uh, he's a network guy and, uh, Tom Hollingsworth is his name.
W. Curtis Preston:And one of the things that to really poke the bear with him is I tell
W. Curtis Preston:him that when we fully go to IPV six, that will be using Nat routers.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, we're gonna put gnat on top of IPV six and it just tweaks 'em.
W. Curtis Preston:And so I went to chat, gp, pt, and I had it write an article.
W. Curtis Preston:Y in his, in his style, uh, arguing for that, um, just to, just to mess with him.
W. Curtis Preston:But yeah, it's, um, a as a person who creates content,
W. Curtis Preston:I, I am concerned about this.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I think you're right.
W. Curtis Preston:I think you need to focus on what makes you you, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I think for like, in, like in my case, it's my passion.
W. Curtis Preston:It's my sense of humor.
W. Curtis Preston:It's my ability to, to converse.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and it, and it goes back to, you know, it's the passion about backup
W. Curtis Preston:and recovery and related topics.
W. Curtis Preston:No AI model is going to be able to mimic that.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, certainly not.
W. Curtis Preston:It's certainly not yet.
W. Curtis Preston:Well yet.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, we'll see, we'll see.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but yeah, so I, I, I am very concerned, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Mm-hmm.
Jim Love:Well, I think we should be, but, but, you know, but we're looking at this,
Jim Love:you know, the, the, the world evolves.
Jim Love:I mean, there were a group of people looking weavers looking at the first
Jim Love:weaving machines in there, and, and they saw them and they, and they,
Jim Love:they thought saw them as a threat, so they tried to destroy them.
Jim Love:That, how'd that work out?
Jim Love:Not really.
Jim Love:Well, right.
Jim Love:Today we've got machines that will knit a pair of socks in
Jim Love:30 seconds off in, in there.
Jim Love:You know, that, that, that occupation's gone.
Jim Love:But that didn't mean that the craft person, who, who was there, the
Jim Love:designer, the new jobs emerged.
Jim Love:And I think that's something we've been doing in it for, for ages
Jim Love:is, you know, who's still, there's lots of jobs that disappeared in it
Jim Love:and some of that I'm grateful for.
Jim Love:know, the night scheduler.
Jim Love:The night scheduler, remember you used to do in mainframes, you would have
Jim Love:a tracker, like seven people calling jobs, pulling tapes off the floor,
Jim Love:mounting the tape, finding out the job failed, and, and then sending a note
Jim Love:to disappoint the users in the morning.
Jim Love:There's lots of stuff that happened that we are like, so there's some guy who
Jim Love:doesn't have to go pull tapes anymore, and there that job, that career in tape
Jim Love:pulling is, is, is no longer with us.
Jim Love:But you know, that person went on to become the cio.
Jim Love:Oh, you know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But, but, but here's a question I have for you,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Jim, is I totally get the benefits of automating some of these processes,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:simplifying people's lives, letting them go and focus on other things.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Do you feel though that when that happens, the newcomers who
Prasanna Malaiyandi:don't get that experience lack something versus everyone else?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Or is it something that they shouldn't even have to worry about today?
Jim Love:Oh God.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:No, I, I, I, I'm so thankful for when I got into computing because I
Jim Love:understand how everything works in principle in there, you know, the,
Jim Love:the, you know, and, and that, that those foundations have been there.
Jim Love:It, it's like, you know, and I'm, and it may sound like an old guy.
Jim Love:I hired an MBA who, who was gonna work on a project for me in there,
Jim Love:and, and we were doing pricing on a big, it was a big financial system.
Jim Love:We were doing pricing of bonds and all that sort of stuff.
Jim Love:And he pulls in, and this is at the time he's, you know, he's got his Excel
Jim Love:spreadsheet out and he puts it out and I say, did you check the reasonableness of,
Jim Love:of this bond income allocation program?
Jim Love:Oh yeah, I did.
Jim Love:And, and I said, okay, so, Uh, I'm gonna take a look at this bond here.
Jim Love:He said, look at those two prices.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:I said that yield is gonna be like 39% Yeah.
Jim Love:On a federal treasury bond.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:I said, find out where that bond comes.
Jim Love:I want the name of that.
Jim Love:I'm gonna go buy a whole pile of them right now that can't happen.
Jim Love:But he typed the same
W. Curtis Preston:allocation into that.
Jim Love:Yep, same formula.
Jim Love:Copy and paste it into Excel.
Jim Love:But he had no concept of math and it just boggled my mind.
Jim Love:And it's the same way you know, that there are people who know computers.
Jim Love:I'll tell you one quick story, but we were, we were transferring
Jim Love:mainframes at one point.
Jim Love:We were going from one shop to another.
Jim Love:And in those days you had, you had literally took a window and you took
Jim Love:a whole pile of tapes and you drove them over to the new data center.
Jim Love:If you're gonna move a data center and you ran the tapes and you hopefully
Jim Love:to God that you got up in the weekend.
Jim Love:In there.
Jim Love:So you would rehearse this two or three times in there?
Jim Love:Well, we would go back and forth in, into this, this thing and we, we, we'd bring
Jim Love:the tapes over and we'd load them up and all that sort of stuff, and we'd run them
Jim Love:and, uh, like we, we, we just couldn't hit this window and all of the best
Jim Love:programmers on our system worked on it.
Jim Love:We brought in a guy who knew nothing about our system.
Jim Love:Everybody freaked out when we brought him in and, and he
Jim Love:said, he said, you know what?
Jim Love:Like, uh, I don't know.
Jim Love:Understand what business you're in.
Jim Love:I don't understand the banking business.
Jim Love:I don't really care.
Jim Love:He said, but he's, what I'm gonna do.
Jim Love:I'm gonna take these things.
Jim Love:This is data, so I'm gonna block, I'm gonna run these processes in parallel.
Jim Love:I'm going to do these things.
Jim Love:He shrunk our, our, our load times so that we could get in the car
Jim Love:and take these tape from like 12 and a half hours to four hours.
Jim Love:But he knew nothing about the business, but he knew the foundations.
Jim Love:You know, and sometimes a lot of knowledge that we think we have about,
Jim Love:you know, where we get really good at something and we don't have the
Jim Love:foundational knowledge, we miss it.
Jim Love:And that's, I'm, I'm, I'm so glad I had that time to, to learn this, you know?
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:When I think about, you know, the topics of backup and recovery and disaster
W. Curtis Preston:recovery, there are a lot of things that I know for the same reason, Jim, right?
W. Curtis Preston:That I grew up in the old days of tape, right?
W. Curtis Preston:I grew up back when tape was the only option and when, when it was
W. Curtis Preston:the best option, and then it became not so much the best option, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And, and I remember experiencing that why.
W. Curtis Preston:And so I understand a lot of the things about the way the technology
W. Curtis Preston:works that the average person might not understand because they
W. Curtis Preston:didn't experience that, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And a perfect example that I have of that is the way overuse.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, of the term air gap, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, ev everybody in the, everybody in the IT industry wants to advertise
W. Curtis Preston:their solutions as being air gaped and immutable when they're often neither.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, the, you know, it's like, do, do you even know what the term air gap
W. Curtis Preston:means and where it comes from, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It is a gap of error, right?
W. Curtis Preston:That is why it's called air gap.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, and let me explain to you
Jim Love:It's related to the Latin.
Jim Love:There's a Latin, it comes from Airhead, which is, airhead is a person who
Jim Love:actually believes there's an air gap, so.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and the, you know, I mean, at best, you know, you could say
W. Curtis Preston:it's like, look, here's the standard.
W. Curtis Preston:The standard is a thing in a box, in a place that you can't get to.
W. Curtis Preston:That's an air gap.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and like, like in literally in a vault that has a lock with a, with a, with a
W. Curtis Preston:scary person standing in front of it.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and you know, that's an air gap and at best you can approximate that.
W. Curtis Preston:Just tell me how close you get to that.
W. Curtis Preston:But, um, you know, the, you know, lots of companies, uh, use the term air
W. Curtis Preston:gap and they don't even throw the word virtual or, or electro electronic air
W. Curtis Preston:gap or something in front of that, right.
W. Curtis Preston:It does matter to learn those fundamentals.
Jim Love:So while we're on the subject Prasanna where is about
Jim Love:experience and all this stuff, I brought you a list and I brought a
Jim Love:list of all the things I'd screwed up.
Jim Love:That's the other thing that that's great about getting into.
Jim Love:I've managed, I've learned everything I have, I know the hard way.
Jim Love:Um, in, in, in there.
Jim Love:And I will say
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's the best way to learn though.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah,
Jim Love:Well, yeah, sort of.
Jim Love:I mean, yeah, it's, there, there are, it's, there are preferable ways to learn.
Jim Love:I just haven't managed any of them in there and that, that air gap brings
Jim Love:me back to that, you know, so, so I'll go, do you wanna go through my list?
Jim Love:I'll
Prasanna Malaiyandi:yeah, yeah, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No love to hear these
Jim Love:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:want to hear this list.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Jim Love:first one is validate.
Jim Love:Validate after the job runs, whatever you do, validate it in there,
Jim Love:have somebody else validate it.
Jim Love:And I learned, this is my fir my first big and we talk about the, the doing
Jim Love:this data center conversion and we arrive with the tapes and we got all
Jim Love:our window and all that sort of stuff.
Jim Love:Oops.
Jim Love:Uh, there's nothing on them.
Jim Love:melt the tape and it goes rolling through and somebody said, said, you know
Jim Love:what, after this, you know, we should really have validated those backups.
Jim Love:Excuse me.
Jim Love:This is, I'm holding what would restore our mainframe back there
Jim Love:if it were to crash in there.
Jim Love:And you're telling me nobody checks these things?
Jim Love:Well, it rarely goes wrong.
Jim Love:It's automated man.
Jim Love:Like, what could go wrong?
Jim Love:It writes, you know, in there.
Jim Love:So that's my first one is, is trust.
Jim Love:Trust.
Jim Love:No computer valid.
Jim Love:It validated, you know, it's in, in, in, in God we trust.
Jim Love:No, what I can see.
Jim Love:I trust, you know, that was my
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I think, yeah, and I know Curtis, we always talk about,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sort of verify your backups, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Do restore testing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Make sure that what you actually have is working and it does what
Prasanna Malaiyandi:it's supposed to do, and you haven't gotten forgotten pieces, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like you're doing a database backup for an application and you forgot this other
Prasanna Malaiyandi:database that lives over on the side and you can't recover your application.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:And, and so you, you trust nothing about what should work.
Jim Love:You know, Murphy was an optimist, you know, like that's the, you
Jim Love:know, that there's, there's always something can go wrong.
Jim Love:That's my first one.
Jim Love:The second one is, is you talked about your vault and I, I, I
Jim Love:call it Schrodinger's vault.
Jim Love:You know, I, either the backups in there are good or they're not, or maybe they're
Jim Love:both, you know, but store it safely.
Jim Love:I can't, I, you know, I've, I've had people who say, oh yeah, we
Jim Love:got a, we got, we got a backup in there, and where's it stored?
Jim Love:Oh, now, in the old days it was you, there were, you know, discs that we moved and
Jim Love:stuff like that, but I, I'm still finding people who are storing backups in the
Jim Love:most, you know, oh, it's, it's stored, you know, I've got my, all my air gapped
Jim Love:backup, but it's sitting over there.
Jim Love:I've literally, in this career, I've pulled tapes out of
Jim Love:the backs of people's cars.
Jim Love:You know why?
Jim Love:Well, we wanna take it off site.
Jim Love:It's in the trunk of your car.
Jim Love:No, no.
Jim Love:You know, and so that's, you know, you might wanna choose where you, no.
W. Curtis Preston:We talked about the, um, that, that one, the, um, basically
W. Curtis Preston:the, the properly storing the, the other copy, uh, you know, there was a
W. Curtis Preston:major fire in, um, in Europe, right?
W. Curtis Preston:The, the, is it O H
Prasanna Malaiyandi:O B H
W. Curtis Preston:uh, o vh, I always get the, the acronym.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:O VH in, um, the cloud provider in Europe.
W. Curtis Preston:And they had their other copies stored literally over in the corner.
W. Curtis Preston:And that's why, um, hundreds of, uh, uh, their customers lost their data.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Anyway.
Jim Love:That literally happened in our, our, one of our beach airports.
Jim Love:Their backup system and their backups were in the basement.
Jim Love:They had a flood.
Jim Love:Water tends to flood basements.
Jim Love:Just a thought.
Jim Love:You
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I have to tell, I have to tell you, Jim, the company that I worked for when
W. Curtis Preston:I very first started my career, we, uh, we hired an offsite vaulting company.
W. Curtis Preston:It wasn't Iron Mountain, it was the other company that was available to us.
W. Curtis Preston:And they, their big advertisement was that they had a World War II like bomb
W. Curtis Preston:shelter, uh, as their vault, right.
Jim Love:yep,
W. Curtis Preston:But it's in the basement and we knew that.
W. Curtis Preston:And so whenever, um, there was threat of flood, like because we were in
W. Curtis Preston:Delaware, whenever there was threat, threat of a hurricane or a flood coming
W. Curtis Preston:up, the Delaware River, uh, we, we would call them and we would pay them
W. Curtis Preston:extra money to move all the tapes.
Jim Love:yep.
Jim Love:So you'd be surprised they were there.
Jim Love:So my third thing,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Jim Love:you backing up everything?
Jim Love:I had, I, I, this is, I, I was, I, I was the, the, the director
Jim Love:of the, of, of, uh, a fairly large financial company here in Canada.
Jim Love:When the VP of IT came into my office.
Jim Love:Now I was on the pecking order, although I was in charge of, of the business
Jim Love:and the technology for, for this area.
Jim Love:So I was, I was, I had some sort of authority, but he
Jim Love:was the vice president of it.
Jim Love:In those days, would would've been a cio, walked to my office, got
Jim Love:somebody sheepishly at my door.
Jim Love:They don't, these guys don't come to see me, to tell me that
Jim Love:they had lost their source code.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh.
Jim Love:the data was backed up.
Jim Love:All the, the stuff was there, but they lost the backup of the source code.
Jim Love:Nobody thought you had a backup source code.
Jim Love:We could always recompile it.
Jim Love:Hello.
Jim Love:It's, you know, and that's what I mean.
Jim Love:You, you, this is where your experience comes in and knowing that, that there's
Jim Love:lots of things that are required to make something run, not just the data.
Jim Love:Bless, I, data is king, data is wonderful, data is everything, but there's more,
Jim Love:you know, and that was my, my first one was going around saying, do I have
Jim Love:everything it takes to run this system?
Jim Love:You know, if, if, if somebody decides that, that I, my source code is corrupt,
Jim Love:am I gonna be able to recompile it?
Jim Love:Am I gonna be able to, you know, it'll bring it back and, and, you
Jim Love:know, am I gonna be able to get that?
Jim Love:Um, and e even with the, the way we've got to, to, to now store interpreted
Jim Love:language and stuff like that, and the way we, you know, we have all, we have much
Jim Love:better storage and thing, but you go and look at the spaghetti that's in there.
Jim Love:You know how many times things have been forked, whether
Jim Love:or not stuff is still there.
Jim Love:You know, just because you got it in repository and people say, oh no,
Jim Love:we've got a method of doing this.
Jim Love:I know because I've worked with really good programmers and gone
Jim Love:back and found code, and you say, we could never reconstruct this, you
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Thi this is why I'm such a fan of auto discovery, uh, of both systems
W. Curtis Preston:and file systems and databases.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, because, and, and then just say, just get all the, just get all the things.
W. Curtis Preston:People argue against it, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, they argue against getting all the things.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm like, if you know something is, Absolute trash and has no value,
W. Curtis Preston:then exclude that specifically.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but just back up all the things.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I, you know, the number of times Jim, I've seen, uh, the, the
W. Curtis Preston:best one I have was a, was a very, very, very large entertainment company.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and this, but you know, the very household name entertainment company
W. Curtis Preston:and their, it they were using where they were specifically picking which
W. Curtis Preston:folders they wanted to back up.
W. Curtis Preston:And I said, you need to stop that.
W. Curtis Preston:We need to go with all, uh, it was a net backup environment, all local drives.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, the size of their backup increased.
W. Curtis Preston:Their entire backup increased by 50% when we went from selected drives
W. Curtis Preston:to, to, to backing up all the things.
W. Curtis Preston:And I'm like, there's no way you can tell me that, that, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:there wasn't anything valuable that, that was being missed.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Jim Love:Oh yeah.
Jim Love:And if it, and if it is absolute trash, then research it properly and delete it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Jim Love:Like, you know, if, if you feel that confident about it, just,
Jim Love:you know, press the, press the button, you know, and, and, and delete it.
Jim Love:You won't do that, will you?
Jim Love:So, back it up.
Jim Love:You know, storage is cheap.
W. Curtis Preston:like, I like the way you think, Jim.
W. Curtis Preston:I like the way you think.
W. Curtis Preston:All right.
W. Curtis Preston:What's next?
Jim Love:here's my, here's my next one.
Jim Love:Here's my next one.
Jim Love:Snapshots versus full backup.
Jim Love:Hit hit me on one system, right?
Jim Love:Because everybody thinks, well, I'm backing it up.
Jim Love:Did a snapshot.
Jim Love:Great, wonderful thing in there.
Jim Love:This was done by a very big shop that was running a system for us.
Jim Love:When they phoned us and said, our, we had a server meltdown.
Jim Love:We can't restore from the snapshot.
Jim Love:No, you can't, because the database was hot and the snap doesn't pick everything
Jim Love:up when you're writing in there.
Jim Love:So, You know, it's another variant of test it out, but don't when some, just because
Jim Love:somebody says we're backing stuff up.
Jim Love:Don't, don't go ask big questions.
Jim Love:We had, you know, you'd rather a, you'd rather have checked that out
Jim Love:than when I would talk to my director of it who was working with 'em and
Jim Love:saying, and you, and you read this contract and you, you did what?
Jim Love:You know?
Jim Love:Um, yeah.
Jim Love:I mean, it was, it's, it, nobody wants to end their career because
Jim Love:they, they, they thought this was backed up, you know, and, and, no.
Jim Love:So that's,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that's all.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So that's also difficult because vendors make it very confusing, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because they're like, oh yeah, we backed that up, and they'll throw out
Prasanna Malaiyandi:all these terms, which, unless you really know what backup is, right,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you'll think, oh, it's all the same.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:And no matter how much you know, it, I think courtesy is probably the same.
Jim Love:Is, is he, I'm gonna ask questions.
Jim Love:Show me, teach me like I'm a little kid.
Jim Love:Don't gimme this.
Jim Love:Where we get this and we get this agreement where we're all data
Jim Love:pros and we all know that stuff.
Jim Love:We toss the terms around, no, no, no, this, this is important.
Jim Love:Walk me through it, you know, and, and tell me how I'm gonna, I'm
Jim Love:gonna deal with this, you know,
Jim Love:So my other one, fat fingers are stupidity.
Jim Love:You, you, you be the judge in this one.
Jim Love:Somebody goes into our server cage, puts a, a, a disc in
Jim Love:and wipes out our, our, our.
Jim Love:S our disc and our, our, our backup disc.
Jim Love:Now, I e every, every, there's always a capability to do that.
Jim Love:And we, in the early days, like we, I had a friend one time and in the old we
Jim Love:didn't, this is the olden days before we had security on the IT terminals.
Jim Love:And we would go and, and we would take programs.
Jim Love:And if we wanted to know what a program did, we'd type in the name of the program
Jim Love:and it would give us the conversation.
Jim Love:And then an, okay, a friend of mine on, on his last day with a
Jim Love:company, uh, I emphasized last day, typed in wipe and wipe, didn't
Jim Love:have an okay and it wiped the disc.
Jim Love:And I thought that one was 30 years, 40 years, or 40, more
Jim Love:than 40 years ago in there.
Jim Love:And, but this happened to me actually in a small system where somebody
Jim Love:walked in and came out and, and I, I didn't know that could happen.
Jim Love:You know, anybody who gets into your cage, anybody who touches anything in there.
Jim Love:If you don't have an, a truly air gapped backup for any work anybody's
Jim Love:doing anywhere and why this would happen, nobody knows, you know, but,
Jim Love:but like, is it, is it fat Fingers?
Jim Love:Did you hit the wrong key combination?
Jim Love:Is it just pure stupidity?
Jim Love:I don't know.
Jim Love:But like I said, the lesson is anybody working on your system anywhere
Jim Love:that you, where you don't have an backup before that work started?
Jim Love:Don't let 'em do it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The other thing I think going along with that, Jim, is also like, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:also scope down the privileges, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like, did that person actually need to be able to access the backup system, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Or should that have been completely siloed off?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So I think that goes kind of hand in hand as well, which hopefully more
Prasanna Malaiyandi:organizations are doing that, but not sure
W. Curtis Preston:well, here, here's again, go.
W. Curtis Preston:Going back in the day, Jim, you, you, you know, one of the things that we've
W. Curtis Preston:always said is that physical access trumps all security protocols, right?
W. Curtis Preston:If I have physical access to your server, I could do whatever I want.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay?
W. Curtis Preston:And, and at, at best, you can frustrate my efforts, but you are not going to
W. Curtis Preston:be, I mean, if, if, if, especially if all I want to do is do damage, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because, you know, torches are a beautiful thing, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but the, the problem is that the, when we look towards the
W. Curtis Preston:cloud, Like physical access isn't even really, it's not the same.
W. Curtis Preston:It's not about physical access.
W. Curtis Preston:It's anyone that can gain access to your cloud administrative console
W. Curtis Preston:essentially has the same thing.
W. Curtis Preston:And that's why Prasanna you know, it's a great point about lease privilege.
W. Curtis Preston:That's why we need to do lease privilege.
W. Curtis Preston:We need to do separation of, of powers so that you minimize the blast radius
W. Curtis Preston:when a cloud account gets compromised.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and also that we can't do a, an actual air gap back up in the cloud.
W. Curtis Preston:Not at least nobody I know does an actual air gap cloud in the backup.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm sorry, actual air gap backup in the cloud.
W. Curtis Preston:Sorry, it took, took me a minute there.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but they, but they, but you can, you can approximate it,
W. Curtis Preston:but whatever you do, don't have everything stored in the same place.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:The, the cloud, the cloud equivalent to storing all your backups in the same cage.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, is storing aria backups in the same account in the same region?
W. Curtis Preston:Don't, don't, don't do that.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Because, you know, like you said, fat fingers or, or
W. Curtis Preston:stupid people, uh, or malicious
Prasanna Malaiyandi:malicious sec.
Jim Love:Malicious people, it doesn't matter, you know, it's, it's, it's zero.
Jim Love:This concept of zero trust and, and you've actually got it prisa, the zero trust,
Jim Love:the reduced privileges for your own good.
Jim Love:You shouldn't have privileges.
Jim Love:You don't need the, you know, and, and, and you should get them.
Jim Love:Like I said, I don't wanna do the, the old guy, I think all through the whole
Jim Love:broadcast, but in the olden days you had, there was a password that would
Jim Love:get you by everything in a mainframe.
Jim Love:Everything in there.
Jim Love:It was stored in a vault.
Jim Love:Two people had to open it.
Jim Love:They had watched the person open that thing.
Jim Love:They had to take the password out, they had to log it, they did the work.
Jim Love:You printed out the code that you did for that fix.
Jim Love:This was, this was middle of the day type hot fix type of
Jim Love:things or things like that.
Jim Love:You, you then had called audit.
Jim Love:They issued a new password, they sealed it in envelope, they put it back under lock
Jim Love:and key two people con and, and everybody says, well, that takes a long time.
Jim Love:Yeah, but do you really want to be responsible for knowing that password?
Jim Love:Like not a chance, you know?
Jim Love:And so that, that, you know, that that's the thing.
Jim Love:Um, my, my last two are,
W. Curtis Preston:saying the old guy thing all the time, Jim.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't have a problem with bringing out these, the old guy wisdom.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:But the, the, the other one is, is cannot restore.
Jim Love:This is, this is, we've got a backup, but we can't restore.
Jim Love:And I will, uh, I will, uh, I, I won't say the firm and I'm
Jim Love:not even gonna say the number.
Jim Love:They, they got hit with ransomware and they had all these backups.
Jim Love:They couldn't restore them right in there.
Jim Love:So you, you count and just, and again, you go back to all the reasons why
Jim Love:backups might not work in there.
Jim Love:And I, so I, I, after one episode, and, and I, I do this now, and actually the one
Jim Love:of the p the person who, who takes over for me operationally in our company, has
Jim Love:now started to repeat my old guy's story.
Jim Love:And I'm happy about it.
Jim Love:And that my old story is, I will phone you from my car from vacation.
Jim Love:I will go, I will come in, I will just tap on your shoulder.
Jim Love:And here's the deal.
Jim Love:We're a great place to work.
Jim Love:We love you.
Jim Love:We, you're a valuable member of the team, but if you cannot
Jim Love:restore that file, you are fired.
Jim Love:Instantly pack your desk and leave.
Jim Love:It's the only sin.
Jim Love:And because I, I went through this, make sure you test your
Jim Love:backups and all this stuff, and then I, I just said, no, no, no.
Jim Love:You know something, I, I'm not interested anymore.
Jim Love:I'm just gonna point to you and I'm gonna say, you're one of the operations team.
Jim Love:You should be able to go and restore a file.
Jim Love:It's in this system.
Jim Love:I'm, I'm telling you, that system crashed.
Jim Love:I need you to mount a server and restore that system, and then I wanna see it work.
Jim Love:And that's, and I, I urge everybody who, especially if you're a guy who's
Jim Love:more, or, or lady who's more business than, than tech in there that take that
Jim Love:one tip and just say, you gotta be able to show me that you can restore this
Jim Love:system and you don't need a big deal.
Jim Love:You don't need a, you don't need a, you walk in one morning and
Jim Love:you say, we're gonna do this.
Jim Love:And that I, I think, is, is, has permeated our culture.
Jim Love:And, and you know that that's a gift you can give to a company, especially a
W. Curtis Preston:like that.
W. Curtis Preston:I like that a lot, Jim.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, what it does is it shows respect to a part of the organization
W. Curtis Preston:that often gets no respect.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, it, it, and it, and it, it, if you are on a regular basis,
W. Curtis Preston:restoring even something small, right.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I, I think it should.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I like, I like what you're saying and I like that.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, you know, you're doing it much more often, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because a lot of environments that are like, oh, we do a re we do
W. Curtis Preston:a recovery test, you know, every six months or whatever, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Those are important to do a big recovery test, but it's also
W. Curtis Preston:important to do a small recovery test, um, much more frequently.
W. Curtis Preston:And to do it off the, off the cuff like you're talking about.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, just say, Hey, go restore this file and go put it over here.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, because what it does is by doing it, uh, by making, restore everyone's
W. Curtis Preston:responsibility, um, what that does is it, it creates a backup person
W. Curtis Preston:as well as a backup system, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because too many times the backup person is the only one that knows anything about
W. Curtis Preston:the backup system, and they're the only one that knows how to do any kind of
W. Curtis Preston:restore, and that is definitely wrong.
W. Curtis Preston:I like, so I like that.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I like that idea
Jim Love:no.
Jim Love:Every, everybody who's on your ops team at least needs to know how to do it,
Jim Love:you know, or you know, or what their way they would do if you, if they were
Jim Love:the person there, you know, in there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, just, just on that gem, I think one of the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:critical aspects there is to also sort of identify what are those scenarios
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that people aren't regularly testing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:For instance, in a help desk environment, you might constantly
Prasanna Malaiyandi:having people say, Hey, I need to restore this file from the file server.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Versus maybe I'm not really doing like the application level restores ever.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so I think that might be maybe a nuance, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Something to consider as you're thinking about this, is how do you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sort of round robin, if you will, across all your data, rather than
Prasanna Malaiyandi:always saying, Hey, I wanna restore a file from this file server, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Just to, because that might be something they're doing all the time and building
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that muscle memory as well, right?
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:And, and I think it boils down to, in this, this thing is that,
Jim Love:that recovery is a culture.
Jim Love:It's not a technology.
Jim Love:It, it, it's a culture.
Jim Love:The companies that are going to recover are, are going to recover
Jim Love:because that's part of their dna.
Jim Love:You know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I like
W. Curtis Preston:What's your final piece of wisdom You got Jim?
Jim Love:Well, yeah.
Jim Love:Uh, air gap, we'll just take it right back to air Gap.
Jim Love:There's no such thing as an air gap.
Jim Love:There's always, there's only Airheads, there's no air gaps.
Jim Love:You can't count on them in there.
Jim Love:And, and my favorite, my favorite was we, we do have two p things that,
Jim Love:that, and, and it was an operational system that I saw, and this guy said,
Jim Love:there's an air gap you can't reach this operational system from, from anywhere.
Jim Love:And I said, so, okay, but how do you give this operational system
Jim Love:commands if it's got this air gap?
Jim Love:And it doesn't?
Jim Love:Oh, I use my laptop.
Jim Love:Oh, the same laptop you connected the other systems with?
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:Okay.
Jim Love:So like, like I said, if, if, if somebody tells you is there
Jim Love:an air gap, don't believe them.
Jim Love:You know, it, it's, it, treat it like it's not, not true.
Jim Love:And.
Jim Love:The, uh, the sophistication level, as you probably know, you guys probably
Jim Love:know, there are all kinds of ways that systems communicate, even if
Jim Love:they are not connected by wires.
Jim Love:It's called wireless and magnetism, you know, magnetic
Jim Love:communication and things like that.
Jim Love:There's all kinds of ways to get in an air gap's, not an air gap.
Jim Love:It's, it's, it's a concept at that point.
Jim Love:And that's, that was the one I just, like I said, it was just you, you think you're
Jim Love:gonna learn nothing new until this, until somebody said, you ask a really, what I
Jim Love:thought was a really dumb question, you
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, I, I'm.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna agree and disagree with you on this one, Jim,
W. Curtis Preston:so be, be because, um, I, I, I think the core concept there is don't trust
W. Curtis Preston:what somebody is calling an air gap.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, be, but I do think it's really important in today's environment
W. Curtis Preston:specifically to at least attempt to get as close to an air gap as you can.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Saying that it's just impossible, which technically it kind of is
W. Curtis Preston:impossible unless somebody is taking stuff out and putting it in a, in
W. Curtis Preston:a hard drive, in a box, in a vault with a scary dude in front of it.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, which no one's doing that.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the, I mean, yeah, okay.
W. Curtis Preston:There's three people doing that, but, but it's nobody, no,
Jim Love:and one of them's the scary dude.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the, um, we, we need to at least attempt, because so many
W. Curtis Preston:people don't even attempt it.
W. Curtis Preston:They're like, they have the backup, they have the copy of the backup sitting
W. Curtis Preston:right next to the backup, or they have the backup in the server and they have
W. Curtis Preston:the, you know, let's, you know, pick a, pick your favorite, um, backup system.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I'll, I'll use data domain, you know, as a, as a target, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So back up the data domain and then I have my, my data domain
W. Curtis Preston:replicate to another data domain and I can, I can ssh to both of these.
W. Curtis Preston:This is a problem, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, and that's not picking on data domain.
W. Curtis Preston:That would be true of any, any, any box, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And I know that data domain, uh, cuz I know Prasanna has brought it up before.
W. Curtis Preston:Data domain has some features to do this.
W. Curtis Preston:Use those features, right?
W. Curtis Preston:None of them are perfect.
W. Curtis Preston:That's where, where I agree with you, Jim.
W. Curtis Preston:None of them are perfect, but we need to at least freaking try.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I think one of the best ways to do it is to sort of cross systems, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Use a different system than the primary system.
W. Curtis Preston:So at least it, you've got some sort of security by obscurity.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I dunno if you have any thoughts on it, Jim.
Jim Love:no, I think, I think you, you and the story's just not as funny.
Jim Love:If I don't, if I don't tell it as if the air gap is absolute, the fact is that
Jim Love:there's always a way to beat everything.
Jim Love:There's, everything can break down, but it's like, if, if so
Jim Love:is the answer to do nothing.
Jim Love:No.
Jim Love:The answer is to do everything in your power.
Jim Love:And there's, there's a, there's something in it that we, we do that just drives
Jim Love:me crazy because we can't do everything.
Jim Love:We do nothing.
Jim Love:That's silly.
Jim Love:Everything you do, everything you do adds another layer.
Jim Love:And that's, that's the, the trick is, you know, is to have it in layers.
Jim Love:Every single layer that you have.
Jim Love:Everyone's better, by all means get to, to, to perfection.
Jim Love:But do something.
Jim Love:Don't, don't do nothing because you know, don't say, don't have an air
Jim Love:gap because somebody can beat it.
Jim Love:Have the best you can have, you know, try to make it better each time and,
Jim Love:and learn from the mistakes of others.
Jim Love:That was my, my, my message.
Jim Love:I hope for everybody learn from the mistakes of others.
Jim Love:It's so much funnier and so much, so much easier.
Jim Love:When you hear somebody's old story and you learn from that,
Jim Love:then learning it yourself.
Jim Love:You know, lying in bed with your gut aching going, will I have a job tomorrow?
Jim Love:You know?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And one of the things I also liked with your, Hey, now I never had to administer
Prasanna Malaiyandi:backup systems, so that's probably why.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Uh, but I've made other mistakes in technology.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So, uh, the one thing, Jim, that I also liked from your stories is, Sort of like
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sometimes we get so fixated on a specific problem or the technology aspects that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:we don't sort of bubble up and be like, what are we really trying to solve?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And like asking some of those basic questions to get people thinking, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like the example you just gave about the air gap, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's like you're so focused on one particular aspect, you sort
Prasanna Malaiyandi:of forget about everything else.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so I think being able to sort of bubble back up and ask those questions,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:important questions, even though they might seem simplistic, but they're
Prasanna Malaiyandi:important to really figuring out what does your solution actually solve.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:What, what is the outcome you're trying to get?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Jim Love:You know, the, and that's, that's what, that's, that's what we forget
Jim Love:is we, we, we don't work towards outcomes.
Jim Love:We work, you know, we think, we think in terms of, well, I've got this
Jim Love:process, this name, this term, this, this, and all this sort of stuff.
Jim Love:Now we're working towards an outcome.
Jim Love:Our outcome is, and it's to provide the security of a business.
Jim Love:It's to provide that business with continuity.
Jim Love:It's, you know, it's to provide the resilience for that business to be able
Jim Love:to survive something we didn't anticipate,
Jim Love:That's, that's, that's, that's my, my fun.
Jim Love:I, I called it backup bingo when I put it together.
Jim Love:You know, you could, you could, you can do it as a drinking
Jim Love:game too, if you've had one.
Jim Love:You have to take a drink, you know, whatever, however you wanna play,
W. Curtis Preston:Never, never have, never have I ever, uh, restored, tried to
W. Curtis Preston:restore a tape that I never tried before.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I actually had that one Jim.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I was at a large, I was at a telecommunications company and this
W. Curtis Preston:was very early in my career and we had been backing up like crazy
W. Curtis Preston:and it wasn't until we went to go to restore the tapes one time.
W. Curtis Preston:We found out that we couldn't read from the tapes.
W. Curtis Preston:We, I mean, I honestly, to this day, I still don't know
W. Curtis Preston:what happened to those tapes.
W. Curtis Preston:It was a perfectly nice, it was a, it was what at that
W. Curtis Preston:time was a high end tape drive.
W. Curtis Preston:It was a 35 94 from ibm.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I, my, my numbers might be wrong, but it was, it was a high-end tape drive
W. Curtis Preston:back in the day and never did figure out why we had made all these backups, but,
W. Curtis Preston:um, you know, weren't able to restore.
W. Curtis Preston:But yeah, that, that, that thing of like, anytime I, I'll tell,
W. Curtis Preston:I'll tell you who gets this, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And that is, you know, you talked about validated the, the biotech, um, industry.
W. Curtis Preston:They have this concept called validated systems.
W. Curtis Preston:And you, you have to, it's like required by law that if you change any part of
W. Curtis Preston:the system, you then have to validate.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, this entire process, you have to validate what's been documented,
W. Curtis Preston:validate that you have all the steps.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, and then you can say that this is a validated system,
W. Curtis Preston:like, it's like with a capital V.
W. Curtis Preston:And only then can that system be used for, um, you know, biotech, uh, type data.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I think we can learn a lot from those folks.
Jim Love:Yeah.
Jim Love:Well, it goes back to that thing.
Jim Love:It's the outcome.
Jim Love:Focus on the outcome.
Jim Love:The outcome is not backups.
Jim Love:The backups are an enabler of the outcome, which is the ability to
Jim Love:restore your, or to make sure that you've got the right system, that
Jim Love:it's all going to work, you know?
Jim Love:It's, uh, and, and it, like I said, it's really easy to get into your own
Jim Love:space and think, I think in terms of I do this, you do this, you do this.
Jim Love:And that's, that's what I mean by, by restoration being cultural.
Jim Love:Like if you want, if you, you know, the ability to restore is a, is
Jim Love:a cultural thing cuz it's a team.
Jim Love:Everybody knows you.
Jim Love:You've gotta be a team and you have to understand what, what you're doing.
Jim Love:And that's, that's, anyway, that's, that's,
W. Curtis Preston:I really, I really like that Jim Restore is a culture.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, uh, there are some environments that have it and there are some
W. Curtis Preston:environments that don't have it.
W. Curtis Preston:And I think the ones that have it are the ones that do better when
W. Curtis Preston:things like ransomware happens.
W. Curtis Preston:So, uh, I want
W. Curtis Preston:to thank you very much, Jim, for coming on the podcast.
Jim Love:thank you.
Jim Love:This has been fun.
Jim Love:Great to meet you.
Jim Love:Uh, uh, Prisa.
Jim Love:Great to see you again, Curtis.
Jim Love:And.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, thanks again, Prasanna even with all of your technical
W. Curtis Preston:problems that you had this week.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I know.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm sorry, but No, Jim, thank you for sharing your stories.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I always like hearing about, I know you said old people stories, but I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:love hearing about it because like you said, I get to learn a bunch about
Prasanna Malaiyandi:like how things were done in the past.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like I learned so much about tape just talking to Curtis.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I never touched tape and I still haven't touched tape, but at least learning about
Prasanna Malaiyandi:some of the issues and challenges is
Jim Love:Well, and you got, you're got a little gray hair there.
Jim Love:You're not like, you know, not a baby yet.
Jim Love:There's these little gray hair there.
Jim Love:It doesn't take long to get to this, you know, before you know, it just, yeah.
Jim Love:Just two or three restores that don't happen.
Jim Love:You're, you're, you'll go gray.
W. Curtis Preston:exactly, exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:That's why, that's why he doesn't have gr that much gray hair yet, cuz he hasn't,
W. Curtis Preston:he hasn't used, uh, tape in anger.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, well anyway, um, we also want to thank our listeners.
W. Curtis Preston:We would be nothing without you and remember to subscribe so
W. Curtis Preston:that you can restore it all.
W. Curtis Preston:There was file but deleted,
W. Curtis Preston:needed you.
W. Curtis Preston:To fix it
W. Curtis Preston:on Facebook don't
W. Curtis Preston:was.
W. Curtis Preston:System isn't worth a space.
W. Curtis Preston:Just for