Greg Irwin 0:18

Thanks to Wade, and Tim over at Zenlayer, these guys together with me are going to be kind of CO hosting our session today we're talking about deploying in emerging markets. So it's really about everything that you can expect in terms of what it takes to basically run enterprise class, across South America, Asia, you name it, everything from network compute storage, these guys are the experts at it. So it should be fun to kind of talk through some of the intricacies. Now many of you have been on before. For those who have my apologies, let me just give a quick rundown on format. I try very hard to keep these interactive. So I will go to the group, ask people for stories. They may be simple, they may be intricate. You know, I'd love to get people involved. So that way, we know where we are in context. And we can kind of build on the community, I always ask people, please take, make a real effort to make one new connection. Through our sessions today. We're incredibly proud of the community that comes together. And I know the best way to get value isn't by a connection to me or Zenlayer. It's the community itself. So please, make a personal goal, just to make one new connection across this group. Remember how if we can be helpful there, by all means, reply back to Neil or me. And we'll do that and of course, Zenlayer is here for awareness. So of course, they'd love to talk to you or your peers about anything you're doing that that doesn't that say,

Greg Irwin 2:06

the chat window is when used well, is amazing. So be chatting, drop, little, you know, comments, questions, add ons, whatever. And, you know, I get to go around and ask people to share stories, but the chat window in parallel and are sometimes the best conversations happen in the chat. So share your war stories or share, share your pain, share your love, whatever it is, but get it in the chat. All right, um, I think that's it. Let's get going. Do me a favor. Wade, Wade, Chen, start us off with a little intro on Zenlayer, so everyone knows who you guys are. And what you do,

Wade Chen 2:51

are happy to do that. So I'm Wade, I'm a Senior Director of our global alliances, partnerships and head of bar, US and European sales as well. We have something like 185 pops around the world where we offer a full infrastructure services like the colo, the network, piece, procurement, entire setup, as well as a bare metal cloud. And then we have an SDN product that connects everything, globally, that you can pretty much spit out through our portal instantly. That's in a nutshell, what we have been able to kind of build up. And we work with a lot of different clients that either do CDN private cloud enterprise level, to help them get into these emerging markets a lot faster.

Greg Irwin 3:35

Now, by the way, I've gotten to know you guys, you guys are the underlying pipes for a lot of people getting into emerging markets. So if you say, well, lots of people can get into emerging markets. Yeah, because then layer has already done the provisioning and set the agreements with the carriers in those markets. And they're basically writing on top of them. So I do you know, with a little bit of homework, you can see that a lot of pretty, pretty amazing networks are sitting on top of this bare metal platform that you guys have dealt with. Thank you, Tim. Tim, do me a favor. Quick, quick intro.

Tim Mektrakarn  4:16

Hi, everyone. I'm Tim Mektrakarn. I'm the VP of operations for Zenlayer. My team handles customer success, service delivery and deployment, post sales operations, and IT services so nice to meet everyone. Tim some basics.

Greg Irwin 4:30

How many customers? Wade gave us the number of pops. But tell us a little bit about a little bit more about the scope of business? Yeah,

Tim Mektrakarn  4:38

so you know, we work with a wide range of customer sizes, right? But a large majority are kind of the Ott space content providers, streamers. And so we have about 500 very large customers. And then we have users on our console platform so that there's a couple 1000 there.

Greg Irwin 4:57

Got it. I'm gonna go to a story. I'm going to start us off, let's jump right in, tell us about one company or platforms journey into an emerging market, I'm going to keep it really simple, really broad. Tell us one thing that one company has done fairly recently this, you know, in the last 12 months to get into an emerging market, and we're going to learn a little bit about what it took, and maybe where some of the pain was, or some of the challenges.

Wade Chen 5:27

So we have a lot of those stories. I think that the easy one to kind of share right now is we had something in Russia, Moscow, one of our large public cloud clients who wanted to deploy into Russia, they needed it within 30 days of signing, and it was around 10, cabinets, 200 plus devices, they wanted it to get in really quickly and turn everything up. Right. So basically, for us from when we signed the Esso up with them, it took us 30 calendar days, to bring that alive, we purchased all of the equipment for them, set up the network, as well as you know, rack and stack everything patched, it didn't last install. And because of the tight timeline for the delivery, we had teams that were working in 24 hour shifts to kind of get that into place. In Russia, luckily, you know, we have an office in China as well, that was able to, you know, send, send some people there, and it was a little bit closer, as well as some of the hardware that could be purchased from there to ship into the country, right. And that's one of those interesting things, because the three or four deploy from signing to deployment, including all that stuff in 30 days is pretty ridiculous. Very few people are willing to even try to take on that task. And they had warned us ahead of time that they needed this done. And we were able to kind of pull that together for them.

Greg Irwin 6:47

What's more typical, if I called you up and said, Wait, I want to get into Russia. And I have to tell my boss, that we're going to do this, that it's going to happen and it's going to be ready to go to go live on x day, you're going to tell me Greg to be safe. You know, not to have mud on your face, it'll take How long

Wade Chen 7:11

am I would say what like the typical one, especially in current environment with the chips and the shortage and the shipment delays and everything right and the pandemic. pandemic, you're probably looking at about eight to 12 weeks. Really, realistically to be safe. If you factor in any, you know, padding for logistics issues, people getting in, depending on where you send people from Russia have a weird story about Russia, where one of my one of my friends from the US was trying to go over there for a business trip. And they got shut down and set back because he didn't have his visa in place. So you know, there's other issues outside of that sometimes you'd run into. But it's a pretty safe bet about eight to 12 weeks, depending on the complexity, and the size of the deployments. And then what they want to kind of ship in there. And if there's any regulatory issues around the production items, and everything's

Greg Irwin 7:59

what's special about these mark, I mean, standing up a data center anywhere is complicated, but I'm thinking of myself

Greg Irwin 8:07

provisioning, I'm thinking of myself permits and regulation and, you know, import, but what, in practical terms, whether it's South America or Asia, what are some of the things that you typically see, it's different from, you know, standing up something with US East? You know?

Wade Chen 8:28

Yeah, there's fun examples for everything, right. Like just off the top of my head, I can tell you, Brazil, for instance, you want to ship something in there, the customers a nightmare. It's like 100% plus on the cost. In a lot of these regions that we're talking about, network becomes the major, the major issue, it's not like the US and Europe where everything is, you know, wide open, they have incumbents in there for the carriers, they have carriers that don't want to talk with each other. So you have to use a different strategy to build up the pops to reach your audience. So depending on where your audience is, there are definitely better networks for that. And then some of these don't even some of these countries don't even have carrier neutral facilities, you got to pick carrier hotels. And then because they don't allow other carriers in that makes for interesting ways on how you shift your data around back and forth. those tend to be the major issues that they'll run into. And just understanding some of that helps. I believe, like Hong Kong, China, they have some issues around certain encryption that they don't allow right into the country. So depending on the hardware stack that you'd normally run, that could be an issue, depending on their typical build that you put into data centers, because in the US, there's a lot of high density calves underlyings emerging markets, you're talking about two to four to four kPa Max and a lot of these cases, right? So how to re architecture that like getting more space, or how do you deal with the cooling issue? Those those tend to be things that we run into the most.

Greg Irwin 9:57

So how do you and done Don't turn this into a sales pitch. But I'd like to understand milenko of AWS and get into some of these markets. What's different about Zenlayer? In terms of, you know, what, why Zenlayer, instead of somebody else in getting into these emerging markets? How do you solve some of these problems?

Wade Chen 10:21

Well, AWS initial and because it's a pure cloud, play, right, data, play the Pops, everything is, as you kind of expect, you don't really have a lot of options in terms of running Karis that you need, if you need better performance. You know, AWS is what you get, right? It's out of the box, that's all it is, if you need something custom in terms of the OS that maybe virtualization doesn't support, you're going to need that, right? If there's something in the office, or you have legacy hardware, or you're trying to create some sort of a hybrid environment, it's not something that they they support, there's a lot of reasons why people aren't fully on AWS cost could be one of them. But performance and where, you know, the the customers they're trying to reach or, or even the the ability and the mix of their network that they provide, those tend to be the major reasons that we've seen.

Greg Irwin 11:11

Alright, so let's, let's try one more. You have a customer and they want to find their way into Russia. And I could go with potentially AWS or I could basically build my own rack. On on Zenlayer, where am i is, what's the difference in costs? And maybe you're right, maybe it's network related? Or maybe it's something else. But what's, what's the cost comparison?

Wade Chen 11:36

That's a very interesting question. Two things have popped up, right? I think if you guys have paid attention, CloudFlare released a recent blog entry where they're talking about the costs, or how much markup AWS does on their bandwidth. That definitely would be one of them, our costs are not nearly as high as the AWS. The other one is, if you look at AWS outpost, that is a full stack that they provided to some of these markets, where potentially they don't have a full AWS one, that cost is significantly higher as well, in terms of the machines that they deploy requirements, and then they will fully manage that stack, right? So I would say the bandwidth plus their bare metal and those kind of costs, it's pretty comparable. It's it's significantly higher.

Greg Irwin 12:22

Alright, hey, let's, let's break it out here a little bit. All right, let's, I'm going to stir the pot. And I'm going to ask everybody, let's use that chat window. Please include in there one project or question that you're thinking about organizationally in an emerging market? 1175? Hey, I'd like to hear about intricacies in in India, or, you know, we're thinking about, you know, how to, you know, do Dr. In, you know, in a certain market, but let's put out there so that I'm not guessing on the topics, so that you're making my life easier. And we're hitting on the things that are relevant for you, so that this session is as valuable as valuable as possible. That's my goal. So please, get into that chat and share some thoughts. And in the meantime, let's start stirring the pot. So Joe, Joe I'm going to ask you to be to get on the hot. The Hot Seat first. Do us a favor, give a little intro you'd have to repeat everything on NASSCO. I'd love to talk a little bit about emerging markets. So please start with the London intro of your course, Joe. everyone,

Joe 13:39

I'm Joe. And I'm the daytime job as the director of IT infrastructure operations and cyber security at kichler lighting, which is a Moscow company. In addition to that day job, I'm also an influencer across Moscow for various technologies, mostly in the infosec space. And I've actually posted my question in there. And if you'd like me to Greg, I'll just launch with that. Let's do it. Okay, so my question is, our use case isn't about getting it more customers in other markets just yet. We're trying to work on supply chain. Yeah. And one of the things that we do now is we have a location in Shanghai, China. And we're obviously influenced by the Great Firewall of China and how it's impacting performance more than anything else, as we link via SD win, or what have you. Originally, it wasn't Point to Point VPN. So I'd like to know more about how your solution can help us leverage a connection between Asia and the United States for supply chain, as well as other continents around the world as we look to diversify our supply chain

Greg Irwin 14:59

guys If you're paying, if you're scoring at home, it took us 15 minutes to get to the firewall.

Alright, guys, Wade, Wade. And Tim, tell us how were some of your clients navigating? in it? Was it Ingress egress from China?

Tim Mektrakarn 15:23

glad you brought it up Wade is the expert with China? To answer that one,

Wade Chen 15:27

yeah, this this pops up a lot, there's a handful of ways that you can kind of mitigate it. I think you mentioned you did a p2p in the past, right? That's actually one of the best ways to mitigate it. Because a Great Firewall doesn't affect layer two, it's typically on, you know, the layer three or IP transit layer. And then as it goes through the internet, China itself has a couple of different ways to do that, if I'll circumvent the easiest one, which tends to be a C into or like a premium VA that some of the Chinese telecoms will offer, that is on a different ASN that provides direct routes in and out of China. But it still goes to the Great Firewall, right? So you're still subject of blocking, you're still subject to kind of seeing certain things. The other one, like you mentioned, the, the layer two network 4.2 point, that is a good way to kind of go go through that. But a lot of our customers will say, hey, when I do that, you increase the cost. Sometimes you also have single point to point networks that may be failure. So you want to look at having redundancy, in terms of the paths going in and out of China to kind of support that, so it doesn't fail. But you can always fell over to a DA kind of network, but usually that's going to suffer. And a couple main reasons for that, obviously, is the Great Firewall. And then China has one timezone. Right. So within that single timezone, everybody's trying to use the internet at the same time, that's what kind of creates the bottleneck on top of anything that is blocked. So there are a couple ways to mitigate those depending on what resources you are. So for supply chain, they tend, I guess those are going to be smaller kind of files that you need to push through, you're not pushing through a ton of bandwidth, it just that you need to be able to connect properly. In some cases, DNS becomes an issue, right? Because the DNS resolver doesn't always work well, if it's outside of China, that might cause you an issue. But under there to case, if you have DNS resolving inside China, you can use local one to kind of support that there's regulatory issues around opening Port 80 and 443. that's required in order to access information. So for that port, 80 and 443, you need ICP, which is an internet content provider recordal. And there's a difference in the record on the license, the license requires a you know Chinese entity, and it's much more difficult to get a recorder is what you know, people are usually getting. And then you need to tie that to a domain. Once you have that in place, you can set up infrastructure in country, and then it makes it a lot easier to deliver that in country. What a lot of our clients do is a combination of that if they have an ICP in place, you can set up the infrastructure in country usually in like a data center in Shanghai, would I be trying to take and you know, do some of the activity with SD where we want to do that regionally and not try to do that out of the country, because you'll hit the firewall, then what you can do is between that Shanghai or China data center, usually people run like a layer two to you know, the next site, right? So within SD, wham, that creates a, like the regional hubs where the offices and then the clients will access, hit the Shanghai data center, run that through a layer two, which will avoid the Great Firewall, the congestion there give you a lot more steady ptmc and performance. And then that should hit your next pop, wherever that may be, whether it's in the US, or whatever the case. And then you can exit from there and continue using IP transit. Or if you have a global which a lot of our clients are they doing? layer two connectivity creates a global regional hub that you can set up in multiple locations. And then depending on where you're trying to exit, you can set up the SDN device there and then use a regional hub. So if it was like the US, for instance, US East, maybe you have something in Ashburn, we run the layer two connectivity from Shanghai all the way to Ashburn exit there. And then you can use that as a regional hub for the US East Side. So that gives you a lot more steady latency. And what's a lot of issues that you may run into. That's where the internal network if you're talking about an external network, where you have to face a lot of clients, it's it's another different story, though. Right? I'm sure. Thank you. Yeah,

Tim Mektrakarn  19:44

absolutely. To add to that, to the Great Firewall Does, does an excellent job. Looking at the actual content in the payload itself, right so it can decrypt anything that's TLS 1.2 and under and if you try to run 1.3, it can break open that packet. and inspect it, and it'll just drop it right. And so you'll see, you'll find that even if you try to run one, not three, you won't work.

Greg Irwin 20:09

Because for the most sophisticated clients that you've got, who really care about great throughput in and out of China? What's working? What can somebody who may not have all the resources of Citigroup, or whomever is somebody who has, you know, 100 people on the network team working on? What can somebody reasonably expect in terms of an internal network connectivity, assuming way that they're partnered with you? And and setting it up as you as you direct, maybe doing workarounds on the architecture more so than, you know, to to accommodate doing doing all the right things? What can they reasonably What can you reasonably expect?

Wade Chen 20:57

I always like to start, but if they asked about China, the two questions I usually ask are around risk tolerance, right? How much tolerance to risk do you have? Because that can greatly affect the second part, which is the cost, right? Do you want to do everything perfectly? legally? Do you just want it to work? Do you need it to work all the time, like this critical infrastructure? Or is this like, you know, hey, I need it to work most of the time. And when it does, it needs to be fast. If it doesn't, I can live with, you know, it being down for a little bit. But the reason I say that is, if you go through all of the hoops, it is a long and expensive process, if you just need something that kind of works, there's ways to kind of work around it. So it could be as simple as us providing you with one of our products, it's actually called CGA, we can set up that in Hong Kong as a pop and then using co2, which has the premium access to to deliver into the country. And then that'll really improve if you're just using regular internet. But if you need something a lot more complex than running that pipeline capacity, as well as getting the regulatory stuff in place, right? Those are all all kind of required. The most, I guess the biggest one is how much bandwidth also is needed. Because of bandwidth costs in China tends to be exorbitantly priced compared to like the USA and Europe, you could be looking at anywhere from 16 to $20 per bag, right for regular IP transit, within within China. So if you need a lot of capacity going in and out, those tend to get flagged and maybe make custom issues. So you really need to evaluate exactly what the use cases, and then you know what kind of tolerance you guys have for it. And then you can structure a how to say a solution around that, that meets meets those requirements, right.

Greg Irwin 22:47

I'm going to turn to the group I have, we could spend the whole time here just talking. I have no doubt. But again, I want to stay on, on topic for the group. So I'm going to let's stir the pot, I'm going to ask people, maybe projects, and then that should result in some questions. And by the way, Wade, and Tim, are, are truly the best at this. So they have the capacity to answer. But I'd also love other people to answer. So it just just just there just to keep it collaborative. So I'm gonna I'm gonna invite my friend Adam, . to to to join in here. Adam is over infrastructure of Major League Baseball.

Greg Irwin 23:38

So Adam, we're talking about networking and out of emerging markets. Tell us a little bit about your initiatives and challenges. First of all, you on the news.

Adam 23:50

Hello, and welcome. It's a nice Tuesday afternoon, by the way, I'm standing outside so as I was wearing overweight, a quarter of both 46th and eighth here in New York City. Yes, New York City starting to come back. So as his baseline, actually baseline has been back. So I am Jeff Bay, I head up corporate infrastructure and basically baseball. So, you know, emerging markets is is an interesting space for us. Because the sport itself, I mean, it gets quite well known, despite its roots in the United States and North America. You know, our greatest emerging markets probably continue to be in Asia and central South America, historically, that our overall player demographics and while we've continued to certainly grow and expand the sport, as it's played and mature and professionally, in those locations, tend to be more where we source our talent from rather than operate league. So we do have things like the World Baseball Classic, which unfortunately was was scheduled to be, I believe, this this offseason and was postponed due to COVID but you know, To resolve we do have, you know, I look at it more for my direct personal space, we do have offices, you know, branch and regional offices in those locations. And just the same to the past speaker, it is interesting to think about, in particular with China, you know, some of the approaches, we've had to take the very gently that's, you know, far approach, especially given the profile of who we are and what we do, if necessary, you know, circumvent those controls almost entirely for collaboration, you know, things like zoom, and Google and perhaps other properties that are that are, you know, at any point in time may not be accessible, just so we can stay connected with that staff, but just, you know, the nature, at least my business, above all, we want to maintain cordial formal relationships with those governing entities, because they're the ones that are best positioned to promote, you know, our sport and amateur and professionally into those countries. So we really don't do much any of those locations to go out of our way to, to, you know, potentially offend the national or local governments there.

Greg Irwin 26:07

Adam, you may not see the thread here. Let me let me bring in some meats question, some meat, I'm sorry, I'm going to read it for you. With respect to something Wade mentioned, do you see a great use case for AWS outposts that you hold in the ballpark? Given the differential between what you run yourself versus what AWS charges? By the way, Adam, you and I have been talking long enough. I know you're a big Google structure. So I guess right now, same thing about gantos. But

Adam 26:39

yeah, that's the answer. You know, that's, that's our answer for that. And so, you know, Google has put together a great competitive, you know, in some ways, I would even term superior platform to kw, I said, they're close enough to par for general, you know, purpose use cases. But, you know, we share that we share. And I've shared Google's vision in terms of how Kubernetes and containerization is definitely the dominant, preferred deployment work bottle for for everywhere, really, within the public cloud. Certainly, with when I call the edge for the US, the edge is really those ballparks, that's where we're doing everything from sourcing ball tracking, and working with partners like Popeye to make sure that their technology is properly sourced and all of the statistical data that they're gathering about the player on the field. You know, that's it for us. And we manage the infrastructure, because it is ultimately thought it's not like, you know, Google, or at least the Google model, I'm not sure about the other cloud providers, they're not providing us any of the metal, you know, we're sourcing that generally white label from here, standards, Dell EMC super micros. But in terms of what's become, essentially the hypervisor layer, for us is, is more and more all new software engineering, and the vast majority of our respected applications, even the persistence portions are being put into containerization. And that's why the combination of gK nanto stories really good.

Greg Irwin 28:04

One more, I'm curious about the delivery of broadcast over streaming into other markets, whether you know, if you want to be able to make games or recordings of games available to fans in Peru or or anywhere, globally, how do you manage the delivery of that content?

Adam 28:29

Wow, that's like a whole 60 minute thing in of itself. But just you know what, anybody who's super interested as I am with this, just watch what NBC is going through literally right now, with the Olympics, look at how the claims of ratings being down for broadcast, but ratings blowing through the roof for streaming, my own personal experience of YouTube TV and the devices we're using, like the streaming revolution jumped on top of all of us from a device standpoint, thank you apple in particular, but Google as well, well, before the infrastructure is in place, that's that's probably the biggest infrastructure challenge of, of, you know, that's not connected to war and peace and health and other these things for them for the 2020s is streaming, bandwidth, and throughput. And how we achieve the ability to capture today are all star game was captured in 4k, it was broadcast in 4k, it was streamed in 4k, but the infrastructure in the middle, the piping every hour from your co to your fabric to your Wi Fi to to our ballpark MPLS and replacing that with SD LAN and all this stuff. It's it's much further behind it five to 10 years behind the move to the IP base. It's happening, but certainly not at the pace that our fans and our partners would love for that. And we all recognize that, you know, in the broadcast space, they literally refer to infrastructure, what you and I refer to as infrastructure, compute and storage. Like that's what they refer to as infrastructure. And it's it's really a scaling issue.

Greg Irwin 30:03

Yeah, aren't Adam, I know you're out on the street. Thanks so much for jumping in and sharing with us. Let's, let's keep going around Sumit. Let me get you in live here. Give a little intro, just tell us about your purview at bra at. And then maybe something you're thinking about or working on with regards to emerging markets. So Hi all,

Sumit 30:32

Sumi, I am responsible for our cloud platform product management, as well as the DevOps platforms. So our pipeline tooling within within the organization. So yeah, that title that came through on the list that Nielsen is a little out of date. That's probably from the last time I was I was on one of these with respect to kind of cloud and my question, I guess, everybody read, probably read into that way. We're a big AWS shop. And so my outpost question was around that. So. But as we, with being a global FinTech provider, we do get into situations where we're trying to enter markets, where AWS might not even have a presence. I think, the last time I was working on something, we were looking at Indonesia, and because of the data residency laws, we were looking to host our software on the bank's infrastructure. Recently, we were working on something in Sydney and concerns around because I think at that time, AWS hadn't announced the secondary reason in Australia. So cross region availability and even with when financial services, we had some services that actually need physical infrastructure, because the vendor provides a key that has to be physically plugged in for service activation and things like that, which then public cloud, I think something Wade was mentioning, why would you not be just on public cloud because of these some financial vendors that need still old school activation using USB keys and things like that? So at that point, we were looking at figuring out how to, we I think, previously don't manage any infrastructure ourselves, for managed services, or SAS? In, in Sydney. So we were thinking about if the client wanted us to host some infrastructure, where would we go low? Exactly. So definitely useful to have have the contact if if we get into that situation, I think at the moment, we're just running off public cloud in a single region. But yeah, there are situations where we need to end up even terminating the client on some of our own infrastructure, because they don't want to go publicly over the Internet to AWS. So

Greg Irwin 33:33

is there a real issue with the network costs in region where you're looking at, they just got over a barrel because you need the, you know, certain amount of bandwidth. And you know, for the application to run smoothly, and you just can't provision it for so affordable.

Sumit 33:56

So from our perspective, I guess, because we're not hosting web content. I think the egress costs aren't as crazy as if you are web hosting, where we're mostly doing transaction processing. So the client sends us data in and that's for free. And then we process it and are generally giving out reports and when that none of the even though transaction volumes can be huge. It's not video, it's not web hosting, that's hitting out to millions of users. So I think egress cost is probably less of an issue. It's and also for that reason, we generally tend to use AWS services so that running of say a cluster database doesn't end up costing within the region, kind of bandwidth costs for doing multi AZ type things. But yeah, again, If that sort of thing starts happening, we still have enough on prem infrastructure that we would just pull back. So at least in the US, and then we look at colos, etc, for other locations. So

Greg Irwin 35:14

perfect to Sumit that. Thanks so much for sharing your appreciate. Yeah. Um, let's go over to Michael, Michael , I'm, I'm looking across this group and thinking who's in lots of countries. And I have a hunch that POTUS is in a lot of countries. So that's why I'm, that's why I'm coming to you here. Are you on the line with us? Maybe not, Michael, you with this one? Going once, going twice. Now, okay. Let's skip. How about how about Karen? Karen has gone a little while since I think we've spoken maybe a year or two. Are you online? I am. So nice to speak with you again. Yeah, do us a favor and give an intro please have I was m s ci, ci,

Karen 36:08

corporate index. So we work on setting the indices for the globally. What I do is, is I run globally, the storage and backups and all the all the interconnected pieces in that space. So we are embarking on a cloud journey as well. Our initiatives are kind of going the same direction. And I missed the question because you caught me off guard, I was doing something else. But

Greg Irwin 36:36

no question. The question. The question is we're talking about emerging markets. So and where's the where the sticking points whether provisioning network, data, residents, residency, governance, auditing, policy,

Karen 36:52

we'll name it all we're getting hit with all of them, right. So as a result of moving to the cloud, in our cloud journey, what we're struggling with is that the traditional age old, I think, age old struggle, so we are definitely leveraging as, as Jeff mentioned earlier, we are leveraging Kubernetes very heavily, both on prem and in the cloud, we are struggling with building our standards to get there, we're trying to ensure that as we are a financial institution, we are also having the same struggles with ensuring that we are completely secure. But our biggest, I wouldn't call it an emerging market, our biggest concern right now our biggest, my personal, you know, what I'm responsible for, is the integrity of the data. And, you know, as we do build indices, etc, we have a very short window that in the event that anything were to happen to that data that we would as a company dropped out of existence. So my biggest struggle right now is ransomware, cyber security and cyber attacks.

Greg Irwin 37:56

And I'm thinking, when you saying the concern, does that mean architect have been incorporated into the overall design of your infrastructure and architecture? Alright, know that you have fell over to know where you have failover to know, you know, all the checkpoints of how data flows?

Karen 38:19

Well, I feel like we have, if you will, all the failover and all the checkboxes, I feel like we have all their traditional ones. So now our concerns are thinking out of the out of the box, creating a unique solution for that particular problem that we're, you know, potential threat to us as an organization and globally, to make sure that we think a little bit, you know, out of the box so that we have extra layers and measures of protection that are not hate sake, not traditional. We're everybody does the same thing all the time, right. So there has to be a flavor of uniqueness to what we do, so that we don't jeopardize the integrity of that data. So that seems to be my, my challenge of the week. As far as emerging markets and technologies. It's bearing that in mind as we move to these emerging markets and these emerging technologies, how do we protect them? As we have traditionally, and, you know, what, what applications do we use? And how do we use them such that, you know, when you're in the cloud, there's no such thing as, let's call it dual sight? You're in the cloud or in the cloud? You know what I mean? So let's turn this and

Greg Irwin 39:26

turn it into a question. Let's turn it into a question. You are building security at every step. You're moving to the cloud. And now you're launching an office in Hong Kong. We're an office in Jakarta, where we'd be really darn close we are, what's your question you have here for the group around something you're working on? conceptually, yes, and how it works in Singapore?

Karen 39:53

Well, then that is the question. I guess the biggest question for me is how Has everybody approached the cyber attack and ransomware position with with respect to on premise as well as in the cloud, such that if we were to be hit, how would you respond to it?

Greg Irwin 40:11

Alright, I like it nice and broad. Let's put it to the group. I'm going to ask Tim and Wade, take a first shot. But I'd like somebody else to answer it as well. So be brave, raise a hand, or just, you know, chime in. In the meantime, let's have let's have Wade, and Tim, talk about what some of your clients are doing to protect against, you know, ransomware? Yeah. Yeah, I mean,

Wade Chen 40:47

I think it's, I get what everyone kind of focuses on, right is having a multi layered solution, you know, at the, at the perimeter, kind of work your way all the way down into the core into the app, and then into the users themselves, right. And having awareness training, it's only a matter of when you're going to get hit, right. And so trying to reduce that external footprint as much as you can, and, and obscure kind of whatever content you're putting out there. So you're not known a known entity on there. That's really the only real way to kind of fly under the radar.

Karen 41:21

Yeah, so what we've been doing so let me tell you kind of some of the things that we've been doing, and maybe you guys can chime in and say, Hey, girl, you're crazy or no. So some of the things that we've been doing are, we actually have one way, single, single direction traffic, we have snapshot well, their cloud direction, or cloud directed snapshots, we've we're leveraging the secure envelope for REST API. And we are not using any vendor solution at all, we're actually growing it ourselves intense intentionally. Because the first vendor who gets their software hacked, you know, X amount of clients are exposed. So we don't want to fall into that bucket. Right. So we've used the encrypted envelope with Azure. Just prior to open the REST API door, we're using single, like I said, single direction traffic. Now that's to and from, and we do have on prem as well as in the cloud. Let's call them, I don't want to say air gapped, but there is an air gap for certain. Make no mistake, there are air gaps in the middle. But there are some logical, let's just call them partitions, not necessarily air gaps, but we are doing our best that we can to air gap. But we're finding in some spaces like AWS, or not AWS, I'm sorry, we're Azure, we're finding those air gap opportunities are to me, they're riddled with holes.

Greg Irwin 42:53

I'm sorry, that was a key point right there at the end. What do you mean, an air gap solution is riddled with holes? I thought that was the definition of air gap.

Karen 43:03

Well, so though, air gap, you would assume that there is a complete separation from one one site or one location to another? When you're an Azure? There isn't? So you go to us West, it's all logical. It's all virtual. So you go from in our particular case, we have us West two, we're going to US East two, we're actually going to Singapore as well. But that tertiary copy is still effectively on Microsoft's network. So if they get trashed,

Greg Irwin 43:33

so do we, huh. That's really interesting. All right. Has anybody thought through that? The fact that they're really, reasons aren't really partition? That's crazy. Well, yeah,

Sumit 43:46

the with public cloud, I guess the biggest problem is it's a single control plane, even though there's like even when I think of AWS even though each region is a separate control plane, but there is a global infrastructure and some of those resources are global in nature, DNS, for example, is yes, is global. I am to some degree is global kms, etc. So the only way to kind of truly air gap is to manage your own encryption and hosted over multiple clouds, and then that becomes very expensive very quickly.

Karen 44:37

Yes, it does. Yes, it does. So we are actually leveraging the multi cloud conversation. We're starting to have that conversation now. We are managing some of the encryption ourselves. But to your point, you nailed it. We are struggling with those single control planes that, you know, I I we we need to get out of our current infrastructure, we are at a very, very clear path for the organization to move off premise to the cloud. But it's coming with, in my opinion, a lot of risks and a lot of struggles.

Greg Irwin 45:13

Great, great feedback. Karen, I'm gonna Thank you. Let me ask, has anybody found a design that provides comfort?

Sumit 45:29

So I heard from AWS and one of the current very senior executives who was at Netflix, that the way they were handling backups was completely segregated account, and just just putting backups in, in that segregated account that nobody ever logged into. Yes, almost the keys were in a safe type of situation. So even though it's, it's still virtual, to some degree, from a control plane perspective, but the backups were in a separate account, so if I am was hacked for one organization, this backup account was in a completely separate, separate org, so to speak. It's almost almost like the I'm not old school infrastructure. person, but is it? Is it onboard? So am I confusing email terminology and backup terminology. But yeah, offsite backup, virtually, in the public cloud creating,

Karen 46:44

yeah, we, we did the same thing. We have storage accounts that are specific for backup and recovery, but that are not published to the global world, right. So they're actually a private account. We have the same phone, and we have that actually, in another cloud. So we are, you know, we are doing some of that. So but that is great. I feel like that's one of the things that we had to do.

Joe 47:09

So from a technology perspective, you know, there's a lot of talk now about immutable, basically, right? Once storage that's available on the cloud with the encryption and you hold the key and all of that. Are you leveraging that type of approach?

Karen 47:26

Do we actually do? So we have net apps as well. So we do NetApp filers, we do snapshots on immutable storage. So worm, worm protected storage, right once read many, but an Azure actually offers it. But it's funny because it's on a shared infrastructure. So

Joe 47:45

okay, yeah. So Karen, everything's going to be as good as the vendor actually is protecting it until someone a little bit smarter finds a way to crack it. And that's probably a win. Not if scenario for anything in our business, right? Well, I know, I know, I know, thing that we're doing right now. And we are looking at the immutable storage is one of our options. But right now, we have an off site, tape library. And I don't know what volume of data you go to actually, actually store here. But we have a tape library. And in its very essence, it is air gapped. So Right, right, we're gonna put a physical library in somebody else's data center, and push it there if it's applicable.

Karen 48:29

In this case, it wouldn't be we have about 15 petabytes worth of capacity. That's kind of what I would call the pride and the crown jewels, if you will. And it's a lot. We got rid of tape tape libraries about five years ago, um, but it is the perfect air gap solution because no one can touch the tape. The only problem with us is that if data is over 10 years old, we become no longer relevant to the world. You know, right.

Greg Irwin 48:56

Karen, I'm gonna make you I'm going to I'm going to, I'm going to pause here on this on this thread, because I think we could spend the rest of our time on it easily. And I'm looking at I think we have 10 minutes left. There's several others I want to try and get into, into our mix here. So let's, let's do it. Let's try and finish strong and share a couple more stories. And then we can all get back to work or get back to our day jobs.

I'd like to invite in Michael, Michael, I saw it he said he had some issues. Getting turning it on. Are you able to connect with us here? Yeah, I couldn't find the window.

We got it. All right, without you found us. So yeah, to give us a real quick one, in terms of some of your emerging market strategies, challenges. I notice at Otis element,

Michael 49:57

emerging market just means We are trying to develop and integrate applications via low code platforms and our emerging market is to, it doesn't have anything to do with what is designed for emerging market. It's a strategy that's enterprise wide, utilize low code, platforms to bring odysseas applications to market faster, and better and cheaper and go and do do cloud transformations migrations. In parallel,

Greg Irwin 50:47

I missing some of the big picture. I think I don't know much about Otis. But is this about empowering employees reaching out to customers? what's the what's the overriding goal? Faster, faster? It what's what's the goal,

Michael 51:04

faster deployment of their applications being accessible through API's, code development for new applications, utilizing low code platforms, and doing a transformation to cloud technology for our infrastructure. That's pretty much it didn't make any difference whether it's emerging markets, which is a target for Otis as well. China is, is high on our radar. How do you how do you run your infrastructure in China? We, we haven't yet. We're in the process of building it out. Because China has a great deal of applications that they require. To be fast because of Otis is broad spectrum of applications that they're utilizing from IoT, to CRM to, to finances to payroll to Treasury Department, they have their they have a lot of requirements when it comes to a broad spectrum of application usage. So China is just one of those aspects to get a much deeper scope in being efficient when it comes to IoT, and fixing the infrastructure that oldest supports. Alright, Mike, any questions you have for the group? No, not at this time. Thank you.

Greg Irwin 52:51

Thanks for joining. Michael, can I ask you to share a thought or two you've been listening intently. Given given intro, what was one or two observations or questions you get?

Michael 53:05

Like the problems are the same across the planet. And for us on the challenges we have, we're trying to move some stuff to the cloud, we're running into problems with jobs a problem? Well, the same problem of keeping things restricted within a border. We have control of goods program, which requires data to stay within the physical boundaries of the country, if we've crossed that border, there's an export charge. So moving to things like zoar, that single plan is causing us all sorts of problem. AWS is a little more compliant, and they got data centers that we can leverage locally, which isn't too bad. The emerging market thing is not something we would look at right now. Most counties you go to countries you guys have talked about or on our restricted lists, we can actually do business with them. So kind of interesting. I think it's something I need to keep in the back of my mind as we move forward with stuff as we move, make our transition into a cloud based economy, right. So we don't have to get there. Having information like this and you're sharing stories has been absolutely enlightening. It's given me lots of lots of things to think about him and taking notes as we go along. So thank you for that. And then thank you for allowing me to spend time and listening intently in this so always welcome.

Greg Irwin 54:21

Thank you, Michael. Good guy, shepherd. Same, same thread. Big, big Why have you got you got a big wide open fairway and mental thoughts or questions you got from the group?

Guy 54:36

I'm with Mike. My, I'm on the other side of the planet. I'm I'm doing Europe, in Africa, in the Middle East. I'm not in the forest.

Greg Irwin 54:49

This is about the non us world, US situation where you may not have, you know, the the network that you might have otherwise had.

Guy 54:58

Yeah, and it goes by Back to the same thing as is everybody is, it's about data protection, being able to, you know, secure the data, keep it encrypted, keep it secure, you know, as as, as it's being accessed across the world. And that's the biggest concern, whether it's using, as Karen was using Kubernetes. In put it in different data centers, or as your AWS or gppc. It's all the same. It's it's, how do we keep the data protected, so that it doesn't get ransomware? Or even get leaked out? Because there's a lot of privacy implications. And as Karen said, the first one who gets you know, leaked or hacked, or that's a reputation killer, right there. Someone's got to be that first person, but it's gonna kill the reputation.

Greg Irwin 55:46

Yeah. Something something you're working on. Currently architecture or something you're working on, and that maybe maybe it's not even data protection,

Guy 55:58

one company's current currently are we're focusing on, we have Doctors Without Borders, because I work with a regional health care university system that does a lot of research. So we have people that are out in the field, that are trying to access the data and input the data, as in real time. So we have those concerns of how do we get it in the middle of Nigeria, or, you know, Miramar or these places where they're at, and keep it secure and keep it so that they have connectivity and access to the data as it's being processed back here in the big data centers with the high performance computing to give it back to them. So that's been my concern. Like I said, it's you started talking GDPR, you're talking about patient health data, you're talking about PII, you're talking about all these things that we have to keep secure.

And it's not a simple task, because there's too many moving pieces. And which is why we normally bring it back on premise is we can control those pieces, where an Azure AWS g TPC, GCP, we can't. And that's that's always the concern. So that's what we're currently working on. We have apps right now that are currently out in Africa that is tracking real time.

medical issues that we can't, we are trying to keep secure issues. So we can't you're trying to keep secure.

Greg Irwin 57:24

God, our got a guy. Thank you. Let's, let's wrap up with Tim. And, Tim, I'm gonna ask you to help us. You know, some final comments. And just a reminder, again, we've done this layer, these guys are part of the pros of moving data in and out and running running data in all markets, not just Asia, South America, Europe. Tim, we talked about why it kind of narrowed down to data, data security, data privacy.

Tell us a little bit about some of your takeaways for the group. Before we before we call this, call this call? Yeah, for

Tim Mektrakarn 58:09

sure. I mean, like everyone said, it, a lot of people are in the public cloud, what we're finding is that you need diversity, right with your vendors, to keep them on is to make sure that you have redundancy, because there's been a whole lot of outages, you know, recently with a lot of D big DNS providers, and then it takes out huge sites, right, and huge web assets. So, you know, whether you're streaming content, you're serving content, you're hosting your own data, the more that you can control, you know, the the better, right? And so, you know, for us, we just, whatever you guys want as customers, right? We can provide you racks, metal, network connectivity, acceleration solutions, right. And so we just want to overall, just give you a better give you and your customers and your end users a better a better kind of performance when you're on the Zenlayer platform. And so that's our value add. And if we're not doing that, we're not we're not doing our job.

Greg Irwin 59:14

Tim, thanks to you. And thanks to Wade, and everybody for taking some time insurance and stories. Again, make a point to connect across the group, we can't possibly cover the detail that we need to in a high level one hour session like this, it was pretty darn good. But there's a whole lot more to get answers to the things that you're you're really working on. So I'll take advantage of that. And of course, exam layer can be helpful in that regard. All the way up. Let's wrap it up. Thanks, everybody, and have a great day. Everyone, cheers, everyone. Thank you very much.