Test Data Management and Compliance – Steven Chung, Delphix

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome back to techstrong TV, you know, I would really happy when I saw this gentleman and on our schedule because we haven't had anyone from delphics here on techstroke TV in a while and you know, they eight years of doing devops don't fix has been accompanied. I think we've covered from day one and It's good to have someone from Delphox back.

I want to introduce you to Steven junk of delphics Stephen. Welcome to text strong TV. Thank you, Alan.

Thank you for having me this morning. It's a pleasure. So Steven, I I didn't say your title.

I was gonna kind of leave it to you. Why don't we start off with this? Why don't you give people a little background on who's Steven changes?

And then if you don't mind, let's talk about, you know, just level set. On who Dell fixes what you guys do. I know over the years right?

It's the mission has continued to grow but you know, it'd be good to bring the audience up to date. Right. Yes.

Yes Stephen Chong. I'm the president at delphics. I run or go to market operations been with the company for three years and prior to delphics.

I was Chief Revenue officer at a startup called pager Duty. So I know there's some people are development communities. So I came from the devops tool chain space help take that company from series B through our IPO at the New York Stock Exchange in April 2019, and you know prior to that had done since companies like Salesforce and and semantic and other infrastructure and application software company.

So been in the Enterprise B2B software world for 25 years. so, you know why delphics and then I'll kind of get on to who delphics is for those who may not be familiar, but Delphics was fascinating to me because this was a late-stage startup that that really belongs to the devops tool chain space that no one's ever heard of before and so if you're a developer or you come from sort of that technical background of building applications, you think about all the Innovation that's been invested in helping to automate application software development. So you have tools like Splunk you have tools like pager Duty you have an entire devops tool chain out there to help developers be more productive and build sort of this self-service model that the Amazons in the world have been developing over the last 10 years.

However, the long poll on the tent that that we often see is data, right? So while we've automated a lot of this other stuff monitoring productivity GitHub gitlab, you know, do all the stuff on the application software development. You're still stuck cued by data right data City in silos and you have to create a ticket ask your dba's to give you data to test to complete your job.

And so even though so much of the application development life cycles moving really quickly. You're kind of constrained by data. So data is like if you're running a bakery the analogy I would use is data is kind of like the oven you can keep putting more chefs and the kitchen, but if you only have one oven everybody's waiting for that one oven.

So what we're saying is instead of one of it what if you can have a limited unlimited number of ovens you have we can virtualize all the databases within the Enterprise no matter what they are modern old in between and be able to serve that up and automate the flow of that data to developer so that An on-demand so instead of writing a ticket and having to ask for data that will be there three weeks later to be able to complete your job tested put into production. Why don't we give it to you on demand? So you can go do it whenever you're ready.

That's one the other method would be how do I fully automated into a cicd pipeline flow where nobody has to do anything? It just goes into production. So we think about you know, an Enterprise.

It's not a natural for a large Enterprise with a mission critical application to only do like one major release per year because they're so scared of all the dependencies that go to it or if you're doing it maybe a couple times a year. That's all they have time for giving all of the compliance and all the processes that are around that well what if we could just give it to you on a daily basis or automate it where you can do multiple releases per day. So what we see is the most Innovative Enterprises have fully automated their devops processes by unlocking.

But I would call The Last Mile of the devops tool chain, which is data and automating that final piece of it to the extent that they're doing several releases per day or in the case of a Fortune 50 tech company. They're doing you know dozens of releases per day, right? So this gives one an advantage in going to Market with new applications new offerings in this digital economy that you know, you can you can you can be a traditional business a traditional Enterprise and be as agile as you know, the Amazons and the airbnbs of the world and that's what that's what we want to get to so that's delphics.

And you know, I think the other reason why we've had such great growth is besides the automation from a devops tool chain perspective and accelerating application data life cycle. We also have a masking product that helps with data compliance. So that's the other piece.

So it's one thing to be able to give people data. The other issue is well. That data has to be masked and it has to be compliant because I can't just give you Alan's data production data to a developer where he or she can see it.

So we we have a product that will that we call continuous compliance and what it does is that it masks data with referential Integrity such that you have a single source of Truth or Alan and Oracle is Alan in you know db2 is Alan in SQL Server all the different products where there's a single source of truth that we can mask with referential integrity and be able to check the big compliance box. So that does not slow down the application development process. So the net of it is, you know, we can get you from doing one release a year on your e-commerce application your b2c mobile application instead of once a year.

How about once a month about once a week? How about every single day so when the business comes to you says Allen I got a great new savings account product that I want to go watch and I need it like yesterday. And you're like, well, you have to wait till next year or give me six months versus okay customer.

How about I get that to you next week or you're a retail company and you want to launch a flash sale on a brand new product that's super exciting. And you know, you don't have to plan it six months in advance. Like I got a great Innovation.

I need to get this out to Market next week tomorrow giving companies that level of agility drives revenue and revenue growth while still being compliant in this world that we're in is very exciting to see exos because they're kind of start between the Rock and our places. If you're a CTO or a CIO. It's like the business wants to move fast.

But also the business has said the CFO has said well, we we have to do this safely. We have to make sure that our data is compliant with gdpr and CCPA and all this other stuff that is sacrense. So security and compliance our table states that has to happen before anything else happens, right?

Well the issue is then the business the people in marketing and Thousand product like well, we want to get to our customers. And so what what's really exciting is Delta's mission is we want our customers to have their cake and eat it too. We want them to be able to have that agility and that speed while at the same time doing it safely and in a way that's that's compliant with all of these Myriad of regulations that exist It's All Pause right there.

Now. That was quite I think I did. Well, it's a good place to pause.

I think you did a great job sending the table on that, you know Stephen one of the lessons I've learned is first of all data is sacristown, right? It's it's all about the data stupid, right? Sometimes we lose sight of that but not all data is equal when we talk about getting the data to Developers.

What what kind of data are we talking about there Steven is it results of tests or feedback loops, you know from deployed apps or something else? Okay, but you know because this data and then there's data. Yeah, what we talking.

Well, I'm talking about all types of relational data, but I'll tell you the ones that matter the most to your point is sensitive data. So let's talk about sensitive data. So let's talk about some of the industry verticals that we serve.

So think about Health insurance where you have HIPAA records, you have patient data super sensitive stuff very large amounts of it. So we have large health insurance companies. You know Health Care is a huge vertical for us and that is very sensitive data.

So if you want to test something like a claims processing application, so I'm coming out with the latest and greatest claims processing application so that if I want to file my medicare Medicare claims with an app with, you know insurance company X that I can do. So in a modern way, right? I don't have to call somebody I can download an app and I can feel safe that if I wanted to go check on the status of my claim or whatever.

I can go do this in a modern way. Well in order to build that You have to make sure that you have access as a developer to production quality data that is still obfuscated. That is still mass that still gives you the the quality of the testing that one needs but still is saved.

And so that's an example of that sensitive data that can be a very large data set right and it's it's a regulated industry. The other would be clearly like banking. We have a lot of financial services companies.

We have large Banks or customers. So think of the millions or tens of millions of banking customers so similar thing I'm so and so bank and I want to upgrade and build a new b2c mobile application because you know, it's it's time we do that well to test that we have again personal information that has to be protected and if you think of it in the context of not just because it's good business to protect personal information the government requires it and will Levy have to be finds if you're not in compliance, and so there's these four stories and I'll protect the names of Companies where a large digital brand has has been fined for over a billion dollars of the European Union for several infractions of the gdpr role and that's just not something you want on your brand. There's Financial liability, but there's also you know kind of brand damage where I don't want to do business with a customer that doesn't protect my information and Telecommunications is the other one right where there's been notable breaches.

This is all public information. By the way, the whole team T-Mobile reach that happen and the class action lawsuits. And so we have a customer in Europe that that has hired Dell fix and as deploying our technology to protect a petabyte of data that has all of their customer records in it.

And it's it's again, it's it's kind of shocking to think that they would spend that kind of money in this kind of economy that is challenging but the boards are saying this is table Stakes. This is Sacrament. You got to have it but the beauty is we'll say What will make you compliant but you don't have to give up your agility for that compliance.

So compliance is usually viewed as like an anchor data by itself is an anchor it's slow but then when you add layers of security and compliance protocols, then it makes it even slower. What we're saying is Well, what if we could just give you that agility because we'll be able to provide all these virtual copies of your database to the extent that you know, you don't have to go slow. You can actually go faster and be in compliance and that that is an unbelievable value prop and clearly when you can do something faster like that and with greater deficiency that it also drives a hard cost saving.

So even in this difficult economy, then you give them like a three three prong value problem. We'll make sure that we take the compliance box so you're safe. Secondly, we'll make your developers happy.

We'll give you agility and will increase the throughput of your software development. So they're happy and then finally, you know, because of this agility and efficiency, you're actually going to save money we can drive hard cost savings on your infrastructure because you need less resources to go do all of this work and by reducing your hardware and infrastructure costs, you're also saving the you're awesome mitigating your carbon footprint. So it goes back to sustainability.

Well, if you think it like, you know virtual virtual machines right as a way to drive efficiency, so think about virtual data, right? So if you can take you know, a petabyte of data and shrink it to you know, 10% or 5% of the size, you know in running your business, then you can dramatically reduce your costs as well as your impact of electrical consumption which then reduces your CO2 carbon footprint which again it's just another box that and I won't say that we we saw it at the early stages of delphics to say we're going to build a sustainable software company. It was just a consequence of you know, being more efficient in data centers to say, we reduce the the cost of operations.

We've reduced the amount of electricity and resources we have to consume. org and a moment. Let me let me but I want to go back to something else.

You said earlier and that is look in these choppy Economic Times and quite frankly as you and I said here today Stephen who the heck knows what 2023 I mean, you know, there's good. There's bad. There's a lot of uncertainty.

Let's say that one of the things I read is a new a new Requirement coming down the pike this year. I forgot Foods the nist framework or something else where? the boards of these large companies public private have to sign off on the cybersecurity and compliance.

You know a processes and policies that you know are being implemented. And this is truly. I mean, I don't want to be one of these guys selling Fudd right for your uncertainty in doubt, but this is truly going to bring responsibility.

For doing you know for taking reasonable actions on your cyber and compliance right up to the board level right? Almost bypassing you in the sea level going right to the board level and and that is gonna be a reason why they're gonna want to make sure that they're doing things like widelfics is talking about because I mean, no one wants that headache, right? And it's in the news every day.

Yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

So I mean and there are macro reasons why boards are driving even like security cyber security has been an issue ever since the rise of the internet, right? So we've always had that but it's intensified recently and I what I can share with you is I travel around the world I talk to cios and CEOs and see so they're like Hey Stephen if you haven't noticed these days there's a huge all-out war in Eastern Europe and you know, the the protagonist against the West are our actively waging cyber warfare against the West against the European Union against the US and then there's so yeah these hostile nation states that we know who they are. I'll protect the names of the you can sort of guess we don't have yeah, you know, we know exactly what's going on.

It's so this isn't some you know, very smart geek that's randomly somewhere. Just trying to go hack into the nsa's network. These are host.

Nation states were trained Engineers who are trying to take down and slow down the West in any way shape or form as part of that process. So we have hostile nation states. We still have cyber criminals that are that are out there making money off of it.

So we just live in this world where we're cybersecurity is is a huge issue. And then the second piece is that you know, the data privacy regulations and so as as these these these economies are evolving the citizens demand that they're they're privacy be protected and so the coming down hard on companies to find that stuff up. And so again, it creates that quandary for the cios the CEO.

So the world is I have to be compliant, but I also have to run a business and the agile and and to stay in business. There's there's no other choice and getting more. org.

I know it's a mission. It was started by Delphox co-founder CEO Jed what but if you wouldn't mind give us a quick. org is a nonprofit started by delphics to solicit technology leadership CIO cto's around the world many of whom are our customers to collaborate with and share best practices and how to run more sustainable it operations.

And so if you think about look I got all these data centers, they're very resource intensive. They have a huge carbon footprint. You know, how can we leverage?

You know the Cloud public Cloud for example to promote greater sustainability? What can we do within our own it practices to promote greater sustainability. And so we really think of the context of how do we make our own Enterprises more sustainable?

But also how do we drive our products and services for our for the external world to be more sustainable and the idea would be that this nonprofit will share content best practices and knowledge so that you know, we can we can basically You know promote this on a global scale and I'll give you a simple example of this is just there's there's some vendors that have been used for E-Waste. So think of all the it departments that have old computers or phones and they just somewhere in a warehouse. What do you do with them?

You can dispose of them you could throw them into a garbage dump, you know, what a waste with all that and then there's companies that actually take that equipment many of which is perfectly good equipment and Donate that to schools that are that might be under schools. For example, so figure out a way to dispose of electronic waste and that that seems like such a simple concept. But if you think about all of the corporations around the world and how many devices that they have and we don't even think twice about this is like what and so now like the cials like hey, I use a vendor here I use a vendor there and here's a great way to dispose of your E-Waste either and who knows maybe even make some money off of that right by disposing but in the very least do some good with it, but then there's more Advanced Techniques of like, well, you know where you buy your electricity from right?

If you're a data center, could you buy it from a place that has sustainable electrical sources like hydroelectricity or nuclear that is zero emission versus buying your electricity from a Coal Fired plant. So there's all sorts of specific actionable ideas and methods that are being shared through this organization with the mission of spreading that at your cross all of the IT industry as well as within within companies and governments around the world so that people can continue to evolve their their best practices around sustainable sustainable it I love it Stephen. Unfortunately, I got to cut it here.

We got people in the waiting room for our next interview. But hey, man, pleasure having you on here. Don't be a stranger right?

Come on, we can continue this discussion. Come back real soon. In the meantime.

That's the luck with delphics and keep you guys keep doing. What you doing. Thank you very much Alan.

Thanks for having us today. Pleasure. Steven chunk president of delphics here on Tech strung TV.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.