Cybersecurity: The Role of Storage and AI with Eric Herzog | RSAC Conference 2025

Hey everyone. Welcome back to Text on TV Live from day one of RSAC in San Francisco, California. I'm your host, Lisa Martin.

We've had great conversations with leading cybersecurity experts all day. We've got a great lineup tomorrow and Wednesday, great guest on Thursday, so definitely continue watching. We appreciate your viewership.

My next guest is no stranger to Tech TV shows. My longtime friend and colleague, the Chief Marketing Officer of Finite, Eric Herzog, Eric Award-winning CMOI lost count of how many awards you have. Have you?

Uh, there's, I did Make you count The other day. Yes, you did make me count the other day. It was around 30.

It's amazing. So, in Fin at Storage, what is a storage company doing here at this Premier cybersecurity event? Well, storage is often overlooked by the CISO or the cio.

Is it? And it's not overlooked by cyber criminals. 90% or more of any enterprise's most valuable data is sitting on their enterprise storage.

So if you don't do something, you're essentially not only putting on social media that you're going on vacation. Mm-hmm. You're not leaving the doors unlocked, you're leaving the doors and windows wide open, wide open with signs in your front yard that say, steal my valuable corporate data.

So storage is often overlooked, and it needs to be included in a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. And, you know, the cyber criminals know all the data flows, they watch all this stuff. It's all done surreptitiously.

So they're constantly observing and making sure that you know where the data is and what data they want to go after in order to hold it for ransom or malware or if it's exfiltration. Right. Stealing the data to sell it to somebody else.

So those are all areas where enterprise cyber storage needs to be front and center. And CISOs and CIOs and the CTOs need to understand that if you got 90% of your valuable data there, you might wanna protect it. Yeah.

Might be a good thought. How are you seeing the CISO role evolve into understanding that very challenge that you just described? Is it evolving in the right way?

Um, it's starting to, it's slow. Um, a lot of people in the storage space are imbuing their products with cyber, for example, ours, infinis safe, the bulk of it is for free. You don't have to use it if you don't want to.

But when you buy our storage systems, you get the Infinis Safe technology, which by the way is won two awards here at the show. Congratulations. And, you know, you can turn it on.

It's easy to use. Uh, and it's the ideal thing to help reduce the threat window. It integrates seamlessly with SIM soar or if you've got a sock.

So it integrates into a wider data center Okay. Portfolio, so that it's not just storage on its own. And that's why we think that, you know, CISOs and the CTOs need to understand how much it is.

And we, we have a number of our customers that use it. Um, a lot of times it's been the storage guys who've gone to the CISO and said, by the way, did you know the storage we bought has in FIT isaf, which basically we got for free and it does this, this, this, and then the CISO will go, wow. So CISOs need to just be more comprehensive in their view.

Mm-hmm. They're always thinking about the edge. Yeah.

Right. If you will, the moat and the right, the walls of the catheter. Right.

Uh, they do think about the server farm and the networking. As you know, most of the major network vendors have security built in as well. Right.

The issue is storage guys do too. And we were one of the first to do that several years ago. And so now it's time for the CISOs to realize if you wanna do it right, you need to include your enterprise storage as part of that comprehensive cybersecurity.

Absolutely. That's a, it's a no brainer. And it's not a nice to have anymore.

It's an essential, I, I mean, here we are at RSAC and all the stats on the trends in cybersecurity. It's no longer a is it gonna happen to us? It's when it's how often.

It's how much is it gonna cost. So this can't be an security cannot be an afterthought in anything, whether it's AppSec or storage. It has to be baked in from the beginning, don't you think?

Yeah. It absolutely needs to be front and center. Yep.

Yep. I mean, it is in, in my world, it's a checkbox item. Yeah.

Okay. There's all sign aspects of networking. Those are checkbox items.

There's all kinds of aspects of enterprise storage that are checkbox items. Well, we would argue that if you don't have cybersecurity as a checkbox item in your enterprise storage, you are leaving yourselves incredibly vulnerable. Oh yeah.

90% or more of your most valuable corporate enterprise data. That does not make logical sense. No.

Well, nobody wants to be the next headline, that's for sure. But are you finding that the sales cycle is getting a little bit easier as CISOs and CIOs are understanding the vast majority of our data is sitting on these storage systems. We we're the, the doors are open.

We're the sign, like you said, come on in, steal our data. Is that conversation getting easier? Yeah.

So we launched a new product last year called the INFIN Box G four. That's our storage array product. That's our new version.

And I did a intro call, you know, presenting BEF under NDA with one of our existing customers. Yeah. A global Fortune 200.

And so as we're going along, I had a couple slides on Infinis Safeco, we added some things to it. So the entire presentation was supposed to be 45 minutes. It up being an hour and a half, 45 minutes of it was when I showed the cyber slides, uh, we need to know this, we need to know this, we need to know this, we to know this.

And that just was happenstance. Right. We had a launch deck that included everything in the G four portfolio that came out, which it had some slides on cyber and it completely derailed the meeting in the right way.

They then followed up with a three hour meeting dedicated with the more technical teams on what does Infinis Safe do? How does it work? Yeah.

How does it help reduce the threat window? Uh, you know, we guarantee recovery times. For example, we guarantee no matter how big the data is, and I'm talking, it could be petabytes recovery on primary storage of a minute or less.

Wow. And in fact, we did a public webinar, um, last quarter, and we recovered four petabytes in literally four seconds. I kid you not That's amazing.

And I'm such an old geezer, you know, being almost 70 years old, that when we do demos Yeah. They're live. Yeah.

We don't prerecord anything. No, I know you don't do that. Yeah.

Don't believe in that because your pro, if you can't do a demo live, then your product must not be very good. Exactly. So we do them all live.

We did the same thing with a backup data set. We work with all the major backup vendors. It could be Veeam, Commvault, Veritas, IBM, protect, doesn't matter in this case, it happened to be Veeam 25 and a half petabytes in 12 minutes.

Wow. And no one else can do that. And we g that's do that in writing.

It's a guaranteed do play. Yeah. All that's outstanding.

Because it's essential. I mean, there's no time to waste when an attack happens and it's discovered there is no time to waste because it's brand trust, customers churn. It's, it's can be a brand nightmare.

How do you bring the customers as Chief marketing Officer? Mm-hmm. I know you're out with customers all the time.

How do you bring them into the conversation and and enable them to help develop the infinite safes and the technologies that you So what we do is we actually lead with cyber number one and AI number two. Okay. Although this is not an AI show.

And the reason is when you look at the CIO surveys of spend, both last year and this year, number one and number two was cyber security and ai, we happen to have solutions that are integrated with storage in both of those areas. And so we lead with those and many times I lead with Cyber First. Um, so, and then I talk about AI as well, but it depends on, on who you're on.

If the CISOs there, you're all about cyber. And even with the CIO there, you talk about both because those surveys from all the leading analyst firms both last year and this year are number one. And number two spend plans from CIOs is cyber security and ai.

And when, since we have storage that actually has both of those things, then we wanna be considered as part of the thing. And it's a pretty easy discussion. We have an infamous scare me slide.

Ah, uh, so what does it entail? Uh, well, for example, one of the security analyst firms estimates that the total cost of cybersecurity, which includes headcount consulting, if you do have to pay, if you lose data, how you resurrect that mm-hmm. Because you have to bring it back is around 10 and a half trillion dollars for enterprise.

I'm sure you a LinkedIn post on that. Yeah. And that, that's 15, 20, 25.

Right? Yeah. That's the 25 number.

And that's not from a storage guy. That's for security card. Now that's all in.

Yeah. So that includes preventative stuff that includes what you do when you have an attack. So for example, in many of the areas of the world, such as the United States and Europe, publicly traded companies have to declare if they have a cyber attack, right?

9 billion. That was one company because of a cyber attack. So there's a lot of issues around it.

There's a lot of expense. Don't just think paying the ransom, right. You've gotta recover the data.

Right. You have to get a known good copy because ransomware is not King Kong. It's not Godzilla yelling and screaming.

It is the ultimate Jason Bourne, as you remember, first Jason Bourne spy movie. He didn't even remember he was a spy. That's how good he was.

That's so that's what cybers attacks and cyber criminals are all about. Yeah. So you've gotta be able to prevent, you've gotta be able to recover.

We would argue that the, the ear is here of what we call next generation data protection. Mm-hmm. It's not just about how you back up the data anymore.

It's the assumption, as you said, it's not if you'll be attacked, it's winning how often. Yep. The average enterprise, by the way, suffers 1,653 cyber tax.

Weekly. Weekly. Weekly.

That's average. How many are they? But how many are they detecting?

Uh, well that's the other thing. Are they detecting everything? They may or may not be detecting Everything.

Probably not. So with all of those types of attacks, it's really critical they think about what's the next generation? That next generation includes being able to recover any dataset size of your primary storage in under a minute or less guaranteed.

Right. Or with backup storage, be able to recover it in 20 minutes or less guaranteed. And so how do you recover?

How do you get a known good copy? And part of what we do with infinis Safe touches all those areas, how we do to help reduce the threat window. For example, when Microsoft Sentinel or Splunk or IBM curate our season attack, we actually can have it talk to our storage and automatically start doing things.

Not pick up the phone, not text, not WhatsApp, none of that Automatically through APIs have that software data center wide cybersecurity software or the SOC talk to our storage and start executing things to help reduce that threat window that is modern next generation data protection that does things that no one's been doing in the past. So from a differentiation perspective, when you're standing on your finnet soapbox with your finnet pin, what are 'cause the guarantees, I've not heard that. I've heard some guarantees.

Not to the extent that you're talking about. So I imagine that's a massive differentiator when, when you're doing marketing or when sales are in accounts, be able to show them the proof in the pudding and saying, we're putting our reputation on the line here. Absolutely.

And again, while they're recorded, now when people get on those webinars or see us at seminars or other things, when we're standing in the booth, those demos are live. Yeah. We don't fart around.

Yeah. We just do not do things. We're old fashioned.

But you know what, where's the beef from that old burg? Where is the Beef? That's right.

Good old Eighties. And again, really, I would argue that everyone in it is from Missouri, the show me state. Yep.

So we show good, we don't video, we show and we show live. So it helps a lot, um, helps a lot. Obviously we're high-end enterprise, we don't do entry or mid range storage.

Okay. So our average sales cycle is nine to 12 months anyway. Okay.

Independent of the cyber angle or the AI angle, which we have as well. And we make sure that we emphasize those values. Remember those are not really technical values, they're business values.

Sure. 9 billion filing with the US SEC mm-hmm. 9 billion Yeah.

But obviously your name is all over the news. Oh yeah. Because it's public.

And if you're in the fortune in the global Fortune 2000 ish, that matters. Right. Well, Nobody can afford to be that next headline, as I mentioned, because it's brand reputation.

A a brand can be destroyed in the matter of, of of minutes. So nobody has this luxury of going, ah, we'll do security maybe later. We'll, we'll do it in in these different patches.

No, it's gotta be comprehensive across the entire enterprise. Absolutely. And when you think about what they do right now, the edge, is there a wall to the their castle?

Abso fricking lly. Is there a moat? And is a moat probably filled with alligators, crocodiles and piranha?

Abso fricking lly. Yep. But you know what, last time I saw Robinhood on tv, Robinhood got through all that stuff.

So guess what? Cyber criminals will Yes. Yes.

You've gotta be able to chase them down. You've gotta recover a good data set. All that is critical stuff that you need to be able to do.

And that's something that, you know, next generation data protection that we do with our infin safe technology at, at infinidat is what you need to do to make sure that you are protecting mm-hmm your most valuable data. And again, 90% or better of it's sitting on your enterprise storage. So why leave it exposed?

Why leave the door open? Why have a sign saying, come on in, come steal my stuff. Mm-hmm.

Right. You don't wanna do that. How has ai, you talked about the AI angle and we're in this AI era ever since chat GPT was born, everybody's ai, ai, AI can't go to a conference without talking about it.

But how does it change the game for the better from a cybersecurity storage perspective? Is this an advantage? So Sure.

Absolutely. We have a technology called infinis Safe Cyber Detection. It's award-winning of course.

And what it does is it scan data sets, whether that be a snapshot volume databases, it scans for anomalous behavior using AI and ML technology. So, and it learns through ai. So if there's the Lisa malware and now there's another malware that kind of looks similar to Lisa, it can learn that, oh wait, it's got the same attributes, but that might be malware.

And then as it continues to learn, it can identify and then alert. Okay. And again, that alert through our infin safe cyber detection can be tied to pushing data and pushing that information actually over to the cybersecurity side.

Okay. So in short, not only can storage be a way to recover with our infin safe cyber detection, to have that rapid recovery that we guarantee, but also be used as the storage early warning system that can communicate with the data center wide cybersecurity packages. So that's one of the values of leveraging AI and ML in a cyber storage environment for both resiliency and for recovery.

Huge value add there. Last question I wanna touch on, I know that, that another, you mentioned award, I have it in here somewhere in fida. I just saw this on LinkedIn, made the CRN storage 100 list in the software defined storage category for the sixth year in a row.

Congratulations. Thank you. You over 90% of your, uh, solutions are delivered with Global channel partners.

Talk a little bit about that in our final minutes and how that channel partner program is really enabling customers to become resilient. So we make sure that the partners are extension of our sales force. They don't just fulfill.

And at some companies they say they use the channel, but the bulk of the revenue, having worked at two global Fortune 500 storage companies in the past, it was mostly fulfillment. We don't do that. So we co-sell with all the accounts.

We have global Fortune five hundreds that we brought to our partner base, global Fortune five hundreds that the partners have brought to us. And then we work that transaction together. So we make sure we have a whole training program, both for the sales team and for the system architects and solutions engineers of our partners.

Yeah. That gives them a technical background and a sales background of figuring out what they need to do to sell our technology in all areas, including cyber. But ai, generic, high-end enterprise storage.

What does that mean? How do we deliver both CapEx and OPEX savings? But we have a, a program called the Enthusiast Program that's a global program for our partner base that we rolled out about, um, two years ago now.

And it's a mandatory thing once you sign up with us that you've gotta have employees that get certified both on the technical side and on the sales side. Sales side As well. Last question, I like, I have one more for you.

Since you're always out with customers, what's your favorite customer story? Maybe it's with a partner or maybe it's direct that you think really just shines a light on the value that Infinidat is delivering those guarantees coming to life. What's your favorite story?

So we were presenting at a trade show and we did a panel. So the panel included one of our global channel partners and four end users. And me, I was the moderator.

So as we're talking about, it happens to be on infinis Safe. By the way, the partner was talking about how there's 27 common customers. All of them are global, global Fortune 2000.

Not all Fortune 500, but definitely in the Fortune 2000. And that all of them were using Infinis Safe, all of them. And part of what he has talked about is that they happen to have a cybersecurity practice.

That cybersecurity practice is independent of storage because they sell cybersecurity packages. Okay. Like Splunk and Microsoft Central QRadar, they have that as a separate business.

So what he talked about was how they've basically made sure that the storage guys understand enough about cyber to identify an opportunity. And the same thing with the cyber guys. And so there it was a great story.

It involves a partner, 27 different end users. Wow. All in the Fortune 2000, all leveraging INFINIS safe to help protect their data, shrink that threat window and get to the next generation of, uh, data protection, All about shrinking that threat window.

Eric, thank you so much for joining me on welcome to your first text on TV show. We appreciate your insights. Great work that FIN is doing.

I'll have to check out the booth, uh, in the next couple of days. Great. Well thank you.

And anyone who's here at the RSA show, we are in Moscone Hall North 51 72. So please stop by. We'd love to talk to you about how you can pre protect your data better and how you can make sure that the cyber criminals don't steal it, don't destroy it, and don't wreck havoc with your business.

Absolutely. Again, Eric, thank you so much for sharing your insights. We appreciate it.

For Eric Herzog, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching day one of Text Drunk TV coverage from RSAC. We've had a great day.

Thank you for watching. We'll be back tomorrow. I've got some great co-anchors.

Alan Shimmel is gonna be here. Mitch Ashley, I think some other celebrities that you'll see lots of great con content coming at you within the next three days. Thanks for watching, guys.

Take care. We'll see you tomorrow.