Billy Field recently joined the Trilio team as Director of Cloud Architecture, bringing with him more than a decade of experience in software engineering, system engineering, support and services, and pre-sale solution architecture. Before joining Trilio, Billy served as a Principal Solutions Architect for copy data virtualizations creator, Actifio as a core component to the Northeast Sales team. He also held previous roles at EMC Corporation and Doyenz.
Billy sat down to share his thoughts on joining the team, as well as his thoughts on what’s on the horizon for the company and the industry.
What enticed you to join the Trilio team?
My decision to join Trilio was based on team and technology. Trilio’s team, which has deep domain expertise, has solved the data protection and recovery challenge for enterprises with OpenStack Cloud deployments. Trilio has the only comprehensive end-to-end enterprise data protection and recovery solution for OpenStack. The opportunity and ability for the company to protect and empower tenants today and apply Trilio’s next-generation backup engine to other cloud architectures tomorrow are very appealing. We are in a great position to lead and shape the community.
What are you most looking forward to within this role?
Trilio has seen a tremendous amount of inbound sales activity and is off to a great start. We have an amazing team, and a huge opportunity to help enterprises more effectively manage their data storage and protection needs. I’m most excited about working with our prospects and customers (end users, OEMs, MSPs) in all phases of an engagement and lifecycle to ensure their success and satisfaction with our product offering.
What will you focus on in your first six months?
We have a lot of activity with existing deployments and active POCs. My team will be focused on all pre-sales and post-sales activities around these engagements. We need to be laser-focused on ensuring that customers and prospects are fully maximizing the value of our product so that they can be successful with it. Ultimately, it is their success that will drive our success, and making sure that they get started on the right foot is important.
What are the biggest challenges facing businesses today around backup and recovery?
The cloud’s scale-out elasticity requires solutions and infrastructure that can be easily managed and deployed. Trilio’s downloadable agentless solution fits this requirement and integrates with a customer’s DevOps processes.
As data sets continue to grow and the need for forever scalable cloud architectures like OpenStack are deployed, correlated backup windows are constantly being challenged. There are only so many minutes in a day. Inversely, recovering equally large datasets run into the same challenges – even if an end user would like to recover a subset of the data. The more data, the bigger this challenge becomes.
Infrastructure sprawl of servers, SAN/Network, storage, and backup media is required to comply with company recovery point and time objectives – this puts a demand on the business for hard and soft dollars. The self-service aspect and single-click recovery that Trilio provides allow for a tenant to easily achieve RPOs/RTOs.
Purpose-built applications anchor data to the infrastructure, making application portability/agility a challenge. The need for an elegant solution like Trilio that captures a point in time of a tenant’s application stack is needed for than ever before.
What tips/ advice would you offer them?
As you scale your data protection program, focus on using today’s technology and tools to build for tomorrow. Your business will grow and evolve, and so will your data storage and security needs. One of the biggest benefits of working in the cloud is its flexibility and its elasticity, but that in turn requires the use of solutions that enable you to be just as nimble. An important aspect of Trilio is that we provide an agentless solution. This allows for rapid deployment and recovery as clouds expand and contract.
What tech trends do you expect will impact businesses in 2017?
As companies embarked on their cloud journeys, there was euphoria to put 100% of their infrastructures into the cloud and eliminate all on-premise hardware. However, as applications shifted to the cloud it opened a different set of challenges and concerns for CIO/CTOs – things like performance, security, data protection, and availability. I believe 2017 is the year we’ll see more of a balanced approach – the year of the hybrid cloud. This initiative gives CIOs/CTOs the ability to place core applications on-premise, with the remaining datasets to reside in a public or private entity such as AWS, Microsoft, SunGard, IBM, and CenturyLink – and reaping the benefits that come from both approaches. Whether private, public, or hybrid, the need for the benefits of the cloud continues to grow. With this, business assurance capabilities and agility will become more and