Rolando Rosas 5:22
love it does the kind of stories we’d like Happy Endings around you. I’m sure you do, too. Charinna
Charinna Kushnir 5:27
we love to go from zero to hero. Don’t we guys?
Rolando Rosas 5:29
we got to do this. Every Absolutely. And that’s why let me tell you, boss, Charinna. Let me tell you, you know what I hope I hope your husband doesn’t mind me throwing out words like love. I love this woman. She’s a great woman. So pardon me if I throw those words. But let me tell you about Charinna. I love this woman because she’s awesome, just all around awesome girl. But let me just tell you a little about her professionally. She’s the EVP for Data Canopy and is a champion builder of Channel Sales teams. That’s what she’s known for, with a demonstrated history of working in the telecom industry. She’s a pro. She’s a veteran of 20 years, just like she said, she is unrivaled when it comes to working with channel partners, and cloud and the cloud Voice over IP as well as colocation. So they’re all under her roof. She could probably talk about those in her sleep. She is by far one of the most traveled EVPs I know of every time I looked at LinkedIn or Instagram, she’s working out she’s at a bar mitzvah, she’s at a birthday. She’s at dinner with clients and she’s working with partners like I get exhausted just watching her LinkedIn post. I get a workout traveling all over the place. So if you’re looking for somebody like that to help you out with cloud matters, that is your gal in your corner. And I want to welcome back to my pad podcast making her second trip to What The Teck? Charinna Kushnir. Thank you. Thank you. Pleasure to be with the two of you. Awesome. Always a pleasure, Charinna. We love spending time with you.
Charinna Kushnir 7:07
Yeah, we have a new hashtag over here a Data Canopy, where in the world is Charinna Kushnir? That seems to be the story of my life. I think I’ve been in seven cities in the last 30 days. I think the worst part about it is waking up and trying to remember which city you’re actually in. I think that’s, that’s the hardship part of it. But that’s okay. We’ll take that over sitting in quarantine. Right?
Rolando Rosas 7:33
Absolutely. Well, look, look at this look at this year, and let me share something with you. Like I’m on LinkedIn right now. Just showing it to you. I know the folks that are that are listening in won’t be able to see this but if you go to lips to Charinna is LinkedIn. That’s Nashville. Look at this. Look at this Dave. Look.
Charinna Kushnir 7:50
It’s a lot it’s a lot of hustling around.
Rolando Rosas 7:53
Like I’m enjoying vicariously through her all her adventures on LinkedIn and your client dinners or Ukrainian dinners. What else we got we got Georgia channel connect in Nashville got a bunch of posts there, we got a bunch of swag that you’re always promoting, you know, all kinds of stuff. It’ll
Dave Kelly 8:11
Rip Van Winkle there, I saw that.
Charinna Kushnir 8:13
That was a that was actually one of our marketing ideas from from last winter to help perpetuate the brand is we actually had 100 Little Elf on the shelves. And one of my actual partners sewed 100 little Data Canopy T shirts for those elves Believe it or not. Talk about a feat to get that done. But yeah, that was a great holiday contest. We ran last
Rolando Rosas 8:42
oh my gosh, you guys I when I look up and you say you know we got some swag. It’s never the same, right? You between you and your your wonderful gals that are at the Data Canopy. Y’all come up with some really good marketing stuff. You know, it’s never never a boring moment over there. Speaking of boring Charinna we were just talking before we went here and hit record about some of the biggest mistakes that you’re seeing, you know, started with COVID still going on right now with customers that you were telling us about, you know, what are you seeing? Are people still making the same mistakes now that the fog is starting to clear.
Charinna Kushnir 9:18
So it’s interesting, I would more put it in the category guys have buyer’s remorse, right. Like, you know the old adage, right? Nobody got fired for buying IBM, right. So it’s the same thing with AWS and Azure. When you start talking about cloud technology, and whether you’re talking about the IT director, the CTO, the CFO, everybody knows who AWS and Azure are, right. So in haste, a lot of companies during COVID When they suddenly had to send their entire work force home, and we’re like, how are we going to access our servers moved their entire network? to the cloud. But what a lot of people didn’t understand is, it’s cheap to put it in, it’s expensive to pull it out. That is the downfall of the public cloud. And what I have seen over the last two years, is that there’s a little bit of angst around private cloud, because not everybody’s sure about who’s maintaining it, and it’s my private cloud and in my basement and dribbles could trough through the wires, right. And then I all my data is gone. Versus AWS and Azure, everybody knows that’s not going to happen, right? So, you know, when you get a customer like the one I had yesterday, who has a $9,000 month Azure bill. And when they went and looked at what it should have cost them, they saw a $2,000 price tag, because nobody talks about egress fees. Nobody talks about how much it cost to pull it out of the cloud, they talk about how much it cost to put it in.
Rolando Rosas 10:58
And you had we had on Rachel, a while back ago, and she was saying that that’s really still I mean, we had a month ago, she’s still so many folks, when they are thinking of going to the cloud. They get enamored by other things and other pieces of the cloud, but they don’t think about those egress fees, they can add up really quickly. And why why is that? Charinna? Why do these egress fees, is it just everybody’s nickel and diming? You with egress fees, and everybody’s, you know, kind of paying as you go in a different manner? Or why is that?
Charinna Kushnir 11:29
Yeah, I mean, everybody, I think that most companies don’t necessarily have a grasp on how much data they’re they’re pulling out on a daily basis, right? You’ve got a server sitting in your office, you’ve had it for 10 years. It never dawns on you how much data is on there, right? You probably bought a server 10 years ago, that was way larger than what you actually get, right? So when you go and you subscribe to a, a cloud environment, most customers don’t have a concept of how much they’re really using. And I think that that’s where we really shine as an organization at Data Canopy, is being able to analyze that information and come back to a customer and say, Hey, Mr. Customer, this is what you’re actually using. So let’s start there, let’s not oversubscribed services that we don’t need. Now, what I will say about public cloud is certain applications and workloads belong, right. So we can’t just say Every Customer Every Time belongs in in a private cloud, right? And that’s where the cost savings lie. Because there’s no egress fees, right? What we like to do is we like to understand every application a customer has, and then say, okay, certain workloads belong here, and certain workloads belong there. And if we need to do a multi tenant, multi tenant environment, if we need to do a hybrid environment, we can certainly deploy that. But not everything belongs in the public cloud. But you have to be an expert to understand that,
Rolando Rosas 13:01
no doubt, no doubt, Charinna, let me make let me do this. Boy, you are just dropping knowledge today. Dave, do you want to jump in and say something?
Dave Kelly 13:11
Well, I wanted to ask, you know, I mean, Charinna, everything comes at a cost and budgets, you know, I’m saying budgets are kind of constrained for a lot of clients. Are you seeing the same thing? You know, if how can we? How can we show these additional fees that people are paying today? And kind of bring them in and, you know, offer offer some options for them? You know, I’m assuming like a lot of things, those egress fees aren’t right on the front page, they kind of learn about it a little bit later. It’s so how do you uncover that for a client?
Charinna Kushnir 13:45
So I’m going to ask you a question back, right, because I hate to answer a question with a question. But I’ll throw a question back at you. So it’ll be a two fold answer here. When a customer comes to you and says, I want to buy hardware, what is the ROI? What is your answer? In general? How long is that piece of hardware going to last?
Dave Kelly 14:06
Well, I guess we look at the we look at the warranty period, where it wouldn’t cost anything other than that upfront cost. So if I have a $200, I’ll call it a $200. headset, I know that it has a two year warranty, the cost of ownership for those two years is $100 annually, just to keep it just to keep it simple.
Charinna Kushnir 14:28
Keep those numbers round. So we are going to assume right that the the shelf life of that product is approximately the warranty period, correct. And that after two years, we’re going to be buying hardware again. So it’s the same thing in our world. So when we start talking about budgets, right? Most customers think that the life of hardware is seven to 10 years, but in the reality, you and I as technologists, we know that that’s not the case even because not even close anymore because everything changes so quickly, right, right. Shelf Life on on a server is probably three to four years. So when we start talking about budgets, and where are the ROI is and moving a customer to the cloud versus having an on prem server? Because that’s a conversation that we still have, right? We have it less than less now, because most customers have accepted, especially with COVID. And with many of them still continuing to move their workforces home permanently, and getting rid of the cost of commercial real estate, right? Yep. And they’re looking at it and they’re saying, okay, if I’m refreshing this hardware every three years, it makes sense, with all the added benefits, I get of a cloud migration for me to do it. And what are those benefits? redundancy, security? All the things that an on prem server doesn’t necessarily offer them?
Rolando Rosas 15:56
And are you you’re talking about when you’re saying redundancy and on prem? Are you still finding that the majority of businesses that need to be in the cloud are still on prem?
Charinna Kushnir 16:10
It’s, it’s probably a 5050 split? Truthfully. I’ll give you a great example. I have a partner who’s who’s a fairly large managed services provider, I call him a pioneer, right? Because he moved his customers to the cloud, all of them four years ago, no on prem servers for any customer that he has. And when I asked him, Why did you do that? Right? Because that, that was that was early stages and cloud for a lot of MSPs, who were still wanting to sell hardware. He, he gave me a really good and very simple answer. He said, if I put a server out on that customers prep, right, and that server goes bad. And the customer calls me, he’s saying, hey, you know, Dave, that server went bad, you have to replace it. And he says, Well, that’s the manufacturer. And the customer says, I don’t care. You care. Right? Right. It’s the same thing like for you guys, you sell somebody a headset, they don’t care. If it’s playing. You sold it,
Rolando Rosas 17:14
no doubt, no doubt. So getting into the cloud takes so much of the burden from the folks that are integrating the technology, the hassle, like we were telling you earlier, the hassle of being stuck with hardware. Nobody wants to deal with the support. Nobody wants to deal with the problem. I mean, the last event during COVID demo, I’ve heard so many stories of servers going down melting down overheating, you know, one server causes cascade effect, and who’s going to take care of that, you know, and a lot of folks don’t want to do deal with it, you know, you deal with it. Right.
Dave Kelly 17:48
Right. Hey Charinna, I have a question for you for the for the Pioneer that you’re speaking of right now, moving people to so moving his clients to the cloud, he’s now able to free up any of that support stuff, you know, those those, just some of those frustrations, he’s been able to get off the table? Has he been able to free up use some new time? Sorry, free up time, so that he can focus on growing his business? I mean, that must have been such a relief for them.
Charinna Kushnir 18:19
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the break. So when we start talking about budgets, right guys, he was able to eliminate some resources, because the guys who rolled the trucks, they’re no longer necessary. He didn’t need as many people as many hands, because there was no hardware that he needed to go into the field to service anymore. So he streamlined his his customers, he was able to streamline his workforce, which was huge for him. And he now doesn’t worry about those failures. So yes, he’s very focused on sales, his primary focus is actually medical. And he very much focuses on medical customers and medical facilities, surgery centers, who have HIPAA compliancy, that they have to be concerned with, right. And that’s something that we hear we hear a lot about is HIPAA, with the medical industry, so now he doesn’t have to worry about that either. So he’s checked off a lot of buckets.
Rolando Rosas 19:16
So it sounds like it sounds like that going to the cloud Charinna is still a good business move. Because quite frankly, you can be more efficient, you can have redundancy. So you know, you have a more resilient system, but at the same time be even more profitable. Because if you’re able to cut labor cost, you’re able to cut other soft costs associated with with servicing equipment, with having things on prem worrying about, you know, actually equipment, equipment failure, those that’s essentially profits you could put back in the business instead of just like as you know, it is always trying to justify their their existence in any organization. And if they’re able to actually say, Hey, we’re actually going to make more money by going to the cloud, then it’s still a good play No?
Charinna Kushnir 20:05
Very much so and, you know, not only. I think one of the big things with IT departments that that I see on a day to day basis is that they’re stretched, their resources are stretched extremely thin, right? So they’re administering ducks, desktops, they’re doing disaster recovery type of engagements, they’re administering software that they, they never seem to have enough hands on deck to do the amount of work that they need to do. This takes something off of their plate, so that they have more time to do day to day tasks.
Rolando Rosas 20:38
I love it. I love it.
Charinna Kushnir 20:39
So we’ll switch gears a little bit from Cloud and into disaster recovery, because DR is probably one of the biggest topics that we talk about. Data Canopy is not a cybersecurity company, we are partners for that. But one of the statistics that we talk to our partners about a lot to our customers is how much will a disaster cost you per
Rolando Rosas 21:04
tell me that? I’d love to know what the heck goes on when you when stuff goes down? What is it costing me because that’s actually going to be probably more expensive. So tell me.
Charinna Kushnir 21:15
So an average sized customer, that’s about 100 employees, if it takes them more than 24 hours to recover their data after a breach or a loss will cost them $12,000 A day in lost revenue
Rolando Rosas 21:29
What get the front door shut down.
Charinna Kushnir 21:35
$12,000 a day.
Dave Kelly 21:38
Well, I guess that’s not I guess I would think that that’s a good number, you’re talking about 100 people that didn’t shut down completely the sales organization is down, they’re not able to take orders, they’re not able to run their manufacturing, you know, what type of what type of a business is losing 12 grand a day? Because of that, you know, I guess
Charinna Kushnir 22:02
it could be I mean, it literally could be anything. It could be trucking and logistics, it could be a law firm it Dave could literally be almost anything. And that’s just an average, obviously, as the organization gets bigger, but you know, DR is, it’s like a life insurance policy. Right? Right. Nobody wants to buy life insurance, because they don’t never want to think about why they would need it. And a lot of companies say the same thing about DR Why do I need DR My servers are secure, I got my data in the cloud. And here’s a myth that most customers have, which is Microsoft 365 is backed up out of the box. And it’s not your Oh 365 goes down and you don’t have a DR policy in place. Your data’s
Rolando Rosas 22:46
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s a big one. So if it was let me ask you this way. Do you know of customers where that’s happened? And what happens when that what happens? When that happens?
Charinna Kushnir 23:03
Nothing. Nothing good happens. And you know, it, nothing good happens even for that customer who’s doing a tape backup, which believe it or not, some customers still do, because the restore time on something like that is days, depending on how much data they have.
Rolando Rosas 23:24
So you potentially looking at something that an event that could literally cost way more than that 12k Because that’s just assuming you go down and you go back live, right, within a couple of hours or a day, whatever. But if you’re down for days, and you got to recover that data, the cost could be way beyond that 12k.
Charinna Kushnir 23:44
Gathering who that is, and most people understand, in fact, even sometimes the IT people don’t
Rolando Rosas 23:53
No, of course you don’t. That’s why I have you here. Because, you know, when it comes to this, I like to know, you know, are we in a better place than we were pre COVID. And it still sounds like there’s still a lot of the same stuff happening before some customers are on board. But still a vast majority of IT departments still have room to grow and improve when it comes to this area.
Charinna Kushnir 24:18
100% And that’s where and that’s where having a trusted adviser that you can bring, you know what’s going on with your business and talk through because one of the the things that we like to tout a Data Canopy is how we explore what the customer has, right? Because we need to understand their business, their business goals, their business functions, in order to be able to advise them. You know, what I see a lot in in the competitive marketplace is you get a box, right? And you say okay, Mr. Customer, here’s the box, you have to fit in it. That is not our methodology. Our methodology is law. Let us understand your business. Let us understand what you’re trying to accomplish. Let us understand your long term goals. And let us build you a solution that makes sense for you. It’s that customizable solution that really differentiates us from a lot of people in this
Rolando Rosas 25:16
love it white glove service. That’s what it sounds like to me. It is it is one on one survey loves that. Yeah. You know,
Dave Kelly 25:27
don’t don’t throw that. No,
Rolando Rosas 25:29
absolutely. You know, I read somewhere, I don’t know if you’ve seen this. But customer service as a whole, like for all businesses, all industries has been just sinking and tanking. And it’s for a whole bunch of reasons. But customer service hasn’t gotten better. And I think a lot of companies do themselves a disservice. Because there’s a lot of things we can’t control, right? We can’t control. But the one, one area that each company can control is their interactions with their clients, or their customer base. And if you can’t make that right, or get that going in the right direction, you just fall down. I mean, you’re you’re leaving money on the table that could potentially be coming back to you by word of mouth and recommendations and reviews and all that kind of stuff, we get into the marketing now.
Charinna Kushnir 26:19
So you know, it’s interesting, when I actually was a seller, and, you know, was actually a producer, I used to tell my customers and I now preach this to my own team. If a customer had a ticket in with support, and that ticket went for more than 24 hours without being resolved, that was to be brought to my attention. And I would escalate it. And people used to ask me, like, how can you make an offer like that, and I said, Because I get very few phone calls and text messages of that nature. Because I don’t, I, our i’s are dotted and our T’s are crossed. That’s that’s the way you run a tight ship. And that’s not to say that nobody ever makes a mistake, because people make mistakes. But 20 years of doing this, I don’t believe in excuses. And I don’t believe in not giving the customer the experience that they’ve paid for and that they expect. Because otherwise, I’m just like everybody else,
Rolando Rosas 27:18
I get lumped with the that group with with people that or companies and organizations that are just providing average to mediocre service. You know, and I don’t know if you see this in the industry, but this happens a lot to incumbents that, that are legacy companies have been around a long time. They can live off a name, while smaller, younger companies are just eating slowly at their customer base, just slowly and then some day, they realize, Wow, what happened to all our customers? Or is the panic or there’s a change in management? It just happens that they’ve let that erode over time, because they’ve been riding that legacy name for years without being challenged.
Charinna Kushnir 28:01
Right? Yeah, I always say I would love to spend $15 million Superbowl ad Jade Academy because that’s what
Rolando Rosas 28:08
would you do? Let me ask you that? How would you? What’s the what? Do you want to run a Superbowl ad? Like? What would that sound like? What would that look like?
Charinna Kushnir 28:19
My gosh, I you know, I wouldn’t even venture to tell you but it would definitely. It would be the first bit Dazzle. Goodness. Even if I had that kind of money from a marketing perspective, we as an organization always believed in reinvesting in our infrastructure in our people, before we reinvest in our marketing, like, we know, a lot of technology companies are nothing marketing machines, right? That’s never the way I want to be viewed in the marketplace, I always want to be viewed as the company that’s reinvesting into infrastructure and into my own people, before I reinvest into a $15 million.
Dave Kelly 29:00
You have a hit. So where do you draw the line? You know, where do you where do you know, you know, it’s like brand awareness or internal, you know, employees and product, you know, where do you make that decision on where to spend your money on on marketing? Or, you know, internal development?
Charinna Kushnir 29:18
It’s, it’s a, that’s a really good question. And a very difficult one to, to, to answer. Because, you know, sometimes we have to leverage the resources that we have, like, LinkedIn is a great example. Because, you know, you can put your brand on repeat there. And there’s very few dollars associated with being able to do that. And then I can go back and I can say, well, I can spend a quarter million dollars on, you know, advertising with my partners. So where is that fine line? And it’s all about one particular question, right? Where is the ROI? Where’s my return on investment? So as business owners, we We all think about, okay, if I put this number into marketing, and trying to establish our place in the market, I need to see a 5x return on my money. If I’m not seeing a 5x return on those dollars, because I have to factor in my time, then I’m I’m not marketing effectively.
Rolando Rosas 30:17
Charinna, let me ask you something that I am always curious about, because you said, you know, you want that ROI. What are you hearing with other clients, you know, in in this arena, where social media is really becoming a bigger player than, you know, when we started 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago? You know, it’s becoming more of a player in getting information, informing clients, potential clients exposure, what role is social media playing right now with the folks that you’re interacting? What are you hearing about that?
Charinna Kushnir 30:52
So it’s interesting, specifically, in technology, I would say that social media is very important for brand recognition, so that when your partners and your customers are seeing you your name, on repeat, that is where the social media aspect of it comes into play. I don’t know that we actually get a customer from social media. But what we get is, we’ve seen you,
Rolando Rosas 31:17
oh, that’s got to help the brand or your name, or both together being linked together, right?
Charinna Kushnir 31:25
For sure, so you get less of Oh, we’ve never heard of you, right? We’ve never heard of Global Teck, we’ve never heard of Data Canopy, we, you know, that starts to go away. They have heard of you, they’ve seen you on social media, they have associated your brand with your name. So that’s where social media really plays that role for us.
Rolando Rosas 31:48
You know, I heard something just recently that in today’s social media age, the way to measure ROI is slightly different. In that if you have a podcast you’re on social media, you do, it’s very hard to bring a number direct to the post, or to continued efforts on social media. But what he was saying was that he’s pulled a lot of the customers that have been becoming customers. And he said that a lot of them will start the journey on social media, they will start this journey on a podcast, they’ll start to journey on something that mentioned them. And they eventually traveled to their website, and then go go in and say, hey, I want to get your services or your product or whatever. And the measuring tools today, whether they’re analytics or attribution tools, are not linking these two different things like going to your website direct. It says, oh, Rolando, or Global Teck Worldwide went on to dedicate a pin Data Canopy’s website. But it’s not capturing that where I started, which could have been on a broadcast could have seen one of your posts before. And that led to, you know, picking up the phone and calling yourself or Ryan.
Charinna Kushnir 33:01
Yeah, I mean, it’s unfortunate, we don’t have that kind of AI intelligence yet to say, Where’s the original point? To ask the customer, Right, partner? Where did you hear about us? Where did you see us? And so we were still asking that question. But I think, you know, with social media, the probability that somebody saw us on social media before they engage us is extremely high. I cannot tell you how often people say to me, because obviously I have my own hashtag and it’s the sheer you
Rolando Rosas 33:29
know, if I were to put it if I let me give you some Latin flavor, I would call this low CUDA maximal this means the most amount of like craziness it’s not really translate well in English. Yeah, but it’s kind of like that.
Charinna Kushnir 33:50
Yeah, I mean, you know, we have to, we have to figure out how to continue to perpetuate things keep it interesting. We don’t want to Oh, and redundant,
Rolando Rosas 33:59
I would never call you stale or redundant. You may have clones but you’re not redundant. Good. Dave, you want to jump in?
Dave Kelly 34:13
You know, it’s satisfying when customers do find us after some content that we’ve created. I mean, Rolando, you and I, we see that every day people are sending us links to our videos to like we saw we saw this video. We liked you guys. Can we get some more personalized white glove? You know, people are now coming to us wanting
Rolando Rosas 34:33
just this morning, I sent you that email right from that guy’s a lawyer here. Listen to this Charinna lawyer. He bought phones from somewhere didn’t tell us where. But he saw a video of us talking about how to fix this problem with phones and headsets. He just reached another even a customer he just saw the video and he says I saw you online on YouTube and, uh, you know, can you work with me on this? That’s like a, I mean, we I would say we’re social media, media, babes. We’re just at the very beginning. So we’re still learning. But the exposure, like you said, people see it. They recognize it. And this guy then sent an email after the fact, because he’s like, okay, these guys know what they’re talking about. And I’m sure it’s the same with you guys over a Data Canopy.
Charinna Kushnir 35:21
No, for sure. And for us, it’s all about hearing the partner or the customer say, we’ve heard of you. We’ve heard we’ve heard of you. So that that’s already perpetuating, that’s already an advanced start for us. Because our competitors are so large in this space. So everybody’s heard their name. So when somebody says, We’ve heard the name Data Canopy, that means I’m ahead of the game, right?
Rolando Rosas 35:48
Takes me through, you know, that that experience with partners that you work with, you know, I know Data Canopy does a lot. But what does that experience like for a partner that’s never worked with Data Canopy and CISM? I’ve seen you, I hear you, Charinna. I’ve seen you post. But what’s that like before I dip my toe in that water?
Charinna Kushnir 36:10
So we thought a lot about that question here for our partners. And for us, it’s about enabling them. And it’s about taking them by the hand because it is complex. It’s not simple. And saying, Okay, let’s look at what your customer’s needs are. Do they have data center needs? Do they have cloud needs, they have disaster recovery needs? Do they have Microsoft Office 365 needs, let’s go customer by customer, figure out what their needs are. And then let’s develop a strategy to gather a go to market strategy that will help you engage that customer and ascertain what their needs are, and take the fear factor out of that engagement. Because what I find is a lot of my partners are not scared to talk about voice. They’re not scared to talk about headsets. They’re not scared to talk about fiber, but they’re scared to talk about the cloud. And, and part of it is because there’s still so many misconceptions. I mean, 50% of the population still thinks it’s past that part of it. Right? So we have to get past the fact that it’s a rain cloud. And what is a cloud? And what is the origin? And where does it Where does it start from which is of course in a data center. So what we are all about at Data Canopy, making sure that we’re enabling our customers and our partners, we’re enabling,
Rolando Rosas 37:35
I love it. And you know, you guys have been, you know, they Data Canopy, Data Canopy picked you from somewhere else, because that’s not, that’s not where I met you. But I know that they are really loving all the efforts and hustle that you’re putting into the game and getting their channel going and working hard. I don’t know, they’re very few women, if I toot your horn here for a second, there very few women, I know, I know, women are out there, they work hard, you gotta be darn close to the top of the hardest working woman that I know, out there in the business today. So if you’re looking for a partner to work with, that’s in the cloud space, you know, Charinna will be in your corner Data Canopy, and the team will be in your corner. I know you guys have met several folks on their team, they’re really great people, I can’t say enough about them. And I love watching what you guys doing over there. And hearing your your success, you know, I feel I feel happy for you, when you’re like, hey, we won this customer. And you know, that’s for sure. You know, Charinna one line, I want to ask you one of the thing because I know time is of the essence for you. You’re talking about cloud, you’re talking about data centers, you know, why would an IT director or an IT person that’s looking at this move when they’re making that judgment between cloud versus how can I keep my hardware, maybe just put it in a data center? Where does the dollar and cents? Where does that add up where that really makes sense for them to make that roll right over into the cloud?
Charinna Kushnir 39:19
So it’s twofold. It’s about the refresh cycle and the hardware where they are in it. So I’ll give you a perfect example. years ago, we had a pretty large financial services firm in Washington DC, who had a issue with water in the ceiling. You know, I think almost every customer at one point or another has had a leak of some sort. And their initial thought process was we’ll pull those servers out and we’ll go put them in the data center. That is what makes sense for us. Because you know, this hardware isn’t that old, right? So that Where are you standing the reefer cycle of your hardware generally is one of the is one of The big factors. The second factor is, is that some people just want to still have hardware, but that they recognize that keeping it on the Prem is not the most secure place to keep it, they need the power redundancies that a data center can offer the security that a data center can offer. So those two factors, when we get past those two things, and we start talking about cloud, okay, we’ve aged out our hardware, we know we want to move, then we start saying, Okay, what applications, right? Maybe QuickBooks, for example, is an application that needs to reside on a server. So we want to keep that in a data center. But some other applications can reside in the cloud. So there’s always that fine balance. And that’s where again, the transformative discovery comes into play is understanding every application that our customer has, and understanding where it belongs, in the cycle, whether it belongs on
Rolando Rosas 40:54
work. So there’s no one one size fits all in this whole thing. This is just a customer, my customer, tailoring the solution to their needs. That’s what sounds like to me. Awesome, Dave
Charinna Kushnir 41:06
100%.
Dave Kelly 41:07
They’re not You’re not forcing your client in all right.
Charinna Kushnir 41:13
Now, we are not there is no box here.
Dave Kelly 41:15
Hey, Charinna, you know, a final question Rolando, if I can, so we had prepared a final question for you. And I think it’s important to mention, and it’s about disaster recovery. As it as as in respect to business insurance, you know, you have to have property and liability insurance, you should be offering health insurance. I’m a strong proponent for life insurance. So if DR is the insurance of this world, you know, what message is being ignored? That really needs some attention? Why would DR be ignored like that?
Charinna Kushnir 41:52
Because people don’t ever think they’re going to have an outage or disaster. That’s why it gets ignored. It’s the same thing with life insurance. Nobody ever thinks they’re going to die. It’s really I hate to use that analogy. But that’s why some people buy it though, right? Nobody thinks that that’s going to happen to that. And it’s the same thing with DR Nobody ever thinks they’re going to have an outage. Nobody ever thinks they’re going to be hacked. So as a result, they say that’s a cost we can cut
Dave Kelly 42:16
in today’s political climate. Is, is the fear of cyber attack, not a real thing for your clients.
Charinna Kushnir 42:24
Oh, no, it’s very real. But again, it’s one of those things where people say, I’m such a small company, that’s never going to happen, that is going to happen.
Rolando Rosas 42:32
Wow. That’s that’s a dangerous thinking because things evolve. Hackers evolved. You know, I read a LinkedIn post by Stephanie Drysdale. So shout out to Stephanie, if you’re listening, she’s in the cybersecurity space. And she was she posted a thing on LinkedIn where the folks that were behind one of the more recent crypto attacks went so far as to do two things. One, they set up a fake website of a company. So it would look like a real website. The second thing is that they made a post on different employment websites looking for crypto developers. Well, guess what, they got exactly what they wanted, they got somebody to apply. They did a phony interview with them, they sent them an email with a PDF, that was the virus, the potential candidate opened it up and gave the keys to the kingdom to that small business, that crypto, that crypto company. That’s how good the hackers are getting. They’re seeing a long game, not just like, I’m gonna send you this spammy looking email. They’re going so far as to create a phony website that’s real, like a real legitimate company, and then interviewing and posting that on employment websites, so they can can get those people inside to open up that email.
Charinna Kushnir 43:53
That says level of sophistication. That’s a whole
Rolando Rosas 43:55
it is it is what that’s that’s exactly what I’m saying. We’re not at the same place. We were five years ago, 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, where, you know, it was, you know, these these phishing attacks, as they’re called. And just going this is a much more sophisticated world. The the measures that companies are putting in from an IT and cybersecurity perspective, are really working. So these guys are getting creative. How can we get in without trying to brute force into the system into the database, that still happens, but the lock downs on that have become much more clever and companies are getting wiser. So there’s still a backdoor, I’m gonna get the guy who’s over there wanting a new job to click on my file. And now I got him. It’s crazy.
Charinna Kushnir 44:46
Wow, that is, it’s absolutely insane.
Rolando Rosas 44:50
Well, Charinna, I want to thank you for coming on today. I want you to tell us, how can people get ahold of you or Data Canopy, if they want more information and want you to work with them.
Charinna Kushnir 45:07
Yes. So LinkedIn is the way to find me Charinna Kushner, you can drop me a note. Or you can send me an email at ckushnir@datacanopy.com.
Rolando Rosas 45:21
Right. And for those people that are watching us, we’ve got Charinna is wonderful mug on the screen right now and on LinkedIn. She’s out of the Baltimore City area, just up the river from where I live down on the Virginia side of the river. We’ve been talking with Serena Kushner, who is a wonderful, lovely guest the hardest working women in telecom that I know of, and it’s been a pleasure having you Charinna I love talking to you and having you. Your your second tour and maybe third or fourth is gonna be do as well. All right, Charinna, thank you. Thanks for being a great sport.
Dave Kelly 45:58
Thanks for coming on.
Charinna Kushnir 45:59
Anytime, guys anytime. It’s always my pleasure.
Outro 46:03
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