The Backup Layer Is a Security Layer: Object First at RSAC Conference 2026 | A Brand Highlight at RSAC Conference 2026 with Anthony Cusimano, Director of Solutions Marketing at Object First

0:00All right, here we go. Marco. Sean. RSA conference. It's coming up quickly. Very, very quickly. Absolutely. Absolutely. You see what I did there? I did see what you did there. Yes. So many good conversations we're going to have and one of them is going to be with our good friend Anthony Kusumano from Object First, how are you, Anthony? I'm doing well in your self, Sean. I'm doing great and we're going to have a chance to connect into your booth to talk about absolute immutability and that's booth S. That's in the South Hall 361. So I encourage everybody to stop by and check out what you're doing with Object First. First, quick few words about who you are, Anthony, and what the company's up to at the moment. So Object First, purpose built for Veeam, our whole reason to be is we saw that ransomware

1:04was going after backup data specifically. So we created a physical on-premises hardware storage appliance that ingests Veeam backup data and makes it absolutely mutable. It's our whole reason to be and the good news is if you have one of our boxes and you write your Veeam backup data to it, it cannot be altered by anyone via Admin, the vendor itself, or the world's greatest hacker. Once it's on our box, it stays on our box. You know what? It's interesting. We went from physical to virtual to cloud and then we realized, you know what, the best security. It's maybe in hybrid. I absolutely agree. That's one of the questions I get asked all the time is, you know, oh, does this replace cloud? Do we get rid of Veeam? It's like, no, no, no. All of these hardware types and infrastructure types have a point and purpose. It's understanding how to maximize them. And we believe specifically when it comes to backup storage, when you look at the past, everyone was using tape.

2:04And the great thing about tape was it was a physical device. You could unplug it and you could throw it in a mountain somewhere. Problem was incredibly slow and it's also very linear and it sometimes catches on fire. So we saw, you know, hey, it's, it's time we improved on this technology a bit. We designed something that uses all of the sort of advantages of a physical appliance, but tweaked and tuned it to perfectly ingest Veeam backup data specifically. And then optimized it for the security use case. So you know, many storage vendors, they're focused on offering generic storage speed. Hey, you can, you can put whatever you want on here. No, our focus was how do we ingest backup data securely? How do we make this operation as simple as possible? And then how do we make it powerful? So you can ingest quick, you can get your data back quick. If you need to run in some recoveries on our box, you can do that without ever compromising any of the security features that a physical, a hardened appliance gets you. And I'm going to, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you're probably going to be showing,

3:06showing off some of that stuff in the booth at our safe conference. So tell us a little bit about what you have planned for those few days. What can people see and expect and chat with you about? We are absolutely going to be showing off quite a few things at our booth. Since, since it's the last time we've talked, we've released quite a few new features, including some new box sizes. We have a little mini box tower now. But we also have this feature called Honeypot, which allows our object first device to simulate a Veeam backup and replication server basically as a trap that causes bad actors to, you know, if they try to get in there, if they try to brute force entry, if they try to remote desktop into it, that spins up an alert so we can tell folks, hey, they're trying to get into our fake Veeam server or probably trying to get into your real Veeam server. So we'll have demos of that. But also my good friend, my teammate, Jeff Burke, he's going to be in the hall giving a presentation on Honeypot amongst other things on Tuesday the 24th.

4:07Jeff and I will also be doing a live stream on Monday as part of a tech field day, talking about Honeypot, our upcoming fleet manager release, and then everything we've been doing with Object First the last four years now. So we've got a lot planned. All of it, believe it or not, you know, is security focused. I think as people are always like, why is a backup storage company at RSA C and it's like believe it or not, this might be the one of the most important security devices you could buy. So we've got a lot to share and a lot to show, and not enough time to do it all. It's a jam-pack schedule. Yeah. Real building on integrity. We forget about those two in the CIA. Yeah. Yeah, we don't have much time here today, but we will talk to you again. All location, of course, is part of our coverage. So we will come and meet you at the booth and we'll get to meet all the other people on the team and even touch. Well, I want to touch things again, you know, that's the thing. Analog, you know, let's go back to that. It is actually helping and it's the hybrid, as you say, of the both things that makes things

5:09more interesting and I think more real as well. So I want the mini box with the honeypot. I like honey. Yeah. It's good to see you. It's good to see you. It's good to see you. It's good to see you. It's good to see you. It's good to see you. It's good to see you. Yes. And who knows better what a what a beam environment looks like than you guys. So I'm excited to see what that looks like. And we'll do that in your booth, which is South 361. So that's the South Hall and looking forward to chatting with you there, Anthony. It should be a good time. Thanks, Sean. We'll see you soon. And thanks, everybody, for listening, watching ITSBmagazine.com forward slash RSAC for all of our coverage and see you everybody there in San Francisco.