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How Veeam Is Strengthening Its Cloud Backup Portfolio

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With more people working from home due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, data protection and availability are now more important than ever. US-based data backup and recovery provider Veeam Software sees exciting growth potential in this area. The company foresees an increased demand for cloud backup and recovery services in the coming months and is geared up to secure business continuity of its customers and partners in 2020-21.

Speaking to CXOToday, Sandeep Bhambure, Vice President and Managing Director, India & SAARC, Veeam Software, says, “Data management has always been vital for organizations. But what has changed now is the surge of employees working from home due to the lockdown. This has forced organizations to review their business continuity plans, making data management the priority of any business IT agenda – something many enterprises weren’t really prepared of, as a result of which they are struggling to manage their data. 

On how CIOs can secure business continuity, Bhambure says, “The biggest impact the pandemic has had on IT is on endpoint protection and connectivity. IT departments need to ensure that all systems stay running and are accessible to employees working from home, without interruption and with the guarantee that sensitive business information remains protected.” 

As data needs to remain available and employees should be allowed access to all the files, tools, apps and information just the way they are used to when in the office, it increases the attack vector for any malicious activity, believes Bhambure.

To minimize these risks, he states that IT teams must educate employees on cybersecurity best practices to reduce the risk of cyber criminals gaining access to a network via phishing links. 

“In addition, all remote workstations need to be backed up to secure endpoints and installed with up-to-date anti-virus software. Conducting regular backups is vital to ensuring the data employees create is stored and managed in the usual resilient way and having department’s access data through a VPN,” he says.

In this regard, Bhambure says that some of Veeam’s recent and upcoming product releases in these areas provide significant benefits to our customers and further differentiating us from the competition, and provide a strong path forward for growth.

The company seems to be bullish on capturing a chunk of the cloud-based backup and recovery market. Earlier this year, its acquisition by Insight Partners at a valuation of approximately $5 billion, followed by the launch of Veeam Availability Suite (VAS) v10, a solution for complete data management and protection for hybrid-cloud environments proved to be game changer. The company has also partnered with Kubernetes backup and recovery startup Kasten to offer cloud-native application backup to its customers.

Another major highlight of Q2 was VeeamOn 2020, the company’s biggest event with a focus on online Data Management event. Initially planned as a physical event in Las Vegas, it transitioned to a two-day online event due to the current pandemic but witnessed close to 30,000 registrants from 148 countries.

“The event has been an outright success as we focused on very realistic technologies to suit the current work situation,” says Anthony Spiteri, Senior Global Technologist, Product Strategy, Veeam. 

“In terms of the main features and functionalities, we are enhancing and iterating our products and their features and making sure we protect the workloads across any cloud. We made improvements to our native cloud backup for AWS and Azure. Alongside, we are enhancing our other core capabilities and our products Veeam Availability Suite v11 and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 that is centered on leveraging more and more cloud,” he informs.

The demand for Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 has exploded due in part to the new work from home environment, fueling the best quarter to date for that product.

This confidence has been reflected in the company’s Q2 2020 results, where, despite the corona pandemic, Veeam increased its yearly subscription bookings by 20% – the biggest in the company’s 14-year history.  The company is also growing the fastest at the Asia Pacific markets, including India, even though Bhambure believes, what is significant is how relevant you are in the marketplace as this is not just about numbers, only then one can continue to clock a healthy growth. 

Talking about the company’s next 12-month plans, Spiteri mentioned that Veeam is looking at backup as a service from its cloud service partner. We are announcing availability of new Veeam Backup for AWS v2 in regards to Amazon Web Services. On the other hand, we have achieved AWS Storage Competency status that validates our solutions to help solve customer challenges and meet business goals.” 

“Besides, we are announcing the newest version of Veeam availability orchestrator v3 which orchestrates the recovery of systems from enterprise and backup for Microsoft Office 365 v5, which is a highly requested solution that makes it easier to restore and find documents and files from within Microsoft Teams. We are also doing instant recovery for NAS backup which formats to read only a copy of your NAS backup,” he adds.

With more than 375,000 global customers and $1 billion in annual bookings, Veeam continues to help customers through their digital transformation and hybrid and multi-cloud journeys at a time when data protection is paramount and leveraging data reuse for overall business value is critical, sums up Spiteri.

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Sohini Bagchi
Sohini Bagchi is Editor at CXOToday, a published author and a storyteller. She can be reached at [email protected]