Veeam foresees growth as changed world of work, IT makes data backup important

21st July 2021 By: Schalk Burger - Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

The significant changes adopted by organisations to enable remote working on an unprecedented scale worldwide have contributed to an increase in opportunistic and targeted cyberattacks on the larger attack surface of companies.

This has resulted in an increase in requirements for effective data backup, regardless of where the application or tool is hosted, says data management multinational Veeam Africa GM Chris Norton.

These additional requirements have led to an inflection point where datacentres, and information technology (IT) more broadly, are being transformed from a more centralised IT architecture to one that has moved out to the edge.

This trend is evident in the growth in revenues generated by hyperscaler vendors and smaller infrastructure- and software-as-a-service companies, he adds.

"The challenge is that this has shifted some of the main functions typically contained in datacentres out beyond the edge of companies' networks, creating a larger target for cyberattacks and driving the need to secure these new environments."

The new demands to enable remote work have required companies' IT departments and their service providers to optimise this new scenario. This is where Veeam's tools help to replicate, manage and back up data, as well as make the data accessible to any device and wherever applications reside.

Norton points out that companies using cloud services retain the responsibility to back up and secure data and Veeam has seen a rapid uptake of its data back-up licensing schemes that enable users to back up, test, deduplicate and manage data within any environment to any environment, such as creating physical back-ups of cloud data or virtual back-ups of data at physical, on-premise datacentres to meet personal information management and protection requirements, as well as enabling the management of data that resides on user devices.

"We have the licensing and capabilities that extend beyond the datacentre and can back up virtual, physical or cloud-based machines using one universal licence. Companies adopted cloud-based systems to facilitate work, such as cloud-based office and virtual meeting tools, that saw the rise of back-up-as-a-service.

"Key for the remote working environment is the ability to ensure that corporate data on devices, in the cloud or on premise is copied, tested, compressed, stored, optimised and made accessible in the event that it needs to be restored following a cyberattack. This is necessary to defend companies and ensure they can continue to operate and defend against cyberattacks."

Veeam is seeing an uptake in the cloud service provider model and many organisations are adopting licence schemes from Veeam, especially to meet data protection regulations.

Additionally, Veeam has a range of partners from blue-chip multinational companies to smaller service providers that make use of its toolset's capabilities to provide data analysis services and application mobility, independent of the physical hardware, also known as containerisation. The company expects an acceleration of these demands and trends in the local market.

"The capability to abstract applications is especially relevant for development and operations (devops) teams to enable them to enhance development of next-generation cloud-native applications.

"In addition, being able to leverage active backups that use the real-time production and operations data of a company in devops, enables these teams to test applications and developments in real-world situations without being required to make assumptions about the data or impacting on operations."

Back-up and disaster recovery are viewed as necessities to secure continuously growing volumes of data and protect against cyberattacks, but customers are leveraging their backed-up data in commercial ways. They are unlocking value from their existing investments in data management to improve their relevance and capabilities, says Norton.