Rethinking Enterprise Data Protection Strategies in 2022 and Beyond – CXOToday.com

The incessant rise of ransomware attacks and other data threats has made backup and data protection services all the more essential for organizations today. While theres no way to predict the extent of these attacks in the years to come, it is clear that a sound data protection, especially a cloud backup strategy, will increasingly become pivotal for organizations to guard against future cyber threats.

In a recent interaction with CXOToday.com, Shiva Pillay, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan, Veeam Software, explains how data backup and protection requirements are changing, as organizations shift to remote work amid the pandemic and adopt new working models worldwide. He also explains the companys growth plans for the APJ region especially the India market for the next one year.

Data itself is becoming increasingly critical because it is the real asset when we talk about data backup and protection. Without it, not only does an organization face business continuity challenges, but it also hinders organizations efforts to aspire for digital growth and transformation.

The COVID scenario puts the CIOs in a situation wherein they must tackle the challenge of how their businesses will run remotely. This has given rise to workplace trends like work from home (WFH) and bring your own device (BYOD), which in turn has resulted in the organizations witnessing proliferation of data, put very simply, its now a lot more difficult to control, manage and protect as you have many people working remotely demanding access to data.It also represents a significant increase in the potential for hacks and data loss. And that data is critical for the businesss ability to generate revenue and touch their customers.

If an organization is unable to understand data and to use it as an asset, it will inhibit their ability for digital growth. As per the Veeam Cloud Protection Trends Report 2021, Data is moving, and IT platforms are changing. Physical to virtual to cloud to containers, this evolution and expanded deployment mix shows that data lives in multiple places, so organizations need the flexibility to protect their data regardless of physical location, hypervisor, or application. Irrespective of where a workload is stored, it always needs protection even when in the public cloud.

The report states that public cloud is now a primary means of storing and delivering an organizations data. In APJ, 49% of organizations, run their high priority workloads on the cloud, and they host as a mainstream platform for hosting data.

Another change in the landscape is cloud-hosted IT delivered models infrastructure as a service, Software as a Service, and containers are gaining a lot of traction for production and disaster recovery, which means legacy providers, typically, served on-premises style engagements, must keep up with these mechanisms.

Talking about containerization, in APJ 40% of back up data belongs to containerized applications separately. Majority of the organizations believe their container architecture is durable, so they dont need to back up at all. Also, as per Veeams Data Protection Report 2021, 82% APJ organizations have an availability gap face an issue with recovering applications in an acceptable time frame and 77% of them face a protection gap.

The 3-2-1-1-0 strategy is fairly simple. It stems from cyber attacks, which are becoming extremely prominent in todays day and age. When you think about cyber-attacks, they really impact a companys ability to drive their business and hamper their ability to move their businesses forward. The 3-2-1-1-0 strategy means you have three copies of your data, on two different media types one copy should be off-site and one copy being offline, air-gapped, or immutable and lastly there should be 0 errors after automated backup, testing and recoverability verification.

Having an ultra-resilient copy of backup data that is either offline, air-gapped or immutable is an incredibly resilient specimen to help ensure data recovery in a ransomware event. It is a life insurance policy for you to get your data back up and running, while your security teams go back and solve the root cause of ransomware attack.

Also, having 0 surprises upon restore is a big benefit today. Sure Backup recovery verification by Veeam is a great way to confidently know that you can restore data. This isnt because a Veeam backup isnt good it is just that certain behaviour are only manifested on restores or reboots that may inhibit a restore going as planned.

Ransomware attacks are inevitable in todays time. It is not something that you can defend against. So, my advice to companies having worked in both security and the data backup space is if you have an immutable copy of that data, thats the ideal way of ensuring that youve got zero errors and you protect the integrity of the data.

New-age technologies, techniques are changing the game. Talking about how Veeam is playing in that space, we have had 20 new product releases in the last year. This spans the ecosystem of not only the cloud business, which is what weve started talking about, but the virtual, physical infrastructure, SaaS and application-specific environment.

Last year, Veeam has released the v11a a product, which is, even stronger and more robust platform. It comprises of a number of things which are quite interesting for our cloud users. One, it has increased value for customers as they expand to the cloud, including native and advanced protection for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. It has also delivered massive new support for leading public cloud platforms to help organizations accelerate cloud adoption by ensuring data is reliably secured, protected, and managed, while optimizing spends.

Our fastest growing product, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 reported 73% growth YoY in Q321.The #1 backup and recovery solution for Office 365 enables users to securely backup to any location, including on premises, in a hyperscale cloud, or with a service provider.

Moving on to Kubernetes, we are now doubling down on modern infrastructure in this space, with the recent acquisition of Kasten. This acquisition enables us to deliver not only in the physical-virtual but also in the container-based environment; it has enabled us to offer K10 platform to our customers across the region.

With Kasten K10, organizations can store backups in the cloud, on-premises, and ransomware-proof immutable environments. It further enhances the data security posture and will add value to the data protection solution.

The intent for us is to deliver modern data protection solutions for the multi-cloud enterprise and help customers manage and back-up all the new types of data that are critical to their environment.

We have the same code that runs on an SMB environment. For instance, if you are backing up on Veeam, the same license will protect hundreds and 1000s of machines for enterprise customers. It really goes down to the concept of where we differentiate ourselves in the market and what we feel is one of the reasons for growth is the simplicity of the product and how it applies to an SMB customer all the way through to very large, complex enterprise customers.

In fact, 100% of our solutions cater to all enterprises across sectors. Veeam is continuously innovating with its solutions and the strong focus on innovation has helped the company reach where it is today. Veeam continues to deliver consistent, double-digit revenue growth because of its unmatched scale and market expansion.

Globally, in Q321 Veeam witnessed a double-digit growth with an annual recurring revenue (ARR) increase of 28% year-over-year (YoY). With the fastest revenue growth YoY (25.3%) in the most recent IDC Semi-Annual Software Tracker for Data Replication & Protection 1H21. Globally, we achieved double-digit growth for the 15th consecutive quarter.In APJ, Veeam reported an annual recurring revenue (ARR) increase of 30% year-over-year (YoY). Veeams momentum was fueled last year by new product releases and major feature updates, and the company is gearing up for a couple more this year in Q1 2022, including Veeam Backup for Office 365.

The APJ region we have expanded our partnership with Ingram Micro following the launch of Veeam on Ingram Micros cloud marketplace in ANZ, were also now available in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Recently, Veeam expanded its business partnership with Ingram Micro India by signing a distribution agreement in India.

This quarter we added some great referenceable customers to the region, including: Parul University in India, Qingdao Huanghai Pharmaceutical in China, Diamond Group in Indonesia, Midosuji Tax Office in Japan, TRC Thailand, Lembaga Lebuhraya Malaysia and Essilor Group in Singapore spanning across multiple verticals such as education, healthcare, construction, F&B and government. This is a testament to our commitment in providing the best-in-class data protection technologies to businesses across all industries and markets.

In India, we also work with major companies like Hero MotoCorp, Future Generali, and 63 Moons to name a few. Automotive, BFSI, healthcare, telecom, ITeS and PSU are the key focus verticals for Veeam in India. We cover the whole gambit of these types of customers.

Our plan is very simple in terms of growth. We will be driving high growth. And it needs to be a sustainable one for our customers, our channel partners, our own team, and the organizations we partner within

The alliances ecosystem will be focused on vertical lead orientation. We have a great leadership as well as sales team and I have a focus that will be on taking share. So, we continue to take share in India, were pushing towards that number one spot

Secondly, we will build more scale by investing into headcount and the areas that help our customers and partners use our products more effectively

And then lastly, we will continue to invest in futures and the way we drive our business. Veeam is continuously innovating and the strong focus on innovation has helped us reach where we are today. From doing $100,000 sales in 2008 to reaching over 1 billion dollars (globally) in 2020, our innovation-driven approach has paid off well.

Ransomware attack volumes have increased 151% globally, in the first six months, businesses of all sizes are aware of the threat. Rick Vanover, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam has written a whitepaper which suggests five best practices CISOs should look at adopting if they want to drive and guarantee business continuity.

If you have the five best practices in place and have great backup solutionthat can help you repopulate your data, youre in a better position to not succumb to ransomware attacks.

In APJ, we are seeing some positive trends around the movement to cloud and containers, it is far more accelerated than we see in some of the other markets. And as you know, India is very central to innovation and driving cost efficiency. The new economical alternatives to build infrastructure become increasingly critical and explosive in those markets.

I always see India as a place of great innovation and forward-looking in terms of tech and driven from a cost efficiency standpoint, but then that has high demands on the type of technology. You must be present as a technology leader to be successful in that marketplace.

All in all, the criticality of data is one of the key messages from here. The move to cloud and the move to different types of Cloud container-based, SaaS, infrastructure as a service means that to keep your data available, you need modern data protection strategies. Veeam is doing well because were so focused on our customers, partners, and are so close to their trends. And as I said earlier, it is important for CXOs to address the changing data protection requirements and start thinking about a layered data protection approach i.e., identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover.

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Rethinking Enterprise Data Protection Strategies in 2022 and Beyond - CXOToday.com