Simplifying data management in hybrid and multi-cloud era

Soma Tah

Enterprise data is now spread across physical data centers and clouds through file shares, shared storage, and even SaaS platforms and applications. Legacy solutions primarily designed to back up on-premises file shares and applications not only fall short in meeting the requirements of the hybrid and multi-cloud world, but cost time and resources and put their data at risk.

Improving reliability of backups emerged as a key requirement for the enterprises looking to replace their existing backup solution, shows a survey done by Veeam capturing the 2020 Data Protection Trends. The second most common driver for change is economics, including both reducing software or hardware costs and improving Return On Investment (ROI)/Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). The third driver is operational improvement, including both improving Recovery Time Objective (RTO)/Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Service-level agreements (SLA) and reducing complexity. Beyond those three meta-trends, cloud usage as well as various form-factor/consumption choices round out the top drivers for change.

Sandeep Bhambure, VP & MD, India & SAARC and Anthony Spiteri, Senior Global Technologist, Product Strategy, Veeam Software talk about the data management challenges faced by the enterprises today and explain how Veeam is helping them solve some of those challenges.

You work with a large set of customers across industries. Could you tell us about the key data management challenges they have been facing regularly? 

Sandeep Bhambure: A recent survey that we conducted among more than 1550 enterprises across 18 countries to understand the data protection challenges faced by the enterprises today and what are their expectations from modern availability and backup players shows that unplanned outages or unexpected outages still remains a big concern (95%) for the enterprises. The most common IT challenge in 2020 will be cyberthreats (32%). Skill shortage to implement technology (30%) is the next concern. So when it comes to data protection and availability, they look at the vendors who can help them protect against cyber threats. They also expect the software to be very simple to use, and to be extremely reliable with a high degree of automation and reporting and so on.

We stick to our vision to be the trusted provider of backup solutions that deliver on Cloud Data Management. From my experience and my interactions with the CIOs across the country and in this region, I can see that CIOs expectations from the backup solution providers are no longer just protection of data. They go beyond backup, and resonate very well with the cloud data management capabilities that we talk about.

How do you help them solve some of these challenges?  

Sandeep Bhambure: Businesses’ requirements today go beyond traditional backup and recovery, they need help with the portability and mobility of their workloads in a multi-cloud environment and in meeting the governance and compliance requirements as well.

CIOs nowadays don't just ask us to protect the data and help them recover the data within a stipulated time to meet the business SLAs only- they need to be compliant to the regulatory frameworks too. Despite having a legacy backup software, a large private sector bank CIO, for example, has adopted Veeam for protecting their mission-critical model workloads and guaranteed recovery of the workloads in less than five minutes, which the legacy software couldn't deliver. A few Smart Cities’ data also gets protected on Veeam. We not only move those data to the AWS cloud, but we also give the ability to recover the workloads straight from AWS clouds to on-prem within minutes.

As customers need to move workloads across physical, virtual and various cloud environments in this hybrid and multi-cloud era, what kind of challenges do they face in terms of cloud data portability? How do Veeam solutions help in this regard?

Anthony Spiteri: It’s certainly not as easy as a click of a button. So we've got this concept of the portable data format that enables complete Cloud Mobility including backup, recovery, and migration across multi-cloud environments. The backup file system is agnostic to any underlying file system or architecture. So effectively, you could take a backup from cloud, virtual machines, as well physical machines and you get that data backed up into our format. And then from there, you can then recover it and restore it into any other platform. A lot of the recoverability functionalities built into the product allows you to recover very easily and without any steps in between. In addition to that, we also offer portability of backup locations leveraging object storage.

A lot of enterprise data today remains unused. Do Veeam solutions help enterprises handle this dark data dilemma as well? 

Sandeep Bhambure: A huge amount of enterprise data still remains unused, lying in tapes, or disk drives mostly- these non-performing data assets pose a big challenge for the enterprises. We are helping our customers to re-use this data, leverage those data for the business, or mining the data for protecting themselves against ransomware or malware attacks, or for faster development of applications and testing, etc.

Anthony Spiteri: We have built a Data Integration API in the Veeam Backup & Replication v10, which enables effective re-use of the business data. This new feature allows third-party integration into the backups and opens an expanding list of possibilities including Data mining, Data classification, Security analysis, eDiscovery, Data forensics. So the whole point is to make sure that customers are getting value out of the data, which was otherwise just sitting idly and collecting dust before. Also, it was becoming more expensive to store that data, with more and more data being created everyday. But with the technologies that we're leveraging with object storage, it's becoming more and more feasible and cheaper to store that data longer offsite in object storage. But with the regulatory compliances coming into play, businesses need to store more. Now, when you know that you have to pay more for storing that data for longer terms, you will try to get business value out of that data and that's where the Data Integration API comes into play.