FEATURE: DATA MANAGEMENT
was the horse that the company backed and
it seemed to work at the time. Obviously,
with the growth of the virtualisation industry.
The company has come a long way in terms
of the portfolio of products that we offer
now. In the last three or four years there has
been a big focus around enterprise per se
and looking after their workloads.
Big organisations, i.e enterprises, have got
legacy workloads that need to be protected
and ensure that they are able to recover
those workloads. We are prevalent across
all industries.
How does the company look at
data management overall?
We have a view that data lives everywhere
all the time. We have a firm belief that every
business is a software business and we need to
ensure that we help you protect your business.
There are five stages that we’ve defined
around data management.
The first one is the backup stage. This is
the early stage of where data lives when
you back it up. There is a requirement
to protect all workloads using backups,
complemented by snapshots and replication
where appropriate, to ensure they are always
recoverable and available in the event of
outages, attack, loss or theft.
The next one is the visibility of that data
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called Data Labs which will spin the workload
up into a separate environment and give
people access to that data very quickly to
make informed decisions, or recover a single
file or complete application.
Stage four is orchestration. Being able to
understand how your business continuity fits
into your data plan. Helping you automate
that is very important. If you do have a
disaster what method of orchestration are
you going to use? So you can extract and get
up and running very quickly.
And the last step of automation which I
think is a little bit futuristic is self-learning
data. Where is the data going to reside?
Should it be off-site? Should it be on-site?
How do I protect myself? I think this is the
last cycle of data certainly that Veeam has
looked at.
How far off are we from that
last step?
We’ve got a methodology that will make
you 100% safe and secure every single
time. Malware and ransomware are really
just viruses and we have been living with
them for many different years. In the past
we would have about one a month and
you would get a patch from your anti-virus
provider. The challenge now is that these
viruses are a lot more prevalent
and malicious.
THE CHALLENGE NOW IS THAT THESE
VIRUSES ARE A LOT MORE PREVALENT
AND MALICIOUS.
so now with the prevalence of cloud and
organisations growing and data growing,
having visibility of where that workload is
sitting is important. It is critical to view the
full breadth of your data, accompanied by
the infrastructure that it passes through
and resides on, so that you can pivot from
reactive to proactive management for better
business decisions
We are a firm believer in stage three – the
activation of the data. How can we help you
utilise that data better? We have something
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INTELLIGENTCIO
Can you ever protect 100%
against them?
We have a methodology which means, you
won’t be immune, but you should be able to
recover from any sort of disaster.
This is the three, two, one, one rule. So
three copies of data, at least two different
medias, in terms of having one on disc, one
in cloud, one wherever, and generally off
site and one that is disconnected from any
cloud or infrastructure.
If you follow those principles at any point in
time you can go back and you are able to
recover. You might have a bit of data loss for
one day or whatever.
We have a feature now that when we
rehydrate and restore data we isolate it
and we have it security checked before we
bring it up, so we can see whether that
malware or ransomware hit already and we
can make sure we don’t bring it live into
any environment.
I think the automation process has a bit to
go but I think it’s something that we are
definitely heading towards.
How many customers have
Veeam got in the Middle East?
We have almost 5,000 customers in the
Middle East. If we take a look at the latest
IDC results what’s notable is in Saudi Arabia
we are number one across all environments.
Generally across the Middle East we are
either one or two.
If I was a CIO and I was looking
to move fairly quickly into a
new market how can Veeam
help me do that?
Traditionally you would go to a legacy
backup recovery vendor. They would charge
you a price and then charge you as you grew
in terms of data so it’s not predictable in
terms of your cost. When you have a new
business you like to cost correctly so you
can enter the market very quickly. You can
control your costs and you can grow.
We’ve got flexible models in terms of
subscription and license-based models. So if
you start a business today and you’ve got a
couple of physical servers and some virtual
environments generally what happens is you
buy perpetual licenses for a year or two or
three years. If the company develops and
you might think about moving workloads
into the cloud but you need to protect
them still and make sure they are recovered
quickly, we give you the flexibility to buy
licenses that equate to points.
You can use points to buy any product and
move that workload or license across any
platform so we don’t tie you into anything
and your business can grow and shrink while
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