Q&
LISA STRYDOM, CHANNEL MANAGER
LEAD FOR AFRICA AT VEEAM
EDITOR’S
tr
yd
om
m
ea
, C
Ve
han
at
a
nel
c
fri
Manage
r Lead for A
W
e’re on a continuous educational
drive with our channel partners,
resellers and customers
in terms of data protection and data
management when it comes to consuming
cloud services. Just because data is stored
in the cloud doesn’t mean a business can
forgot about it.
In April we announced the availability of
new Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365
version 3, which is now our fastest growing
product. Even though Microsoft takes on
the management of the infrastructure on
which Office 365 is built,and is responsible
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS
INTELLIGENT
TECH CHANNELS
Issue 25
for the uptime of these cloud services,
businesses are responsible for, and need
to be in control of their data from a
compliance and legal perspective.
Locally, there is a heightened interest in
public cloud with the arrival of Microsoft Azure
and Huawei Cloud earlier this year and Amazon
Web Services set to launch next year. Many
local cloud providers are now complementing
their solutions with that of a public cloud
provider. Those who are still focusing on their
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings
need to adapt quicker to complement their
solutions with that of a public cloud provider or
see their growth shrink.
We are seeing the emergence of agile
partners and resellers that businesses find
easy to work with. Channel partners who
specialise in a specific service offering,
coupled with a consultancy layer, will
become specialists and will see good
opportunities in the months to come. They
are open, willing to change, and provide
clients with the options needed for a digitally
connected business environment.
Coming back to the question posed,
the traditional way of looking at data, its
availability and security would simply be to
have backups in place. That said, frequent
testing becomes vital to ensure backups
are encrypted and kept in secure locations
whether in the cloud, on premise, or a
combination of the two.
One of Veeam’s key pieces of advice that
we have been sharing with the industry
for years is the 3-2-1 rule. This states that
you need to have three copies of your data,
stored on two different media types, with
one being offsite.
Our recent update to Veeam Availability
Suite 9.5 includes enhanced features to
Veeam DataLabs, which allows businesses
to use backup data to assist with security
and data governance options, including
GDPR readiness and malware removal. This
means businesses have the ability to restore
a virtual machine in an isolated environment,
run another vendor’s antivirus software
against that machine, and either remove or
trace the malware or ransomware.
When it comes to the cloud, the
discussion will always revolve around
security and compliance. Having reliable
backup of business-critical information is
crucial as ransomware can specifically target
cloud-based services. Educating the entire
value chain remains key as cloud is a shared
responsibility model and companies need to
ensure that their data is protected and that
they can access it.
51