Getting your VeeamON!

Recently software vendor Veeam held its 2018 VeeamON conference in Chicago. VeeamON was one of my favourite conferences of last year, unfortunately I couldn’t make it out this time, but I did tune in for the keynote to listen to the new strategy messages that were shared.

The availability market is an interesting space at the minute, highlighted by the technical innovation and talent recruitment you can see companies like Veeam, Rubrik and others making. Similar to the storage industry of 5 years ago, the data protection industry is being forced to change its thinking with backup, replication and recovery no longer enough to meet modern demands. Availability is now the primary challenge, and not just of the data in our datacentre but also that sat in service providers, on SaaS platforms or with the big public hyperscalers, we need our availability strategy to cover all of these locations.

As with the storage industry when it was challenged by performance and the emergence of flash, two things are happening; New technology companies are emerging offering different approaches and thinking to take on modern challenges that traditional vendors are not addressing. But that challenge also inspires those established vendors, with experience, proven technologies, teams and budgets to react and find answers to these new challenges, well at least it encourages the smart ones.

This is where the availability industry currently sits and why the recent VeeamON conference was of interest. Veeam’s position is interesting, a few years ago they were the upstart with a new way of taking on the challenge presented by virtualisation. However, as our world continues to evolve so do the challenges, cloud, automation, security, governance and compliance just a few of the availability headaches many of us face and Veeam must react to.

One of the things I like about Veeam (and one of the reasons I was pleased to be asked to be a part of their Vanguard program this year) is that they are a very smart company, some of the talent acquisition is very impressive and the shift in how they see themselves and the problem they are trying to solve is intriguing.

VeeamON 2018 saw a further development of this message as Veeam introduced their 5 stages of intelligent data management which sees them continue to expand their focus beyond Veeam “The backup company”. The 5 stages provide the outline of a maturity model, something that can be used to measure progress towards a modern way of managing data.

Of these 5 stages, many of us are on the left-hand side of the graph with a robust policy-based backup approach as the extent of our data management. However, for many this is no longer appropriate as our infrastructures become more complex, changing more rapidly with data stored in a range of repositories and locations.

This is coupled with a need to better understand our data for management, privacy and compliance reasons, we can no longer operate an IT infrastructure without understanding at the very least where our data is located and what that means for its availability.

In my opinion, modern solutions must provide us with a level of intelligence and the ability to understand the behaviour of our systems and act accordingly. This is reflected on the right-hand side of Veeam’s strategy, that to meet this modern challenge will demand increasingly intelligent systems that can understand the criticality of a workload or what is being done to a dataset and act to protect it accordingly.

Although Veeam aren’t quite doing all of that yet, you can see steps moving them along the way, solutions such as Availability Orchestrator which takes the complexities of continuity and delivers automation to its execution, documentation and ongoing maintenance, are good examples.

It’s also important to note that Veeam understand they are not the answer to all of an organisations data management needs, they are a ultimately a company focussed on availability, but what they do realise is that availability is crucial and far beyond just recovering lost data, this is about making sure data is available “any data, any app, across any cloud” and they see the opportunity in becoming the integration engine in the data management stack.

Is all this relevant? Certainly, a major challenge for most businesses I chat with is how to build an appropriate data strategy, one that usually includes only having the data they need, to know how it’s been used and by who, where it is at any given time and having it in the right place when needed so they can extract “value” and make data driven decisions. This can only be achieved with a coherent strategy that ties together multiple repositories and systems, ensures that data is where it should be and maintains the management and control of that data across any platform that is required.

With that in mind Veeam’s direction makes perfect sense, with the 5 steps to intelligent data management model providing a framework upon which you can build a data management strategy, which is hugely beneficial to anyone who is tasked with developing their organisations data management platform.

In my opinion, Veeam’s direction is well thought out and I’ll be watching with interest in not only how it continues to develop, but importantly how they deliver tools and partnerships that allow those invested in their strategy to successfully execute it.

You can find more information on the announcements from VeeamON on Veeam’s website here www.veeam.com/veeamon/announcements