As the options available to businesses for solving their back-up needs become increasingly diversified, the companies that are looking to remain the go-to answer for those solutions are compelled to keep evolving.

“Data is the life-blood of the organization,” said Danny Allan (pictured), vice president of cloud and alliance strategy at Veeam Software Inc. “So being able to mine it for data insights, being able to leverage that for data governance, being able to use it for e-discovery, but also to be able to use it in proactive ways for the business, like determining that a ransomware attack is taking place … ”

Allan spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during the VeeamOn event in New Orleans, Louisiana. The trio discussed challenges of cloud and hybrid solutions, some of the key drivers of back-up tech improvements, the elevated visibility of cyberattacks and how Veeam is moving with the times. (* Disclosure below.)

There are a variety of back-up solutions for businesses these days. One advantage of Veeam is its ability to do “direct restore to Azure,” though Allan acknowledged that for users who were used to the direct access of on-prem solutions, there was still something of a hurdle in perceptions to be cleared.

Another challenge was the nature of access for a business’ users to things the business had chosen to store in the cloud. An important step was to make the cloud “part of your orchestration strategy.” And with the integration of application program interfaces providing smoother experiences once users were on board, that step was becoming much easier to make, Allan explained.

Growth and defense

And with companies across a wide range of business foci becoming much more comfortable with cloud as a persistent part of their operations models, more and more of those enterprises are outgrowing the cloud with which they began, according to Allan. From there, they need to jump to a bigger one while retaining or improving the security practices and safeguards to which they’re accustomed.

For many of these customers, “You want the connection, but only when you need it,” Allan said. He felt that disaster recovery, cost optimization and the footprint of the actual cloud provider were the prime drivers in cloud back-up adoption and upgrades, factors applicable to both the more tech-savvy customers and those with their eyes on the red and black ink.

For both these breeds of customer, analytics and visualization are expected to be the areas of growth most important for their operations. For customer data, Allan shared, “We’ve been looking to expose that data to our partners” as an answer to their increasing need to understand “what is in the data we’re storing.”

That improved understanding has benefits in several areas, but the one that was pulled out as a prime example was the way it allows users to respond to ransomeware attacks. Allan discussed scenarios of being able to roll back to five minutes before the attack happened, examining how the changes came in and affected files, and sharing that understanding with other security groups as a way of improving response and protection.

With Veeam’s announcement of features including continuous data protection and other disaster recovery utilities, as well as the emphasis on the Veeam Availability Suite as its flagship product, “Our vision is to provide always-on availability for any service,” Allan concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of VeeamOn 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VeeamOn 2017. Neither Veeam Software Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE