Data protection’s new incarnation incorporates both on-premises data centers and virtualized cloud environments with traditional backup methods and current data management innovations. Are backup legacies or data availability startups better-equipped to streamline all of them together?

“We’re going from reactive recovery to proactive, assured productivity,” said Jason Buffington (pictured), principal analyst, data protection, at The Enterprise Strategy Group Inc., or ESG. This is the trajectory of nascent data availability technology.

Data availability finally addresses disaster recovery’s weakness: If the backup provider a business relies on experiences a crash, it’s down until someone hits a restore button. “That’s the thing that no one really wants to talk about,” Buffington said.

Buffington spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Veritas Vision conference in Las Vegas. (* Disclosure below.)

Data availability is exploding. Veeam Software Inc., for instance, began as a backup solution for VMware Inc., but it is now skewing its brand toward data availability. In fact, data availability is one point on a whole data protection spectrum, according to Buffington. This also includes archive, backup, snapshot and replication.

Many are entering the data protection market, but not all of them have a cohesive “availability story,” Buffington explained. For that, they would need to stitch all of the points on the spectrum together and make them cross compatible with both on-prem or cloud environments. Veeam, Veritas Technologies Inc. and Dell EMC are the top three contenders, as he sees it.

Evolution vs. revolution

Veritas’ advantage is that they have been providing software-defined storage and backup solutions for over two decades, Buffington pointed out. The company has experience running in physical and virtual data centers, which will remain even as businesses move some workloads to cloud. But it’s also making advanced moves in multicloud.

“Their idea of a heterogeneous platform to enable higher levels of availability — I think the market’s just now growing into that,” Buffington said.

Startups like Cohesity Inc. and Rubrik Inc., on the other hand, “want to have a dialogue that says, ‘Don’t start with backup and try to grow forward. Start over,'” Buffington said.

Commvault Systems Inc. is one young company that could pull ahead in the market. Organizationally, it has been a bit siloed in the way it tells its data protection story, according to Buffington. But in reality, its data protection is more cohesive and streamlined than the other companies’, he added.

“Sometimes it’s hard to remember that they’re actually the only ones that have a single code base,” Buffington said. “Everyone else actually has some myriad of pieces and parts that have to be assembled along the way.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Veritas Vision 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Veritas Vision 2017. Neither Veritas Technologies LLC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE