Large businesses will typically have multiple locations with on-premises data centers in addition to the dispersed clouds meant to manage all that data, which means there are multiple areas, physical and virtual, for disasters to strike. If there’s ever a problem or an emergency, these companies need a fast and reliable solution that will allow them to recover data quickly and with as little effort as possible.

In the case of IBM, the software giant has partnered with VMware Inc. and Veeam Software Inc. to reassure its customers as they transition assets to cloud-based environments. Transferring data from one location to another can be done quickly and steadily, and customers can rest assured that their files are in safe hands should a problem occur.

Dale Hoffman (pictured), director of offering management, VMware solutions, at IBM Cloud, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VeeamON event in Miami Beach, Florida. They discussed how IBM and VMware are working together to help businesses shift to the cloud and what IBM is planning for in the sometimes messy world of disaster and recovery (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Vellante: What do you think is driving the VMware-IBM momentum?

Hoffman: If you think a lot about these critical customers, they want to take advantage of things on the cloud. One of the key things to them is business continuity — the ability to make sure I can back things up and recover things as quickly as I can. We have about 60 data centers worldwide, and having that geographic span is a huge advantage. When I back up, I may be moving data back and forth in a certain region. I’m looking for some latency, and I don’t want to be charged for that.

It’s a powerful value proposition for the customers. We don’t charge for any type of data movement inside our cloud. Also, when you go outside, maybe for high availability into the geographic reach, the same thing happens. So, I think those are some key things: the security, the very fast backup and recovery, and the fact that they’re not going to be charged for that. That’s a good value proposition to our customers.

Burris: How is IBM helping to move customers forward? What’s the backup restore conversation in that process? Is it an afterthought? Is it something that’s becoming more central to their thinking?

Hoffman: The way we and IBM Cloud have thought about this is dividing the journey to cloud into two pieces. Twenty percent are already there. They weren’t the real business-critical kind of workloads, but the next 80%, that’s where we really see a huge advantage to us. It’s our enterprise relationships. It’s what we do from a security aspect on the cloud and how easily we can help them what we call “lift and shift” and migrate things over.

Once you’re there, it’s about how I can help give you that assurance that we’re going to give you the best backup and the best recovery in the event of a disaster. It’s something where if you do see a failure, being able to have a very fast recovery point and letting you know everything is secure and backed up.

Burris: Globally, how do you see IBM bringing IBM intellectual property? IBM invention to this with Veeam platform to conserve a broader range of customers of different sizes, different geographies, and different workload forms? How do you see IBM participating in that process?

Hoffman: Let me give you a couple examples. About a month ago, we introduced something called Hyper Protect Crypto Services. It’s the same technology that we have in System Z that’s used by our large enterprise customers that gives you that FIPS 140-2 level four, so we are the only cloud in the world that has that technology.

Once you put your keys in there, nobody’s going to get to them at all, and it’s an innovation of taking something that was done in a different division within IBM, and now making it an endpoint service within our cloud.

Now, let me give an example of doing a bit of innovation with Veeam. One of the things that we’re trying to do … is add more value to our clients, so take SAP, for example. We just announced both on our bare metal and VMware side that we’re the only company with a certified SAP server in the cloud, and what we’ve just recently done is we’ve integrated and put Veeam as the backup choice for that.

What that enables everyone to do is leverage a lot of innovative work that Veeam was doing to make sure you can backup SAP correctly. We married that with our infrastructure and our bare metal and VMware stack with Veeam as that backup. And just a little bit of foreshadowing in the future, we’re going to look at ways to further automate that SAP landscape, so our clients will see a much better solution.

Vellante: Give us a summary of 2019. Maybe some of the first half highlights and maybe show a little leg for the second half.

Hoffman: We can keep things in compliance and monitor all that for you. We brought some app modernization to help people on their journeys modernize their apps. Moving forward, I see a few big things. We announced something last year called Mission Critical VMware, and it’s two active sites with a witness site, and you’re moving things back and forth, so if you have a failure in a certain region, you can instantly go in and switch over.

We’d also like to look more into a multi-tenant type of space, and we think that opens a whole new market segment for us. Guess who’s going to be our partner in that to make that backup happen? That’s going to be Veeam.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VeeamON event. (* Disclosure: Veeam Software Inc. and IBM sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Veeam, IBM, and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE