Veeam Software Inc. is known for quick data recovery and backup skills, but to truly take advantage of its cloud-connected data management services is to fully understand what kind of data you’re storing. You can’t simply put the data away and never use it; you must be aware of what the data is and how it can assist you. Veeam looks to make data management a more intelligent and automated process.

These are the perks that attracted Flex-N-Gate Corp., an automotive parts manufacturer. After years of inferior data recovery solutions, Flex-N-Gate would have saved time and energy had they moved to Veeam sooner, according to the company’s director of information technology.

Nathan Hughes (pictured, left), IT director at Flex-N-Gate, and Jason Buffington (pictured, right), vice president of solutions strategy at Veeam, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren) during the VeeamON event in Miami Beach, Florida. They discussed the relationship between both companies, the challenges associated with data recovery and backup, and the importance of data to virtually every organization today (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

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

Vellante: What are the big trends you’re seeing in the market that are really driving this next era?

Buffington: Every 10 years or so, when the industry shifts the platform of choice, the data protection vendors almost always reset, right? The people that led in NetWare don’t lead in Windows. The people that led in Windows didn’t lead in Vert. The next wave is we’re moving from servers to services. We’re going from on-prem into the cloud. The problem is that every time the secret sauce doesn’t line up. You must reinvent yourself each time, and what we saw with the past generations and what we learned is you can’t be so busy taking care of your install basis.

You forget to keep innovating on what that next platform is, so for us, Act Two is all about the cloud. We’re going to take everything we know about reliability and move it into the cloud. The difference is that in virtualization there was one hero scenario: VMs. This time around its IaaS, SaaS, iPaaS; it’s using cloud storage. There’s not a single hero scenario, which means we have a lot more innovation.

Warren: What are you using Veeam for today, and where do you see yourself going with Veeam?

Hughes: Right now, we’re primarily using Veeam as backup and recovery. That’s how we started with it. We came from another product that was great conceptually. But in the real world it had terrible reliability, and its performance was poor. When Veeam came onto the scene, it was a breath of fresh air because we got to the place where we knew that what we had was dependable. It was reliable. We got to understand how the product worked and how to improve the way we’d implement it.

One of the key features of Veeam that really excited us are its instant recovery options. We were used to the idea of having to write down a VM out of snapshot storage and then being put in a position where it would take an hour, two hours, three hours before you could get something back online. Now, to be able to launch something right out of snapshot storage within a five-minute range is a blessing.

Vellante: You’ve talked about full automation. Is that something that’s kind of near-term, mid-term, long-term? Where is that?

Buffington: We’ve talked about the sequencing side, which is where you focus on [recovery time objective]. How fast you can get back in the running again? Think of it like a zipper. You’ve got the bumper that’s coming in to a line of cars, and if either side slows down, everything breaks. At the end is the truck. Everything must come at the same time and at the same rate. If there’s downtime on either side of the source, you’re done, but that’s an RTO problem.

The engineering side for high tech is a [recovery point objective] problem. You have unique stuff coming out of somebody’s brain into a PC, and it will never come out that way again. So, when we look at back up and replication, that should be the next piece to go on. And then data labs become interesting in their orchestrations.

Vellante: How vital is data to your organization?

Hughes: Data is vital to virtually any organization. Everything is data driven. Even when you go to the shop floor, all your scheduling, all your automation equipment. All this stuff is talking, and it’s laying down data. You’re putting rivets in the parts. You’re probably taking pictures of that now with imagers when you’re in manufacturing, and you do that so if you get 300 bad ones, you can see exactly when that started and what happened at the machine level. So we’re always collecting massive volumes of new data, and to be able to store that reliably is everything.

Vellante: Is Veeam sort of the lever in the fulcrum to new data architecture?

Buffington: We’re getting there. Here’s the trick. You first must solve for basic protection. The next thing to get to data management is you must know what you’ve got. You’ve got to know what’s in those zeros and ones. Some of the things you’ve already seen from us move around GPR compliance. Some of the things revolve around sanitization of data for DevOps scenarios and reuse scenarios.

Now that the data is curated and ingested into our system, what else can you do with it? When I talk to C-level execs, what I tell them is, “Data protection, no matter who it comes from, including Veeam, is expensive if the only thing you do is put that data in a box and wait for bad things to happen.” The good news is that bad things are going to happen, so you’re going to get ROI, but don’t just leave your data in a box. Do other stuff with that data, unlock the value of it.

Now that you’re more aware of it, let’s do some of the copies. Let’s reduce some of the compliance mandates. Let’s only put data that has sovereignty requirements where it goes; but to do all that, you must know what data you’ve got.

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. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Veeam nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE