Veeam Software Inc. is refocusing its strategy  to become a more dominant player in the multicloud era of modern data management, where data can live anywhere and moving it across clouds only expands the threat plane. The backup, disaster and recovery provider aims to be the most reliable in the data management market, according to Danny Allan, vice president of product strategy at Veeam.

Veeam’s extensive customer base is driving its decisions to iterate and optimize. “We have 350,000 customers that are giving us guidance on how to make it simple, how to make it reliable, how to be flexible,” he said. “There is a budget for back-up. So we’ve done two things. Focus on the cloud and focus on that technical decision-maker, and it seems to be resonating.”

Allan 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 Veeam’s cloud data management strategies, its five-stage Availability Platform, and data protection (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

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

Vellante: Dial back several years ago. There were a lot of nice incremental improvements. But [today] there’s a lot of … things that are going on. Your take?

Allan: So now we’re at this inflection point where all these organizations are saying, “OK, now I really have to do something about the cloud.” The fight for dominance in the cloud-management era is only really beginning now and will unfold over the next few years.

Vellante: The five stages of the Veeam Availability Platform are backup, [aggregation], visibility, orchestration, automation. But the core of it is back-up, because that’s kind of what you guys are all about, right?

Allan: We have customers that struggle with back-up. And they struggle with back-up in their data center and in the cloud. So, I always highlight to customers, that … we want to go there [with artificial intelligence and machine learning. And we’ll help you get there. But start with back-up, because that’s about aggregating your data into one place.

Vellante: We started really paying attention to [cloud]. So, now that we’re a decade and change in, what are the learnings on how that  was affecting your product strategy?

Allan: Just picking up infrastructure and moving it somewhere else doesn’t necessarily leverage the cloud for what it’s good at. Sometimes what we actually see is reprioritization, like the data goes back on-premises after it moves to the cloud. But we are beginning to see cloud-native applications that are designed for the cloud. And that’s where I think it’s really interesting.

Burris: This notion of what backup does and why it’s now important becomes, for the first time, central to what a company’s strategic business capabilities are. How is that shifting how you balance and how you get information about features and functions and … what you do next?

Allan: We’re now going through this phase of building data management into our platforms. Building data management in is more than just back-up; it’s an ensuring that all of the data you have the visibility across it, that you can unlock it, that you can distribute it. Because if we’re only looking at data in a reactive way, we’re missing the greater opportunity to make our businesses run faster.

Burris: You look at what data protection is doing; you’re looking at how you can start to add more data-security attributes to the platform that you have. Where does security and data protection intersect and come together?

Allan: I believe that Veeam is well positioned because we’re at the intersection, and we can see all of this data. That’s why visibility is the center stage in that five-stage journey [mentioned above]. Because you move from being reactive to being proactive with the data. And proactive in terms in of security and … data privacy.

Vellante: How have you seen GDPR … affecting the way people think about data protection and data management?

Allan: It has done a few different things. One is it’s raised user awareness and organizational awareness of the issue of data privacy as opposed to security. That the users have some ownership over their data. The second thing that it’s done is actually put … legal teeth to this. There have been hefty fines associated with it.

So, around GDPR … we’ve made it simple for customers to tag data. Does this belong in this country versus this country? Secondly, we introduced a step in [Veeam Backup & Replication] Update 4 … that when you recover data you can actually say, “I want to run this script to eliminate that user’s data from being recovered.”

Vellante: I wonder if you could just describe … the tenants of the architecture? There’s an architectural component that was my takeaway from this morning’s conversation that’s fundamental.

Allan: One of the fundamental components is [that] our data is self-describing. So when we do a backup, there’s no dependency on a central server or central management environment. With a self-describing format, what it means is even if the Veeam Software blows up and goes away, if I have that VBK file, I can recover all of the data in it. And that is very unique to us. Because if you do your data protection in the cloud, you just need to move the data on-premises and I can open it on-premises with a completely different software stack, if you will.

And it’s not only fundamental for block storage back-ups, but also the way we introduce object storage and cloud object storage models as well. It’s completely self-describing even if your Veeam software goes away and your 10 years down the road. You can still get that data back.

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