What is the state of enterprise big data? Many companies are hoarding as much data as possible in the era of digital transformation. At the same time, sophisticated hackers and data-privacy regulations increasingly make data a liability. How can companies progress with their big-data projects in the face of all this adversity?

They need a good backup plan, according to Greg Hughes (pictured), chief executive officer of Veritas Technologies LLC. That is, they need resilient data-backup and protection software to cover their hides. Hughes has determined this from listening to enterprise customers themselves. Veritas is a 25-year-old company serving 99 of the Fortune 100 companies.

“I spend about 50% of my time talking to these customers, so we learn a lot,” Hughes said.

Hughes spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld event in San Francisco. They discussed how backup and protection software helps companies get their data act together (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Red alert to resiliency

Companies are struggling to get a handle on their data for regulatory and defense purposes, according to Hughes. For example, an Australian customer told Hughes she deals with 27 different regulatory environments.

“Another customer was saying that the California Privacy Act will be the death of him — and he’s based in St. Louis,” he said.

Many companies’ storage infrastructure is so complex, they can’t figure out anything about their data, Hughes pointed out. “Boards are saying — because of the ransomware threat — is all of our data protected? Is it backed up? Are all our applications backed up and protected? And customers could not answer that question,” he said.

In the case of breeches and ransomware attacks, companies need not wonder “if” but rather “when?” This is why resiliency has become so important in storage and backup. It’s about what companies are able to do after an attack in order to recover.

“What you want in that case is a resilient infrastructure. You want to be able to restore from a really good backup copy of data,” Hughes said. Veritas’ Enterprise Data Services Platform abstracts away the complexity of data to recover quickly, he added.

What does this have to do with regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation? Veritas also offers data availability and insights solutions. They can run analytics on secondary storage and catalog and classify sensitive data, Hughes explained. Veritas even has a full GDPR solution combining technology with insight from professional services advisers.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld event. (* Disclosure: Veritas Technologies LLC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Veritas nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE