What’s a copy of backup data good for? It isn’t just a standby in case of disaster anymore. A host of data-management tricks and computing technologies are cropping up on top of backup data to make it more resilient to the unexpected, and  less disruptive to business operations.

Reliable backup software and usable data copies can improve companies’ overall information technology in surprising ways, according to Danny Allan (pictured, left), vice president of product strategy at Veeam Software Inc. Developer operations, security teams, and others can work with copies without impacting production.

“One of the interesting things about Veeam customers — they’re far more likely to be on the most recent versions of software, because you can test it easily by taking a copy, testing the patch, testing the update and then rolling it forward,” Allan said.

The enterprise will see more use cases for backup data in coming years, according to Allan, and these may include data classification and General Data Protection Regulation compliance.

Allan and Ratmir Timashev (pictured, right), co-founder and executive vice president of marketing and corporate development at Veeam, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, during the VMworld event in San Francisco. They discussed backup’s spin into data management and customer-driven changes to Veeam’s business model (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Data copies that do more

Backup data calms fears about employees mishandling sensitive data or throwing a wrench in production. Veeam’s Staged Restore allows users to manipulate data copies in a sandbox before giving them to a developer, for instance.

“You don’t want to give them credit card numbers or health information; you probably want to mask that out,” Allan said. 

A new market of offerings around outsourcing data classification and archiving could evolve from this, Allan pointed out. This could take the burden of finding sensitive data or personally identifiable information for GDPR compliance off of businesses’ hands,

Veeam has spun into data management and multicloud as a result of customer demand. Timashev acknowledged that competition is getting stiff in data management, but he remains confident.

“We have a very good position because we own the major part of your hybrid cloud, which is the private cloud. And we’re providing a good vision for how the hybrid-cloud data management, not just data protection … should be done,” he concluded. 

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE