Data protection can be a great idea in concept, until it doesn’t work.

When crippling ransomware attacks impacted 23 cities in Texas near the end of this summer, public libraries checked out books by writing the names of borrowers on sheets of paper and police issued manually generated tickets by hand.

And the towns in Texas weren’t the only ones hit by cyberattacks. Hospitals, cities, court systems, and police departments in Georgia and Pennsylvania have also been impacted by ransomware intrusions over the past year.

Without a clean backup copy of an organization’s entire data catalog, users are at the mercy of criminals seeking monetary gain for holding computer systems hostage. While cities have been targeted by malicious actors more recently, large enterprises are vulnerable as well.

“The bad guys are going to get in, spear phishing works,” said Greg Hughes (pictured), chief executive officer of Veritas Technologies LLC, who described how employees can be enticed to click on one innocuous email link that downloads destructive malware system-wide. “There’s been a lot of focus from large enterprises at restoring at scale very quickly, so you’re not beholden; you can’t be extorted by ransomware attackers. We provide availability, protection and insights for those customers.”

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 the company’s hardware and cloud-agnostic strategy, its work with VMware Inc. in support of hybrid models, the importance of gaining insights from data to meet regulatory requirements, and Veritas’ evolution as a market leader (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE features Greg Hughes as its Guest of the Week.

Ninety-nine of Fortune 100

Formed in 1989, long before ransomware entered the lexicon of disruptive threats, Veritas has emerged as a major player in data protection, software-defined storage, and analytics. The company has claimed 99 of the Fortune 100 and all of the top 10 firms among telecommunications, healthcare and financial institutions as customers, according to Hughes.

“We work with the largest, most complex, most highly regulated, and most demanding customers on the planet,” Hughes said.

That’s a tall order, and Veritas has built its enterprise credibility by following a hardware agnostic strategy while working with 60 cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services Inc., Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Hardware-agnostic approach

An example of how this strategy has evolved for Veritas can be found in one of its major customers — Groupe Renault. The automotive company has 40 terabytes of data across VMware-based SAP application servers that run on the Veritas Resiliency Platform to replicate between data centers.

“They work with us because we are hardware agnostic,” Hughes said. “Our strategy is focused on taking away the complexity and helping the largest companies in the world deal with these data challenges.”

Veritas’ work with VMware Inc. extends beyond Renault’s application servers. In August, Veritas announced general availability for its Enterprise Data Services Platform for VMware on-premises environments or running in any of the major clouds.

The Enterprise Data Services Platform is designed to abstract complex data for enterprise information technology organizations while providing protection and insights.

“VMware is talking about this hybrid, multicloud world, and Veritas is 100% supportive of that vision,” Hughes stated.

Aptare acquisition adds insight

A key component of that multicloud vision involves being able to glean insight from massive amounts of data spread across the enterprise. In March, Veritas acquired Aptare Inc., a provider of analytics solutions for hybrid cloud environments.

Aptare had been focused on storage-based predictive analytics, which can help with a multitude of needs, including compliance demands.

“The storage infrastructure is so complex, companies were having a hard time figuring out anything about their data,” Hughes explained. “They were having the hardest time just answering some fundamental questions that boards were asking. Aptare pulls information from storage area network arrays, network file systems, virtual machines, and all data protection applications to get a complete picture of what’s happening with your data.”

That complete picture can be especially helpful in meeting a growing number of regulatory requirements. Following implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe last year, California passed the Consumer Privacy Act, which is scheduled to go into effect in January 2020.

California’s new law requires businesses with over $25 million in annual revenue or in receipt of personal information affecting at least 50,000 state residents to be transparent about the data being collected. It’s part of a growing wave of privacy-based regulation that will likely engulf many firms in the coming years.

“They’re dealing with this massive growth in government regulations around the world because of concerns about privacy,” said Hughes, who cited one customer in Australia with particularly onerous data reporting requirements. “She deals with 27 different regulatory environments. How do you deal with that when you don’t know what you have in terms of data?”

Roller coaster journey

This is the thorny thicket of data protection and regulatory requirements that Veritas must navigate for its customers around the globe. It’s a chaotic field, but that’s not unfamiliar territory for a company that endured its own 12-year roller-coaster ride as a public company subsidiary, seeing itself spun-off and then returning as a private business while experiencing major changes in its top leadership.

The company was acquired by Symantec Corp. in 2005 but was then broken up and sold to a private equity firm — Carlyle Group LP — in 2015 after struggling to gain a major foothold in the volatile security business. Under the guidance of BEA Systems Inc. co-founder Bill Coleman, Veritas pivoted from an on-premises backup and recovery solution to a more successful multicloud management and software-defined storage model.

Hughes himself was no stranger to the company. He held a succession of executive positions at Veritas between 2003 and 2010 and then left to become an operating partner at Silver Lake Partners before taking over as CEO of Serena Software Inc. He returned to lead Veritas in 2018 after Coleman stepped down.

Six months after returning to the company, Hughes received a bit of news that may have reassured him that he made the right move. Veritas had earned a position at the top for worldwide market share by revenue, according to Gartner Inc.

“All we do is availability, protection and insights,” Hughes said. “That’s why we’ve been in the Gartner Magic Quadrant 13 times and we’re the market share leader. We’ve been around for 25 years, and we protect everything.”

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