Outdated backup and recovery systems became a liability fast when COVID-19 forced work to go remote. Imagine this scenario: Company data is backed up to tape and stored off-site — a simple and cheap old-school solution — until lockdown means no one can get into the office.

Or maybe the organization was updating legacy systems sequentially. But lockdown means it’s hard to procure new hardware or deploy new machines when applications start to struggle on resources.

Cloud is the obvious solution; and the global response to COVID-19 has kicked adoption into high gear. As Microsoft Inc.’s Satya Nadella said: “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”

“It’s not just working from home. It’s how do I actually conduct my operations, my backup, my archiving … all of those things remotely,” said Danny Allan (pictured, left), chief technology officer at Veeam Software Corp. “It’s actually changed the way organizations think about their data management, not just operations from the sense of internal processes, but also external processes as well.”

Allan and Anton Gostev (pictured, right), senior vice president of product management at Veeam, spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the VeeamOn event. They discussed how Veeam’s software-defined backup and management solutions are helping companies handle the transition to remote operations. (* Disclosure below.)

Software-defined backup saves the day

The examples above are real use-case scenarios Gostev described to Vellante. In the first example, the customer was already using Veeam Availability Suite version 10. The solution’s offsite backup and object storage capabilities allowed the company to switch from off-site tape backup to fully automated off-site backup and direct object storage in the public cloud.

“I don’t know how long it would have taken them, if not for COVID-19, to move to this process,” Gostev said. “Now they love it because it’s so much better than what they did before.”

The second scenario is one that has affected more than one customer, with Veeam experiencing a “big uptick” in use of its Direct Restore feature. Describing it as “a lifesaver in this situation,” Gostev explained the process. “What they do is that they schedule the downtime, and then migrate, restore that latest backup into the cloud, and continue using the machine in the cloud on much more powerful hardware,” he said.

As well as backup-as-a-service, Veeam offers disaster recovery-as-a-service. “It’s not just about protecting the data, but getting back the specific element of data that you need for operations,” Allan stated. “Having specific granularity to pull back that data, exactly the data you need when you need it, is critical.”

Veeam goes beyond data protection and recovery

Protecting data and making sure that recovery is available in the event of disaster is basic to any business. However, the flipside of data protection is data management. Linking the two, Veeam offers a comprehensive solution that automates operational procedures, making data recovery and management agnostic of location.

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s on-prem or whether it’s in the cloud, that protection of data and then the effective management and integration with existing processes is fundamental for every infrastructure and will continue to be so into the future,” Allan stated. “It’s only when you have this effective protection and management that you can begin to unleash the power of data.”

The pandemic accelerated Veeam’s vision of becoming the biggest storage vendor without selling a single storage box, according to Gostev.

“This is just becoming the reality,” he said. “We are already managing over hundreds of petabytes of data in the cloud, and we only just started a couple of years ago with object storage support. So that’s the power of software-defined. We don’t need to sell you any storage to be eventually the biggest storage player on the market.”

Ultimately, what Veeam’s customers care about is reliability, according to Allan. “Make it simple. Make it flexible. … We have a product that as everyone says, ‘It just works,'” he concluded.

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: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VeeamOn. Neither Veeam Software Corp., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE