Exponential data growth poses pressing information-technology and business challenges for enterprises, including those related to data protection, compliance, and workload portability. Solving these issues for customers is what drives data management and security company Veritas Techonologies LLC, according to Tim Burlowski (pictured), senior director of product management at Veritas.

“We want to make sure that data is protected and always available,” he said. “[It] means you have to be ready with a recent recovery if necessary, and you need to provide that data back to the consumer as quickly as you possibly can.”

Burlowski spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation. They discussed how Veritas positions itself to solve data problems for companies, enterprises’ progress in recognizing information as an asset, and how the evolution of infrastructure and regulation deepens the challenges of data management. (* Disclosure below.)

Data as a valuable asset

Although enterprises are faced with an increasing amount of data, not all recognize the value of this asset and the need to take care of it, according to Burlowski. “I see companies taking shortcuts and outsourcing. And then, suddenly, you’ll see them in the news. And they discover that they had a major outage for a couple of days,” he said.

Other organizations are taking it more seriously and starting to prune their data, examine it, meet various compliance regimes, and think about backup. “[These organizations] are really starting to drive a more efficient IT operation when it comes to data protection,” Burlowski stated.

Veritas’ solutions for data security aims to provide many layers of protection to detect intrusions and prevent them, no matter where the data lives.

“Our products are sort of the last thing that often stands between the customer [and] losing their data completely,” Burlowski explained. “And so we’re looking at a number of technology innovations that will enable them to store their data on immutable devices … which we’ll be announcing later this summer.”

Infrastructure evolution deepens challenges

If data management is already demanding the rapid evolution of the IT infrastructure, the rise of public clouds, for example, makes it even more challenging. The biggest change for Veritas has been a renewed focus on application programming interfaces, intermediary software that allows two applications to talk to each other, according to Burlowski.

However, it does not replace the deep integration that Veritas does with other companies and with the container ecosystem, OpenShift, and other technologies.

“The truth is that database vendors exploded, and it’s not just Linux anymore — it’s containers, and it might be a container based on CentOS, and it might be container running in the cloud, or it might be a simple function like a Lambda function running on nothing in AWS,” he explained. “And so, this whole world has gotten a lot stranger. We’ve had to be a little bit more prolific in what we support.”

The evolution of the regulatory environment over time has also had an impact on market solutions. What has most affected Veritas is the growing concern of customers about privacy, driven by regulation such as the European General Data Protection Regulation, according to Burlowski.

“In some ways, it’s actually been a good-news story for data protection and data management, because people are starting to say: I should identify where the data is, I should figure out where the [personally identifiable information] is, and I should make sure I’m actually using my backups for the right purposes, which is something we’ve always believed in,” Burlowski pointed out.

Privacy concerns should remind companies to rethink their backup strategies, such as what to backup and for how long to do it, according to Burlowski. As the price of data storage has dropped dramatically over the past 10 years, at an average of 15% per year, companies have ignored these issues, he added. But when working at scale, there is an enormous amount of waste.

“We’ve identified for customers, using our data analytics technology, millions of dollars of cost savings where they were both storing files on expensive primary tier one storage and they were backing up those … every single week, even though it hadn’t changed or hadn’t been read in seven-plus years,” he explained. “They literally didn’t know why they had it. And I think people are starting to consider that, especially in budget-constrained times.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* 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