Veeam Software Corp., a technology company that develops backup, disaster recovery and intelligent data management software, has had a long and lengthy relationship with Google LLC in a number of different areas. And as many organizations continue to demand hybrid and native cloud solutions for data storage and protection, the partnership continues to expand.

Danny Allan (pictured, left), chief technology officer of Veeam, and Brian Schwartz (pictured, right), director of product management of Google Cloud Platform at Google, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during VeeamON 2021. They discussed ways that Google and Veeam are partnering for hybrid and native cloud solutions for the enterprise. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Veeam’s 400,000 customers have seen … a massive shift to work from home and to supporting software-as-a-service workloads. What have you seen when it comes to data?

Allan: Certainly, for employees working from home, there’s a massive increase in the attack surface for organizations, because now instead of having three offices, they have … hundreds of locations for their end users. And so it’s all about protecting their data.

At the same time, there’s been this explosion in malware and ransomware attacks, and so we really see customers focusing on three different areas. The first is making sure that when they take a copy of their data that it is actually secure and we can get into. Second thing that we see customers doing is monitoring their environment. So this is both inspection of the compute environment and of the data itself, because when ransomware hits, for example, you’ll see change rates on data explode. And then lastly, make sure that you can recover intelligently … because the last thing that you want to do if you’re hit by ransomware is to bring the ransomware back online from a backup. So we call this “secure recover” or “secure restore.” We really see customers focusing on those three areas.

So about the Veeam and Google partnership — talk to me about it from your perspective — the history of it, the strength of the partnership, and why it matters.

Allan: We have 400,000 customers. Where do they send their backups? Most customers don’t want to continue to invest in storage solutions on their premises, and so they’ll send their data from on-premises and tier it into Google Cloud Storage. So that’s one integration point. The second is: When they’re running workloads within the cloud — so this is now cloud-native — if you’re running on top of the Google Cloud platform, we are inside the Google Marketplace and we can protect those workloads.

A third area is around the Google VMware Engine, there’s customers that have a hybrid model where they have some capacity on-premises and some in Google using the VMware infrastructure. And we support that as well — that’s a third area. And then a fourth, and perhaps the longest running: Google is synonymous with containers and especially Kubernetes … so our [Kasten] K10 product, which does data protection for Kubernetes, is also in the Google Marketplace. So a very long and deep relationship with them.

Schwartz: There’s still a lot of customers that are on their journey into the cloud and protecting those on-premises workloads — and in some senses even using Veeam’s capabilities to move data to help migrate into the cloud is … a great pillar of the relationship. But as Danny mentioned, increasingly more and more primary applications are running in the cloud, and the ability to protect those and have the great features and capabilities that Veeam provides. So we’re super excited about the partnership; we’re happy to have this great foundation to build together with Veeam into the future.

Being able to support the hybrid cloud environment for customers and ensure that that data is recoverable is table stakes these days. Does that give Veeam an advantage over your competition, Danny?

Allan: It does, absolutely. So customers want the hybrid cloud experience. What we find over time is they do trend toward the cloud, there’s no question. If you think about what Google is known for, they have incredible capabilities around machine learning and artificial intelligence, and they’ve been doing that for a very long time. And so you can imagine customers, after they start putting their data there, they start putting their workloads there, they want to unlock it and to leverage the insights from the data that they’re storing. And that’s really exciting about where we’re going.

I’d say we’re early days for most customers; they’re still kind of moving and transitioning into the cloud. But if you think of the capabilities that are unlocked with that massive platform in Google, it just opens up the ability to address big challenges of today — like climate change and sustainability and … all the healthcare challenges that we’re faced with. It really is an exciting time to be partnered with Google.

Brian, let’s dig into the infrastructure and the architecture from your perspective. Help us unpack that and what customers are coming to you for help with. 

Schwartz: Danny mentioned the prowess that Google has with data and analytics and AI. I think we’re pretty well known for that. There’s a tremendous opportunity for people in the future. The thing that people get just right out of the box is the access to the technology that we built to build Google Cloud itself. We have eight products here at Google that have a billion users. 

The other thing I like to mention is the Google Cloud Storage that Veeam is built on, our object storage, it’s the same technology that underpins YouTube and other things that most people are familiar with. So, when you’re going to do a restore, it’s going to load fast, even if you’re on one of the more inexpensive storage classes. So, it’s a really nice experience for data protection. 

It has this global network property, so you could restore to a different region if there was ever a disaster — there’s just the scale of our foundation of infrastructure. And also … we’re super proud about the investments that Google has made for sustainability. Our cloud runs on 100% renewable energy. At the cloud at our scale, that’s a lot of green energy. We’re happy to be one of the largest consumers of green energy out there, and we make continued investments in sustainability. So, we think we have some of the greenest data centers in the world, and it’s just one more benefit that people have when they come to run on Google Cloud.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VeeamON. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VeeamON. Neither Veeam Software Corp., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE