The Amazon Web Services Inc. partner ecosystem is vast. And Veeam Software Corp.’s long-term partnership with AWS is a prime example of an AWS partner success story.

With AWS’ cloud storage and compute solutions and Veeam’s disaster recovery, cloud backup and data productions, the duo have formed an inspiring partnership. Continuing that momentum, both companies are exploring new ways to add event more value across a wider range of use-case scenarios.

“Kubernetes workloads is a newer set of workloads on AWS that we’re very interested in,” said Andy Langsam (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager at Veeam. “We made an acquisition and have a product called Kasten that we’ve been investing in and working with AWS with their EKS Anywhere.”

Veeam completed its acquisition of Kasten Inc. in October 2020, the company’s first move in the Kubernetes, or K8s, space. Kasten, for its part, was a startup with expertise in solutions that protect Kubernetes-native workloads on-premises and across multicloud environments. In essence, the acquisition’s purpose was solidifying Veeam’s place as a provider of single data protection solutions across virtual, physical, cloud and Kubernetes environments.

Langsam and Sabina Joseph (pictured, right), general manager of technology partners at AWS, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during today’s AWS Partner Showcase event. They discussed the current DevOps landscape and new cloud security threats. (* Disclosure below.)

Responding to cloud storage and containerization demand

Recent 451 Research statistics showed that almost two-thirds of organizations are already on Kubernetes or will shift to the containerization platform within the next two years. AWS and Veeam understand the amount of potential data needing protection, as well as the amount of value that stands to be created across Veeam and AWS customer bases.

“People are stepping away from the traditional backup methods, tape libraries, secondary storage sites, and things like that. And they’re backing up data into the cloud,”  Joseph said. “And we, AWS, offer a number of different storage services, data transfer methods and networking solutions that provide unmatched ability, reliability and security. Of course, AWS and Veeam have been partnering together for quite a number of years with cost-effective, pay-as-you-go services.”

Veeam continues to add enterprise customers, currently numbered at about 400,000 — most of which are either already fully cloud-based or looking to shift their storage and backups entirely to the cloud, according to Langsam. A lot of those customers place backup and disaster recovery at the forefront of their computing objectives.

Dealing with a parallel ransomware pandemic

Statistics around the ubiquity of ransomware attacks are mounting. Crucial private and public sector workloads and data have moved online, thus creating a profitable landscape for malicious ransomware perpetrators.

“We just published a study where 71% of the thousands of people that responded said that they had already been a victim of a ransomware attack,” Langsam stated. “It’s a staggering number. And when we look at our relationship with Amazon, we look at the integration we’ve done around moving data up to object storage.”

Within the AWS ecosystem itself, a set of intrinsic features are reinforcing the implementation of solutions by partners like Veeam.

“AWS has a capability called immutable data sets. And so that affords you some great protection against ransomware, as an example,” Langsam added. “That’s one of the areas that we’re investing in very heavily. And, by the way, our mutual customers are backing up and restoring with Veeam. And we’re doing it on AWS, and the data volumes are exploding.”

In essence, Veeam and AWS deliver immutable, three-tiered backups to customers through Amazon S3 Object Lock integration, Langsam explained. This means that even if ransomware attacks succeed, the backups remain unchanged, are unencrypted, and cannot be deleted.

Both companies plan to take their partnership to the next level moving forward, with AWS’ “channel-first” approach at the helm.

“AWS has millions of customers and a hundred thousand partners across 150 countries. Veeam has, as Andy mentioned, over 400,000 customers and 35,000 partners worldwide,” Joseph said. “So somewhere in these four numbers, we both intersect on those customers and partners. And one of the initiatives that my team is heavily focused on is triangulating between the partners that Veeam has together with our technology partnership.”

Watch the complete interview below, and be sure to check out theCUBE’s complete coverage of the AWS Partner Showcase “Speeding Innovation on AWS” event. (* Disclosure: Veeam Software Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Veeam nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE