After two years holding online-only events, the recent VeeamON 2022 event saw the launch of the first hybrid VeeamON. While the in-person crowd gathered in Las Vegas to celebrate the lifting of pandemic restrictions with live sessions and corridor chats, close to 40,000 additional attendees took part in a parallel virtual event that included live keynote speeches and content from Las Vegas alongside exclusively online sessions.

It was also the first VeeamON appearance for Veeam Software Corp. Chief Executive Officer Anand Eswaran (pictured), who outlined big goals for the future of the company. Data protection is a crowded market, with Gartner’s Magic Quadrant showing newer entrants, such as Cohesity Inc. and Rubrick Inc., joining Veeam, Dell Technologies Inc., CommVault Systems Inc. and Veritas Technologies LLC, in the leaders’ quadrant. 2021 marked Veeam’s fifth year in the top position.

But, the big news was that IDC Corp. data had Veeam and Dell neck-and-neck for market share. It’s not a position Eswaran plans to stay in for long.

“We see a path to taking share and getting from here, 12% [of market share], to 25% to 40% and being an outsize number one,” Eswaran told theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and David Nicholson in an interview at VeeamON, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

In case you missed VeeamON, here are theCUBE’s top three takeaways from the event:

1) Cybercriminals target backup first.

There’s an old information technology joke: “We’re the best at backup … but terrible at recovery.” It used to be funny, but with known zero-day exploits being stockpiled by criminals, it is inevitable that companies are going to get hit with a ransomware attack — that is, if they haven’t already been unknowingly infiltrated.

Seventy-six percent of organizations reported an attack in 2021, according to research in the “2022 Top Trends in Data Protection” report published by Veeam. Of the data targeted, only 47% was encrypted and only 64% of that was recoverable.

“Ninety-four percent of the time, one of the first intrusions is to attempt to get rid of the backup repository; and in two-thirds of cases, the backup repository is impacted,” Jason Buffington, Veeam’s vice president of solutions strategy, told theCUBE.

In a concerning trend, more than half of the organizations attacked go ahead and pay the ransom. And only one in five successfully recover 100% of their data without paying a ransom. This shows that companies are reacting after the attack rather than defending against it, according to Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst, ZK Research. During theCUBE’s analysis of the VeeamON keynote, Kerravala backs up these statistics by mentioning a Florida hospital that is “stocking up” on bitcoin in order to pay when they receive ransomware demands.

“They don’t even really argue with them. They just pay it out,” he said.

Changing the reactive cybersecurity mentality is essential, and the best way to protect backup is to prevent it being accessed in the first place.

“If you don’t have something that is air-gapped and cut off from the rest of the world in a physical or logical way, you can’t guarantee [it’s secure],” according to theCUBE’s Nicholson.

This expands the definition of data protection, with Veeam and many other market players offering immutable backups and automated recovery solutions.

“Things have changed so dramatically,” said theCUBE’s Vellante. “It’s now a whole new total addressable market [with] the adjacency to security [of] data protection.”

Here’s the full keynote analysis with Zeus Kerravala:

2)Edge is the next frontier to conquer.

Edge computing adoption is already happening in retail, manufacturing and the energy sector, with access to sensor and device data being used to improving processes and experiences. However, the term “edge” covers a vast territory that includes not only the internet of things and industrial IoT, but cellular data and organizational edges within hotels, universities and entertainment venues. This is creating an increasingly fragmented data environment, making protecting data both harder and more critical.

The increase in edge adoption will bring “small tweaks” in process and technology, according to Danny Allan, chief technology officer of Veeam, during his interview with theCUBE. “You’re going to see a lot of Arm at the edge, obviously, for power consumption purposes, and you’re also going to see different constructs for networking … they’re going to try and minimize the persistent storage to the smallest footprint possible,” he said.

But, due to the requirement of edge to be stateless, “containers will lead the edge,” Allan added.

As current market leader, Veeam has developed its comprehensive Modern Data Protection portfolio featuring immutable backup and automated recovery. But the company is now challenged to move into other adjacent markets and “to go create not just a backup and recovery company, but a true data management platform company that has relevancy in cyber and analytics or artificial intelligence and data warehousing,” Kerravala said.

Veeam’s solutions are decoupled from the underlying hardware so it can run on virtual machines and containers. This is ideal for creating a portable format for data that encapsulates virtual machines and/or instances that can live in the containerized world, according to Nicholson.

“And once you create that common denominator, that’s the secret sauce for what you’re talking about as supercloud,” he said.

Here’s Danny Allan’s complete video interview:

3) Veeam is building a supercloud.

“Supercloud is becoming a thing,” proclaimed Vellante in a recent Breaking Analysis feature. During VeeamON 2022, he received confirmation that building a supercloud is not only a practical idea, but that Veeam is in the process of creating one.

“It is technically feasible, and you can do it today,” Veeam CTO Allan stated.

Describing how Veeam converts snapshots into the Veeam portable data format, Allan explained how the idea of supercloud comes into play within Veeam’s architecture: “If I can convert it into the Veeam portable data format, I can move that OS anywhere, I can move it from physical to virtual, to cloud, to another cloud, back to virtual. I can put it back on physical if I want to. It actually abstracts the cloud layer,” he said.

In the 18 years since it was founded, Veeam has grown from providing backup on block storage devices using the vSphere Virtual Machine File System format to encompass not only virtualization, but cloud, containers and cybersecurity.

“I’m just fascinated by the whole concept of a portable format for data that encapsulates virtual machines and/or instances that can live in the containerized world,” Nicholson said. “To watch the progression from that fundamental to all of the other areas where now you’ve created this common denominator layer has been amazing.”

There’s something brewing, according to Vellante.

“There’s something different that’s not just public cloud, not hybrid cloud, not private cloud. It’s across cloud, it’s supercloud,” Vellante said “[Veeam] really wants to build out a supercloud, so we’re watching that very closely.”

Here’s the VeeamON event final wrap-up analysis segment:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of VeeamON, here’s our complete event video playlist:

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE