Modern enterprises are all in the data business — it’s an inescapable truth. With the proliferation of disparate tools and ecosystems, the resulting sprawl is introducing new vectors for complexity and affecting organizational cyber resilience. That’s where the data freedom idea becomes critical.

Veeam Software Group GmbH has long championed this cause, aiming to give users the flexibility to choose their preferred data platforms. The same ethos shows through in the recently announced platform support for the hypervisor tool, Proxmox.

“Our customers and our partners are asking for choices — there have been some conditions that have changed in the data center,” said Rick Vanover, vice president of product strategy at Veeam. “We announced a new hypervisor, Proxmox, will be supported with Veeam. One of the things we’re going to show is a massive migration of workloads from VMware to another workload.”

Vanover spoke with theCUBE Research analyst Christophe Bertrand, during an AnalystANGLE segment on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Veeam as a versatile platform ready to protect and manage data in an increasingly complex digital landscape.

Combining data freedom with advanced threat incidence response

Supporting Proxmox will facilitate the migration of enterprise workloads at scale, addressing the market clamor for greater choice and availability. Importantly, however, while data freedom and workload migration capabilities aren’t new, the readiness and enhanced orchestration tools of today make these migrations seamless and secure — reminiscent of the physical-to-virtual conversions seen two decades ago, according to Vanover.

“The first question people ask me when they want to move their data is, ‘How can I protect it? Because moving to a new platform is enough of a risk. I don’t want to have a data protection challenge,'” he said. “It has come up every day in almost every conversation I have with customers. There are three camps: Some people want to contract their workload or fully embrace a new platform, and some people are going to stay the same.”

In response to the increasing intensity and sophistication of cyberattacks, Veeam’s focus on enhancing cyber resilience is timely. It recently acquired Coveware Inc., a company specializing in advanced incident response. This acquisition is set to bolster Veeam’s end-to-end cyber resilience capabilities, according to Vanover.

“The thought here is we haven’t really done much externally with that [acquisition],” he said. “We’re going to take some time to explain the capabilities of what is now part of the Veeam portfolio. I’ve even set up a demonstration of end-to-end resiliency, including Coveware’s incident response. We also announced that we’re going to incorporate some of the Coveware capabilities into the Veeam data platform.”

Imbuing the Veeam platform with Coveware’s advanced incidence response chops will enable a slew of features, such as immutability for data protection, clean recovery processes and administrative tools such as ransomware warranties, ensuring robust protection against evolving cyber threats, Vanover added.

“We understand the market,” he said. “It starts from capabilities as simple as immutability, got to have that. But then it goes further into ensuring clean recoveries and into this incident response and further into these administrative vehicles like the ransomware warranty.”

Here’s the complete interview with Rick Vanover:

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