After leaving its mark riding the virtualization wave, the data protection company Veeam Software Inc. has continued to extend its product portfolio and capture the other major waves in the industry.

The company is now focusing on three areas to drive its future revenue growth, according to Danny Allan (pictured, left), chief technology officer of Veeam.

“One is in the data center, so we built a billion-dollar business being the very best in the data center for vSphere, Hyper-V for Nutanix AHV and, as we announced, also with Red Hat virtualization,” he said. “The second is SAS – Office 365 is exploding. We already announced we’re protecting 5.8 million users right now with Veeam Backup for Office 365. And there’s a lot of room to grow there. And then the third area is cloud.”

Allan; Rick Vanover (pictured, right), senior director of product strategy at Veeam; and Dave Russell (pictured, center), vice president of enterprise strategy at Veeam, spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during VeeamON 2021. They discussed Veeam’s main growth areas, how the company can help businesses on the path toward the cloud environment, Veeam’s role in the security landscape, and what life is like at Veeam under the new management of Insight Partners. (* Disclosure below.)

Innovation will be based on containers

Enterprises’ IT infrastructure has undergone many changes in the past two decades. While the 2000s were marked by the development of digital and IT services aimed at end users, a decade later it was the turn of virtualization, which benefited the business, making IT more efficient and increasing the ROI (return on investment), according to Allan.

The new era of innovation is based on a move toward containerized infrastructure, he explained. “That’s why the Kasten acquisition is so strategic to us, because the unique thing about containers is they’re designed to be consumption friendly. You spin them up, you spin them down, you provision them, you deprovision them and they’re completely portable,” Allan said.

An important part of this infrastructure modernization is the migration of part of portfolio applications to the cloud, which can be complex and laborious for many enterprises. The decision on what to move should be made on a case-by-case basis, and data backup and recovery solutions can help businesses along the way, as they offer a safe return, according to Russell.

“We have instances of where people want to repatriate data back, and having a portable data format is key,” he stated.

While some companies repatriate data when they realize that the cloud is not the best strategy at any given time, others actually build their workloads in the cloud with the intention of bringing them back to on-premises. Veeam’s goal in this scenario is to give businesses the confidence that they can move forward if they want to, but that they can also return if necessary.

“Data mobility is at the heart of Veeam, and with all the different platforms, Kubernetes comes into play as well. It’s definitely aligning to the needs that we’re seeing in the market,” Vanover said.

Protecting data from ransomware attacks

By ensuring that data is backed up and can be recovered wherever is is, Veeam also acts as a defense for customers against the growing and increasingly dangerous ransomware attacks. Helping companies to store data, keeping it offline, encrypted and immutable has been Veeam’s focus for a long time.

“[And] it’s more than that; it’s detection and monitoring of the environment, which is certainly what we do with our monitoring tools, and then also the security recovery,” Allan said. “The last thing that you want to do, of course, is bring your backups or bring your data back online only to be hit again, and so we’ve had a number of capabilities across our portfolio to help in all of these.”

Some of the areas in which Veeam may present some differentials are around detection and response, according to Vanover.

“A lot of people think a backup product would shine in both protection and recovery, which it does [and] Veeam does. But especially on response and detection, we have a lot of capabilities that become impact opportunities for organizations to be able to really provide successful outcomes through the other functions,” Vanover stated.

When the system captures data in the form of a backup, it also advises teams not to put backup infrastructure on internet connectivity and to use only minimal explicit permissions. These things, combined with immutability or air gap capabilities, provide companies with an additional level of resilience to drive recovery.

“From an analytic standpoint, we have an API that allows organizations to look into the backup data [and] do more aggressive scanning without any exclusions, with different tools on a flat file system,” Vanover explained. “Couple that with secure restore, when you reintroduce things into the environment from a recovery standpoint you don’t want to reintroduce threats. So there’s protections, there’s confidence building steps along the way with Veeam.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VeeamON 2021. (* 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