As Veeam Software Group GmbH recently held its annual industry analyst event in San Antonio, it had a new direction to talk about following its announcement of its intent to acquire Securiti Inc. for a little over $1.7 billion.

Veeam is best known as a data protection company, but that changed when with the intent to acquire Securiti. This changes the profile of Veeam from being security-adjacent to an actual security vendor and, one could argue, it positions it to be the industry’s first artificial intelligence resiliency company.

This is important positioning as Veeam looks to go public. Looking at the competitive landscape, Commvault Systems Inc., which is considered more of a legacy backup and recovery company, trades at a market cap of $5.2 billion with a trailing-12-month revenue of just over a billion dollars. Conversely, Rubrik Inc. is thought of as a data security product, and it has a market cap of $14 billion with almost identical revenue. Veeam’s ability to tie the combination of its core product to Securiti to create a company that can not only protect AI workloads and data but then recover if breached, would be unique and likely fetch a trading multiple north of Rubrik.

The strategic rationale: Resilience for the AI era

For decades, backup and recovery systems focused on protection: ensuring organizations could recover after cyberattacks, outages and, more recently, ransomware, which has been a strong catalyst for Veeam adoption over the past few years. But in today’s digital landscape, where AI and compliance demands make enterprise data more dynamic, distributed and business-critical, a new challenge has emerged — not just recovering data, but ensuring it’s continuously secure, trustworthy and compliant across hybrid, multicloud and public cloud environments.

The combination of Veeam’s expertise in backup, recovery and ransomware remediation with Securiti’s deep capabilities — in data discovery, classification, lineage, data security posture management, or DSPM, and privacy automation — now offers continuous visibility and governance of both primary and secondary data. A good way to think about it is that Veeam has created a “data command center” that unifies resilience, security, compliance and business enablement, all tightly coupled with AI-native features.​

Key differentiators: The first AI resiliency platform

Once the deal closes and the two companies come together, Veeam should have some unique differentiators, which include the following:

1. Unifying governance, security and recovery

Unlike most backup providers, Veeam can now provide end-to-end intelligence and automation from data creation to archival, governing how data is used for AI, automatically classifying sensitive assets, enforcing privacy policies and ensuring only trusted, compliant datasets feed AI models. The addition of DSPM allows Veeam’s platform to shift “left” of the breach, enabling security teams to articulate, enforce and audit policy before and after incidents.​

2. AI-driven data management and trust

At the event we got a good look at Securiti’s Data Command Graph and agentic AI. Veeam can leverage this to create a real-time, unified layer across hybrid environments, helping organizations “trust” their AI pipelines by verifying the integrity, provenance and compliance status of their data flows. For enterprises regulating the use of large language models or deploying AI at scale, this capability should be a boon: Resilience is no longer just about recoverability, but also about the quality and legitimacy of data used for business-critical insights.​

3. Continuous, automated compliance and privacy

Legacy backup companies focus on restoring data post-incident. Veeam now tracks data lineage, retention and policy adherence constantly enabling proactive compliance with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA and emerging AI-specific mandates. This capability greatly reduces the manual burden on information technology and risk teams and addresses one of the most urgent problems in AI adoption.​ Given the regulatory landscape around AI is likely to continually change, being able to automate this will be big for customers.

4. Single command center across all data estates

Veeam’s platform vision provides a consolidated view and governance interface for primary, secondary and software-as-a-service data worldwide. This goes beyond traditional solutions that typically stop at protecting backup copies. Enterprises can now map, secure and manage permissions on their entire data estate in one place — a critical requirement in the era of distributed cloud, edge computing and shadow IT.

This convergence of backup, security, privacy and AI into a single platform directly addresses emerging enterprise needs. It enables safer, more robust AI deployments, where organizations need assurance not only that their data can be recovered from ransomware, but that it is also clean, compliant and fit for decision-making and automation.

One of the interesting aspects is that this approach creates direct C-level visibility and relevance for Veeam, which should also help its valuation as it looks to IPO. Traditionally siloed IT and business teams can collaborate on a shared “source of truth” for data: auditing AI pipelines, enforcing sovereignty and demonstrating regulatory compliance without compromising speed or agility.​

Final thoughts

Veeam’s acquisition of Securiti AI isn’t a consolidation play or even to move into an adjacency. It’s an aggressive move by Chief Executive Anand Eswaran (pictured) to redefine the industry his company leads in the AI era. Market leaders rarely lead transitions, which is why technology shifts typically lead to new winners but, being private gives Veeam to transform and then IPO. The company is uniquely positioned to lead in a world where resilient operations require more than restoring data — they demand holistic, automated governance of the data, policies and AI models that power modern business.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Photo: Zeus Kerravala​