A research study conducted by Veritas Technologies LLC in 2017 found that an alarming 69 percent of organizations erroneously believed that cloud service providers were responsible for client data protection and compliance with privacy rules. That gap in understanding, combined with an enterprise-wide shift to multicloud environments, is putting more pressure on data management vendors to provide solutions.

Veritas Technologies has responded to this through a recently formed partnership with Nutanix Inc. “As customers move their workloads onto hyperconverged platforms, and a lot of our customers are doing that, they need to find ways to protect that data,” said Peter Grimmond (pictured), head of technology, EMEA, at Veritas Technologies. “What we’ve done with Nutanix recently is to integrate NetBackup with AHV so we can now backup at the VMware level from Nutanix.”

Grimmond stopped by the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host Stu Miniman (@stu) during the Nutanix.NEXT EU event in Nice, France. They discussed his company’s recent partnership with Nutanix, what makes the solution work, and implications for meeting new data privacy requirements, such as the General Data Protection Regulation. (* Disclosure below.)

Extending data protection to hybrid cloud

The partnership will integrate Veritas NetBackup 8.1 with the Nutanix native hypervisor (known as AHV) to protect virtualized workloads. The addition of NetBackup extends Veritas’ data protection capabilities within Nutanix Enterprise Cloud or other hybrid cloud environments.

The solution is driven by RESTful APIs, technology that transforms transactions into a series of modules. NetBackup has a RESTful API that allows the user to backup parallel workloads. Nutanix has a RESTful API that allows a user to access its backup. “We hook those two together and get a solution reasonably quickly,” Grimmond explained.

The Veritas-Nutanix partnership will also become more significant as the clock ticks closer to the deadline for the European Union’s GDPR, which goes into effect in May. GDPR requires companies doing business in Europe to meet strict rules surrounding data privacy.

“We’re … hearing the same thing from our customers, which is that GDPR is something that’s [concerning] them,” Grimmond said. “Generally speaking, I think enterprises are still looking for help to get their problem solved.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Nutanix .NEXT EU. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Nutanix .NEXT EU event. Neither Nutanix Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE