Veritas looks beyond NetBackup for growth in ASEAN

Veritas Technologies may be better known for its NetBackup backup and recovery software, but the company is looking to its availability and storage analytics portfolios for growth.

That is according to Andy Ng, its vice-president and managing director for the Asia South region, who noted that the pandemic has brought business resiliency to the fore as organisations step up their digital transformation efforts amid growing cyber threats.

Ng said a large oil and gas company in Malaysia, for example, had engaged Veritas to back up and secure its data assets for long-term retention to guard against ransomware attacks.

Some of these attacks had already affected a professional services firm in India whose employees were locked out of their laptops for about three days, Ng revealed, adding that the firm had since increased its investment in Veritas’s software 10-fold.

“So, in a quick six months, they realised that if they don’t protect their data and recover, the damage to their brand and impact on revenue will far exceed the investment that they need to make,” Ng added.

New workloads, particularly cloud-based workloads, which Ng admitted Veritas had not been well-equipped to handle, will also provide a window of opportunity.

“We’ve done a lot of work from a product perspective to make NetBackup relevant to the cloud,” he said, adding that backup and recovery requirements of databases and VMware workloads were now addressed through the latest version of NetBackup.

Ng said high-profile cloud outages have also helped to debunk the misconception that cloud workloads are backed up by public cloud suppliers, elevating the importance of protecting data and applications on the cloud.

Veritas also offers storage analytics tools, such as Aptare which optimises storage across all brands of storage, as well as data insights tools that provide metadata on data access and compliance requirements.

“Because Veritas backs up the most data in the world, we have a lot of intelligence through this metadata that could even let you delete data, so you don’t waste time and resources backing up the same set of data when it’s not required.

“It’s also policy-driven, so we’re not going to leave that to a backup administrator or to someone who can’t see the entire value of the data from a governance and compliance perspective,” Ng said.

On growth prospects in the region, Ng said Veritas, which is owned by Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, is on track to achieve its growth targets, with strong demand from governments and state-owned enterprises in Southeast Asia.

However, the pandemic has had a bigger impact in some markets, such as Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam (CLMV), than others, curtailing their growth for Veritas and other tech suppliers in the region.

“That’s not surprising given that they’re probably not as well connected or embracing work-from-home,” Ng said. “Their remote workforce hasn’t been as efficient, so a lot of business practices are still conducted face to face.

“We’re definitely seeing a drop in the CLMV region and the current situation in Myanmar doesn’t help. But looking into this coming year, as the pandemic starts to improve, we should be recovering in those markets.”