Veeam outlines data protection vision

The onslaught of ransomware attacks, growing usage of cloud-native applications and the need to manage backups remotely amid the pandemic have been a boon for emerging data protection software suppliers in recent years.

According to Gartner’s latest research on the global enterprise backup and recovery software market, suppliers such as Veeam, Cohesity and Rubrik have seen double-digit growth, winning market share from the likes of Dell Technologies and Veritas.

The market remains highly fragmented, however, with no single player commanding a major slice of the market, unlike other IT segments where market leaders tend to lead by a bigger margin.

Against this backdrop, Veeam, which made a name for itself by making it easier to back up virtual machines, is eyeing a bigger slice of the pie – by helping businesses detect ransomware attacks on backup data, as well as protect data in software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and the growing number of Kubernetes workloads.

During a media briefing on the sidelines of VeeamOn, the company’s annual confab held in Las Vegas this year, Veeam’s newly minted CEO Anand Eswaran said his goal was for the company to reach an outsized market leading position. “Number one or two doesn’t matter as much as whether we can get to that 25-40% market share in the next two to three years,” he said

Eswaran said as long as Veeam taps its strengths in data protection and increases the velocity of innovation, the company will have the opportunity to “defragment this market and become the outsized leader in market share”.

During his keynote address, Eswaran elaborated on Veeam’s vision on the future of data protection, starting with helping organisations safeguard their data against ransomware attacks.

Encrypted data

Citing Veeam’s recent survey of more than 1,000 global IT leaders, Eswaran noted that three out of four organisations suffered at least one ransomware attack last year, and 47% of them admitted that their data had been encrypted by the attackers.

In addition, backup repositories accounted for 94% of ransomware attacks and over two-thirds of the affected companies could not recover the data after the attack.

“It can be hard to completely eliminate the attacks, but you can certainly take steps to reduce the risks through interesting, innovative and modern data protection strategies,” said Eswaran, adding that 25% of victims in the study have recovered from backups rather than paying ransom.

Another area that Veeam has been doubling down on in the past few years has been data protection for SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365.

The company said its Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 business has been growing faster than expected, with 73% year-on-year growth. It is expected to launch Veeam Backup for Salesforce later this year.

Another cog in Veeam’s strategy has been to protect Kubernetes workloads via its 2020 acquisition of Kasten, a purpose-built product for protecting stateful containers.

With the rise of production containers and the increased need to protect them, Gartner senior director analyst Chandra Mukhyala noted that the addition of Kasten to Veeam’s portfolio opens more opportunities.

“Veeam’s solution has been a popular choice for protecting virtualised environments because of its offering’s ease of use and Veeam’s simple licensing relative to other products in the market,” said Mukhyala.

“The addition of support for physical workloads, including NAS [network attached storage], and continued integration with external storage systems, public cloud, containers and SaaS, increased Veeam’s total addressable market, enabling it to capture share from vendors with more complex products,” he added.

To bolster its Kubernetes workload protection capabilities, Veeam also announced the latest 5.0 version of Kasten K10, which now comes with ransomware attack detection among other new features.

Johnny Yu, research manager for storage and computing at IDC, said: “The alarming rate of ransomware attacks and the increased use of cloud-native application development means it’s only a matter of time before cloud-native applications become more heavily targeted.

“With its new K10 V5.0 release, Kasten by Veeam has positioned itself as a solid choice for companies that are looking for comprehensive, end-to-end ransomware protection for Kubernetes environments.”