The Platform: Accelerating Transformation, Not the Gap

Veritas Perspectives December 26, 2020

The Transformation Gap Emerges

For many enterprise customers, the ‘new normal’ we live in has forced digital transformation efforts to accelerate in unprecedented ways. In some cases, 3-year strategies were forced into 3-month executions.

Even as we look to turn the corner on the pandemic the new normal of more remote work, and thus more remote data and systems, is continuing.

As a result, the pace of transformation will likely continue to accelerate, but this is not without risks. We’ve learned that when digital transformation outpaces your ability to manage data risks efficiently and cost-effectively, a transformation gap emerges.

The longer the transformation gap persists, the more risk you’re exposed to.

So, what are these risks?

First, operational inefficiencies emerge:

We must meet both the performance demands of today’s modern workloads AND traditional applications, while also being simple, and easy to use.
Using disparate technologies across edge, core, and cloud OR physical, virtual, and container architectures creates complexity while requiring different skillsets and operational procedures.
These inefficiencies drive a need to TRANSFORM the approach to data management away from point products.

Second, effects of a ransomware attack:

64% of Sr. Executives say their ability to ensure data security lags because of the complexity of their IT environments.[1]
This same research indicates that an enterprise’s susceptibility to a ransomware attack, is in no way tied to whether their IT infrastructure is more heavily on-premises or in the cloud. Meaning, attacks will happen regardless, and the cloud is not an automatic defense against an attack.
Of those organizations in the study that were hit with an attack, 38% of them still found themselves down for a week or longer.
To properly PROTECT multi-cloud environments, it isn’t enough to simply be able to recover, we need to be able to do so quickly, to anywhere from anywhere.

Finally, hidden costs:

Through 2024, 80% of enterprise organizations are likely to overspend by 20%-50% as a result of being unaware of mistakes made in their cloud adoption.[2]
These costs are avoidable! OPTIMIZE your environment before cloud migrations and keep it optimized to avoid unnecessary spending.

Having discussed the risks the transformation gap exposes, the real question then becomes, HOW DO WE CLOSE IT (or at least narrow it significantly)?

Point Product or Platform to Close the Gap?

I believe the question of ‘how’ brings us to an important crossroad every IT leader needs to consider:

Continue the status quo of a point product for each environment? (Mind you this is one reason some enterprise organizations end up having up to 7 different products for backup alone!)
Or standardize on a platform that works across all environments?

Both approaches offer pros and cons, but what makes the most sense going forward?

Our enterprise customers heavily favor a platform, but one that is open, flexible, and accommodating to the dynamic nature of their IT environment—inclusive of edge, core, and cloud:

They want APIs for integration
Proven support and performance for mission-critical workloads
Dynamic light-weight support for newer workloads like containers, etc.
They want fewer points of management, simpler operations, and intuitive UIs, but not at the expense of customization and the control to tailor a solution right for them
And most importantly the need reliability

This is where Veritas is extremely well-positioned to deliver value.

When we launched the Enterprise Data Services Platform a year and a half ago, we laid out the promise of uniting the areas of availability (for mission-critical applications, data, and services), protection (against ransomware and other disasters man-made or otherwise), and insights (to drive down costs and ensure compliance).

Since then, we’ve continued to deliver against that strategy. In the last 6 months alone, we:

…were named a leader in the Gartner MQ for Backup and Recovery for the 15th time in a row.[3]
…announced NetBackup 8.3, which unified native cloud snapshot support and resiliency orchestration with the #1-deployed backup and recovery solution in the enterprise.[4]
…were among the first to achieve AWS Outpost service readiness.[5]
…announced the acquisition of Globanet, extending our leadership in digital compliance.[6]

All of these announcements were yet additional proof points of us executing against our strategy, aligned to the needs of our enterprise customers’ changing expectations.

And that’s why I’m so excited to announce yet more proof points against our EDSP vision:

First, I’m happy to announce today the next evolution of the most powerful and widely adopted data protection solution in the world: NetBackup 9. NetBackup continues to streamline data protection management, ensure business-critical resiliency, and deliver customer choice with a single platform supporting any workload, any cloud, and any architecture at any scale.

What’s new in NetBackup 9?

Scale-Out Architecture with Flex Scale: NetBackup is already available in more flexible deployment modes than are offered by any player in the industry and, with the inclusion of its new scale-out hyperconverged mode, Veritas continues to expand customer choice while reducing complexity, cost, and risk.
Operational Simplicity: The launch of NetBackup 9 further reinforces Veritas’ focus on abstracting the complexity of enterprise IT. By delivering unified protection from edge to core to cloud, NetBackup streamlines management of the most dynamic environments through orchestrated automation of discovery, protection, and recovery.
Open Stack: NetBackup 9 also includes new features to simplify enterprise data protection for mission-critical OpenStack environments. Utilizing OpenStack native APIs, NetBackup 9 delivers seamless integration, multi-tenant controls, and intuitive self-service management. In addition to offering scalability and performance benefits, NetBackup 9 dramatically reduces costs and the burden of administrative management, while ensuring high-performance backup and recovery operations for OpenStack both on-premises and in public clouds.
And we’ve made improvements in security and platform hardening, improving NetBackup’s already industry-leading ransomware resiliency capabilities.

Taken together all of the innovations we have released for NetBackup provide the first real opportunity customers have to reject point products that only address a piece of the puzzle and standardize on a platform optimized to handle the diversity of needs in today’s multi-cloud enterprise, without the tradeoffs; to Conquer Every Cloud.

Whether you prefer build-your-own, software-defined data protection and resiliency; data protection cost/performance-optimized for edge environments; scale-up or hyperconverged, scale-out for modern apps, we have you covered, It’s all ONE NetBackup.

In addition to NetBackup 9, we’re also making considerable advancements in our overall EDSP strategy to deliver enterprise-grade data protection, security, and management capabilities for any workload, via any consumption model.

To that end, I’m also happy to announce the acquisition of HubStor, significantly expanding our abilities to address SaaS-based workloads and to deliver a complete BaaS solution built entirely on Microsoft Azure Cloud.

Enterprise-grade technology, freedom of choice, and operational simplification has been at the core of Veritas for many years. And we continue to push the limits with today’s announcements.

To learn more about these announcements and the technology innovations we’re driving, I invite you to check out the ‘Conquer Every Cloud’ virtual conference.