22 November 2024, Fri |
7:17 PM
Veeam® Software, the Modern Data Protection company, recently hosted 200 registered attendees, customers, partners, and industry experts in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for its VeeamON Tour. The event at Al Ammariyah Hills Resort brought together leading IT experts and visionaries from across the region to share and learn about the market’s hottest topics, such as Modern Data Protection, ransomware, native cloud, and Kubernetes.
Mohamad Rizk, Regional Director, Middle East & CIS at Veeam Software who presented the keynote address entitled ‘The Future to Modern Data Protection’ said, “With the current digital transformation trend and emergence of the hybrid workplace, cloud, virtualization, Kubernetes and SaaS have all seen rapidly growing adoption by regional enterprises in the Middle East. They are seeking to bring flexibility, scalability, simplicity and cost benefits into their IT infrastructures by moving away from legacy data centre architectures. As such, they recognize how vital it is to have a comprehensive strategy that embraces and protects vital data across all these environments. Eliminating data protection gaps, engaging automation, and moving to an autonomous system reduces risks, improves productivity, and creates robust business continuity.”
“With increasing threats from ransomware attacks and data security challenges relating to multi-/hybrid-cloud architecture adoption, we, as a community, have rallied together to deliver the most robust solutions to our customers. Veeam provides a single platform for all data environments. Ensuring data security, protection and integrity is deeply rooted in our DNA and our continuous technology innovation has helped us reach the status of being the #1 provider in EMEA during 2H’21 in IDC’s DR&P market. VeeamON Tour Riyadh has been an excellent forum to showcase all our innovations that will help customers drive business efficiency and agility, protect their data, and ensure that they are well prepared for the next stage of their digital transformation. Our software-defined approach means there is no lock-in to proprietary hardware and works with our customers’ existing architecture, both on-premises and in the cloud.”
“Entire industries face a data protection emergency and businesses are looking for ways to accelerate their strategies to protect data, remediate cyber-attacks and recover from systems outages. Companies who succeed in accelerating their adoption of a Modern Data Protection strategy will put in place solid foundations to gain competitive advantage from digitization. It will enable them to experience the lower cost points and flexibility of public cloud, leverage the security and proximity of private cloud, and fast-track their development cycles by deploying Kubernetes, with the assurance that their data is protected across their entire infrastructure. Organizations should also understand that they can be vulnerable to vendor lock-in due to exponential business growth with the data protection requirements that once worked before now being, outdated and no longer viable to their current business model. Data protection solutions, like in the case of Veeam, should be flexible and scale with the customers business without the extra cost of vendor lock-in or complexity,” said Mohamad Rizk.
VeeamON Tour attendees were given a demonstration of Veeam’s latest technologies including:
The session, ‘Kubernetes the Next wave of Infrastructure’, provided insights on the growing adoption of Kubernetes, the de facto platform for orchestrating containers today. According to findings of the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022, 69% of UAE organizations and 76% of Saudi Arabian organizations are already running containers in production, while 29% and 22% respectively plan to do so in the next 12 months. Containers and Kubernetes have greatly simplified operations for DevOps teams, accelerating the rate at which companies can go to market with new applications and technologies, internally or externally. Kubernetes also enables organizations to create self-healing, highly available applications. As more companies adopt containers and do their orchestration using Kubernetes, the potential attack surface will grow. This is why regional enterprises need to expand their Modern Data Protection strategies with technologies that work against a wide range of Kubernetes application stacks and deployment methods, such as Kasten K10, that completes their ability to protect these new cloud-native workloads and the business growth they support.
The incidence of ransomware is on the rise, regionally, 88% of UAE and 84% of Saudi Arabian organizations fell prey to ransomware attacks in 2021. Against this backdrop VeeamON Tour Riyadh presented ‘Ransomware Best Practices for Secure Backup & Recovery’. Attendees discovered how secure backup is an organization’s last line of defense against ransomware and what they can do to counter the need to pay a ransom to recover their data. For businesses in the Middle East to win the ransomware battle, they must do three things – educate their employees, implement the 3-2-1-1-0 backup rule requiring 3 copies of data and have a remediation plan of a full Backup and Disaster Recovery strategy, that gives them the ability to recover data in event of a ransomware attack.
The Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022 findings were shared with attendees, including the fact that 98% of UAE organizations and 97% of Saudi organizations experienced unexpected outages within the last 12 months, and that 17% of UAE organizations’ and 18% of Saudi organizations’ data is left completely unprotected on average.
Platinum sponsors of the VeeamON Tour Riyadh included Exagrid, Scality, Nutanix, Redington, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Pure Storage, Defined Solutions, Intel, Lenovo, CT4, Ingram Micro, Alnafitha IT, and National Computer Systems Co. were among the gold sponsors (NATCOM).
