At its VeeamON Tour in Dubai 2021, Veeam Software hosted 175+ registered guests, customers, partners, and industry experts. The purpose of the event was to bring together prominent IT experts and visionaries from throughout the region to share and learn about the latest market trends, such as data protection, ransomware, native cloud, and Kubernetes.
Claude Schuck, regional director, Middle East at Veeam, presented the keynote address entitled ‘Embracing the Future of Modern Data Protection with Veeam’, said, “When we talk about Modern Data Protection, we focus on three areas – cloud, containers and security. Migration of data remains the #1 barrier in cloud adoption. Veeam eases the barriers associated with adopting the cloud by providing portability, protection, and simple licensing of workloads.”
He added “When it comes to containers, current Kubernetes data management tools require extensive expertise and set up time when first deployed, and lack process automation for managing, monitoring, and troubleshooting. Kasten by Veeam® is the leader in Kubernetes backup and disaster recovery. It simplifies data protection, backup and disaster recovery, and application mobility in Kubernetes environments for a smoother out-of-the-box experience. And the final pillar of the Modern Data Protection strategy is security. A company’s data is its most valuable asset. Managing, protecting, and meeting data security regulations are monumental tasks. With Veeam, you can implement transparent, actionable and dependable strategies to protect your data from tampering or deletion with secure, verifiable backup options.”
The technical session on Cybersecurity and Orchestration featured information on managing the ‘new normal,’ and the need for disaster recovery in the face of complex cyberthreats such as ransomware. The devastation that ransomware can do to enterprises is enormous. Businesses that believe they have no other option but to pay cybercriminals to unlock their files risk not only their money (as there is no guarantee their data will be restored), but also their reputation. Cybersecurity and a data breach insurance policy should be a top focus.
Regional Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) must implement a comprehensive security strategy that includes stress testing of IT systems, backup, a disaster recovery plan, and employee training. DR planning may not be the most glamorous or lucrative work for IT teams, but it is one that should not be overlooked or viewed as a checkbox exercise. A solid disaster recovery strategy should include a well-documented and tested process. DR testing must be thorough, considering every possible scenario and developing a suitable response.
While this might be a resource-intensive task, for firms that consider more and more of their programs to be business-critical, the investment will pay off when calamity strikes.
Among the Veeam highlights revealed at the event were:
According to the Veeam 2021 Data Protection Report, 70% of Middle Eastern enterprises understand that they have a “Availability Gap” between how quickly they can recover applications and how quickly they need apps to be recovered. 68 percent of the same companies indicated there is a “Protection Gap” between how often data is backed up and how much data they can afford to lose. 94 percent of enterprises considerably boosted their cloud services utilization (43 percent) in the first months of the pandemic. This was due to the increased difficulty for IT to sustain on-prem, physical operations due to remote workers using SaaS-based collaboration platforms. There will be more endpoints to protect.
The misconception persists that the fundamentals — backup and recovery of critical data and applications — are still covered even with legacy data protection. This could hardly be more untrue. There is still a shortage of key functionality in legacy backup to provide backup and recovery capabilities. Organizations reported that their backup jobs had failures or could not be completed within the given backup window 31% of the time. That means approximately one-third of all backups could be unrecoverable. According to the study over a quarter of all restorations (26%) fail to restore within the expected SLA.
With the rise of cloud and modern delivery techniques and the reality of backup and restore challenges with legacy backup, the need for current data protection is more critical than ever. Modern data protection may bring new levels of confidence and operational excellence and many other economic and productivity benefits by ensuring data is constantly protected and available.
