Videos

Christophe: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Data Protection Conversations. Welcome, Doug, from Veritas. How are you doing, Doug?

Doug: Very well. Good to see you again.

Christophe: Thank you for joining us. Let's just jump right in. What can you tell us about the Veritas platform? What does it do? What do you have? And then maybe we'll talk a little later about roadmap.

Doug: Yeah, sure. So we recently took a look at our portfolio and realized that we have great solutions in terms of availability, protection, and insights. You know, when you think about availability, it's all about mission-critical availability, ensuring your applications are always online and your systems have access to their data. Protection is all about ensuring your data is protected and can be recovered regardless of the event.

And insights is about getting valuable insights into your infrastructure and your data so that you can ensure things like regulatory compliance, or properly manage your infrastructure. All of those together we can deliver as a common solution that we call the Enterprise Data Services Platform.

Christophe: Makes perfect sense. I really like the term data services, because that's really what it's all about. Tell us a little bit, if you can,about the roadmap. What's coming down the pike? What do you have coming up for us?

Doug: Yeah, sure. So my specific area of responsibility is in protection, specifically NetBackup. So, with NetBackup, we got a really exciting release that we're in the process of getting out to market. There's four key themes in this release. The first theme is workloads. It's taking that list of almost 800 workloads that we support today and growing it even more to ensure that customers can run whatever workloads they want and protect the data associated with those workloads.

The next theme is cloud. It's getting the use cases that customers need for cloud, such as backup to cloud, backup in the cloud, or even DR between clouds. The third area is in operational simplicity. It's making the product much easier to use and helping our administrators spend less time actually administrating that backup, offloading some of that to the workload admins through self-service.

And the final theme is compliance and governance. That's all about ensuring that people can prove their compliance to their regulators, as well as captures things like security, ransomware, those kinds of topics.

Christophe: You brought up a couple very interesting topics, very broad platform, a lot of depth in what you do. Now, obviously, we're living through some different times right now. Are there some specific programs or capabilities that you have developed to help customers in these difficult times?

Doug: So, when you think about our customer set at the large enterprise, many of them are looking at ways to streamline operations, right. People are working from home, the ability to talk with one another in the office and just ask for something by calling over the cube just isn't there. So there's much more focus and pressure to do things like self-service, where the admin themselves can restore their own files, set up their own protection requirements, etc.

Another key thing that people are asking about, because people are working at home, is how do they protect their laptops. So there's a much more renewed focus on the data that has left the four walls. A lot of customers weren't really prepared for that. You know, they had a remote workforce, but now everybody's working remotely. So how do they protect that data and ensure that their data that's on their laptops or in the cloud, in that SaaS application, is protected?

And I guess the third big key thing that we see a big focus on is security. Ransomware, in particular, it's a massive trend of exploitation, and the attacks are, without a doubt, on the rise. And customers are asking us to ensure that they stay protected and prepared.

Christophe: Let's double-click on ransomware, which, of course, you should not do, and please tell us what you do specifically when it comes to ransomware with the platform.

Doug: We think about ransomware very holistically. So we look at ransomware from four phases. The first phase is protection. Many people think of us as very strong in recovery, and we absolutely are. So we make sure that your data is well protected in that first phase. So taking advantage of things like immutability and other capabilities to ensure your secondary storage is well protected.

For detection, we have capabilities built into some of our solutions that can see the encryption algorithm kicking off. And we're also working with the partnership community for this next release to talk about, you know, how we can help customers use other partner solutions to do better detection. Mitigation is all about cleaning it up. The last thing you want to do is recover it back in.

So it's making sure you understand what Last Known Good is, and also, finding the malware so that you eliminate it and don't just recover the problem. And then once you know what Last Known Good copy is and that you've remediated and mitigated the problem, then recover, and that's something that we are highly specialized in. It's recovering at large enterprise datacenter scale very rapidly, so thousands of instances coming online very quickly.

Christophe: Well, Doug, that's quite a long list of capabilities. It was great to hear from you. And thank you for your time today.

Doug: Thank you, Christophe. Always good to talk to you.