We Believe That Being Hardware-Centric and Appliance-Centric Kills the Agility of Organizations

At the recent VeeamON Tour in Bangalore, Sandeep Bhambure, Vice President and Managing Director, India & SAARC at Veeam, and Ankit Agarwal, Senior Director, Global Systems and Cyber Security at Encora, shared key insights into their transformative partnership. The interview deep dived into how Encora's integration of Veeam's advanced technologies is revolutionizing traditional cloud services, showcasing a seamless blend of innovation and agility.

Sandeep outlined Veeam's unique position as a software-defined and hardware-agnostic leader in data resiliency, emphasizing its commitment to ensuring data protection across diverse environments, from multi-cloud setups to on-premises systems. Meanwhile, Ankit highlighted how Veeam's solutions have consistently empowered Encora to adapt rapidly evolving technologies without compromising on efficiency or data integrity. Together, their discussion provided insights on how this partnership is driving advancements in the cloud and data protection landscape, with a particular focus on customer-centric solutions and resilience in an ever-changing threat landscape. Excerpts.

I am interested in understanding more about the technology market. It is crowded, and differentiation and positioning matter a lot. Where does that differentiation and positioning come from?

Sandeep: Yeah, that's a great question. You are right; the market is quite cluttered. However, Veeam is very differentiated from the rest of the data protection and resiliency vendors. The most important point is that we are 100% software-defined, which is crucial in today's IT space because every business is talking about cloud and agility.

We believe that being hardware-centric and appliance-centric kills the agility of organizations. We are the only software-defined data resiliency company. If you look at the top vendors in Gartner's Magic Quadrant, the leaders in that space, we really stand out. We are the leader—four years in a row, we have been number one in terms of our agility and ability to execute. For eight years now, we have been in the Magic Quadrant for Data Recovery and Replication. So, that is one clear differentiator. We are, as I said, software-defined and hardware agnostic. Everyone else is selling some appliance or another.

Second, we are the only company with an end-to-end approach to data resiliency. In fact, we are embarking on a big initiative, a mission called Bharat Cyber Suraksha. This initiative is focused on comprehensive ransomware mitigation strategies.

Bharat Suraksha goes beyond data protection for individuals and organizations. It is an initiative where we are partnering with companies to ensure that industries and companies in India can safeguard and drive data resiliency in their landscape. Our end-to-end approach clearly differentiates us from other players.

In terms of revenues, we are number one in different categories. In modern workloads, such as Kubernetes and container backup, cloud backup, and M365 SaaS backup, we are the world's number one company with a significant market share, with each category potentially in higher double digits. That is how we are differentiated.

Who are your challengers?

Sandeep: Our challengers are Commvault, Rubrik, Veritas, and Dell. Now, Cohesity and Veritas are together. But these are the five or six players in the leaders' quadrant, and we are right at the top in terms of our ability to execute.

The IT landscape has completely changed over the last decade. In this heterogeneous IT environment and hybrid mix of cloud and legacy systems, where is the threat landscape heading at right now? And is there a new approach you are taking to solve these problems?

Sandeep: If you look at the fine print of the agreements between the hyperscalers and their customers, they always emphasize that the SLAs are around uptime. However, data is a joint responsibility. I'm not discussing finances, but they do talk about uptime, whatever that means—whether it's 99.999% or 100%.  Where I'm coming from is that when it comes to data sets, they state that data is a joint responsibility in their agreements. For a customer, what does "joint responsibility" mean? It simply means that if I am a customer, it is my responsibility. That's what it implies. Uptime is covered, but data is not.

A few months back, when incidents occurred around CrowdStrike, the impact was on uptime. I see that even when SLAs are in place, uptime may not be delivered. That’s one scenario—SLAs are in place, uptime is not delivered, and there are no specific SLAs for data. This means that today, data in the cloud is at significant risk and needs protection, which is the customer's responsibility. This is where Veeam can play a critical role. In fact, we are the world's number one company in protecting cloud workloads. We have moved exabytes of data onto the hyperscalers and are protecting that data.

So, from a threat landscape standpoint, since you are discussing that aspect, the threat to data exists everywhere—in the SaaS world, in the cloud, in containers, on-premises, in virtual machines, and in the physical world. Our job is to protect any data, anywhere, always.

 If you look at the company's DNA, it started with a Russian origin. Most of the threat actors operate at least in Europe and those places. Is there a greater understanding your company has in terms of the threat patterns?

Sandeep: We are a 100% American company, not of Russian origin. Although, 16 years ago, it was founded by Russian members, since 2020, we have been an American company, global in nature, with 550,000 customers worldwide and a presence in 35 countries. India is a hyper-growth region for us.

With such a large customer base and over a decade of experience in protecting their data, we have amassed a wealth of knowledge and information about different threat scenarios that our customers have faced. We leverage this wealth of information to better support our customers by infusing AI into our services. More importantly, the number of years and customers we have is allowing us to offer a multi-cloud setup. Data moves freely between clouds in a multi-cloud environment or returns on-premises, and all this data needs protection, which we call data freedom. This is important because agility is one of the reasons why many organizations, if not all, have adopted cloud or multi-cloud solutions—the ability to do anything from anywhere. That is agility.

We are partnering very closely with AWS and Microsoft and are part of their marketplace offerings. We are also part of the Google marketplace, meaning any of their customers can avail of data protection from Veeam through their marketplace. Our partnership with Microsoft is strategic. We are co-innovating with Microsoft, working on co-pilot to infuse more data intelligence into our offerings so we can proactively pick up alerts and drive better resilience and recovery for our customers. Our relationship with AWS is also significant, as we have moved exabytes of data to protect millions of instances on the AWS cloud.

Can you give me some use case scenarios on the ground level? What are some of the threats that CISOs of enterprises face today? What are your top three challenges they face, and how do you address them? What challenges do they encounter right now in this age of AI, considering the macro and micro-level developments?

We are not just a security company. I'm just giving you a bit of background about Veeam. The entire data resiliency space comprises security companies and data protection of the infrastructure. We are clearly focused on the data resiliency space, where data protection is at the core of everything—data protection and recovery.

We believe that, regardless of the kind of threats customers face today, or irrespective of the security posture and the millions of dollars they have invested in enhancing their security, our research suggests that 75% of companies have still experienced a ransomware attack in the previous 12 months, and many of them have experienced multiple attacks. It's inevitable.

So, where does Veeam come in? We help customers build the last line of defense. 92% of attacks happen on the backup repository, and a clean backup is the surest way to get your business back. Our job is to ensure the customer has a clean copy of data that is recoverable anywhere. We work alongside security companies like Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, and Splunk, among others, that are already in the customer's environment. We don't want to reinvent the wheel by trying to incorporate those security features into the backups. Instead, we prefer to have API integrations with these security firms and their offerings so they can become more sophisticated.

The basic advice we have for customers is to have a clean, immutable copy of data that should be off-premises and error-free, guaranteeing 100% recovery. Many times, the data copy may not be clean, and during recovery, it might not work. Customers have often observed that the data is not tested for 100% recovery, and at the time of recovery, they find out it's a corrupt copy. Our technology differentiates itself by checking for zero errors at the time of backup, ensuring guaranteed recovery. We work with security players to make it immutable.

What are some of the most interesting inflection points that acted as key learnings for Veeam that  took it  to the next level?  Can you cite some instances?

We have always been at the forefront of innovation. We started as a company focused on protecting virtual environments, and we have millions of VMs being protected. That was about 15-16 years ago, as VMware was gaining more dominance in the industry. Customers could clearly see the advantage of our ability to recover a virtual machine, irrespective of its size, even if it was in terabytes, in just a few minutes. That was the unique selling proposition of Veeam and how we really started.

The next big inflection point came when we began supporting Hyper-V, Nutanix, and other flavors of hypervisors, not just VMware. However, I would say that was still organic growth. The next major inflection point was the universal adoption of cloud. As workloads started moving from VMs and data began migrating from on-premises to the cloud, customers felt the need to protect those workloads. That was a significant turning point, and that's when we championed the cause of data freedom, the ability to protect data.

Another evolutionary process was the need to protect SaaS data. The next big inflection point we have seen is app modernization and the containerization of apps. This is going to be very significant. We also see a big potential in AI initiatives because customers are building on-premises infrastructures, bringing data back on-premises from clouds, and infusing more data from other sources. Essentially, most of the infrastructure is on-premises. These are some of the trendsetting inflection points for our business.

Can you talk about Encora and your collaboration with Veeam?

Ankit Agarwal (Encora): Encora is a digital innovation partner for clients across the globe. We have offices in 17 countries. Our partnership with Veeam has been strong for almost 8 years now. Veeam has been a reliable partner for us in terms of securing our data, backing it up, and ensuring timely recovery. The partnership has only grown stronger over these 8 years.

What are some of the deliverables you achieved after signing with Veeam? How significant was it for you in terms of operational efficiencies?

Ankit Agarwal: The primary solution of partnering with Veeam is having someone who understands what data to back up, how to back it up, and how to restore it efficiently. Over time, we've observed that companies change their DNA and move to different technologies to enhance. However, they often lose the essence of what they have accomplished. With Veeam, we haven't seen that change. They've been consistent in their approach for decades. Their efficiency has increased, and they are more aware and ready for the future. Technology adoption has become faster; previously, it was a three-to-four-year cycle, but now changes occur in six months. This rapid innovation has helped us ensure our workloads are protected. With every new technology we adopt, solutions are available without needing to shift to a different provider. So far, that hasn't been an issue with Veeam.

 Data centers are becoming very significant. For example, private data centers are transitioning to the cloud, and tech companies and GCCs are emerging in India. Instead of relying on third-party data centers, people are opting to build their own or use third-party centers. Do you have any involvement in this area?

Sandeep: Yes, I can provide a simple example regarding global data centers and even cloud service providers. We have a dedicated Veeam Cloud Partner Program and several Veeam Cloud Service Providers (VCSPs) who have deployed Veeam to offer services to their clients. These providers are not just protecting traditional workloads like databases or virtual machines but also include the ones you mentioned, such as Control AIS, NetMagic, ESDS, and NextGen, among others. TCL and several other partners are cloud service providers, and we are supporting their data protection services for their customers.

It's a very mature offering. We are also taking steps to enable our traditional partners to offer backup and data resilience as a service. This initiative stems from traditional partners who have been selling hardware. Their customers are now asking if they can provide these services as well. We are empowering them to offer data protection as a service.

Your thoughts on the Bharat Cyber Suraksha?

This is a mission we are on. When I say 4,400 customers plus, it's not just about the number of customers or the different enterprises we are supporting. We are on a mission to protect the digital landscape for every customer in the country, including government data. We want to create awareness about this mission.

We are on a mission of Bharat Cyber Suraksha, which aligns with Pragyaashil and Atma Nirbhar Bharat. We are also working with organizations like Policy Bazaar, so customers can better deal with bad actors and have ransomware protection and insurance. This comprehensive approach aims to help organizations across the country.

Finally, what are your strategic priorities for India? How significant is India for you?

Sandeep: Certainly. India holds a distinct and strategic place within the Veeam world. I'm in charge of all sales operations for six countries. Within Veeam, India is considered a hyper-growth region. To give you some perspective, India and the SAARC region, which I oversee, are part of the APJ. APJ itself is the fastest-growing region within Veeam, and India and SAARC are the fastest-growing areas within APJ. We are actually growing at multiple times the market rate, making it the fastest-growing region. The strategic importance of India goes beyond just the business we conduct here. We are growing at much higher double digits and have thousands of customers in India across various verticals. Many top-tier organizations in every vertical could be our customers. This is part of the sales aspect, but strategically, we support global customers from India. We have product development for certain technologies based in Bangalore and intend to expand these operations and India's footprint. From both a sales and opportunity standpoint, as well as India's contribution to Veeam globally, that's where we stand.