Protecting data in the cloud

When we spoke to IBM's Global MD, CTO and VP of global technology services Bridget Karlin, she made clear that her job of building technical communities depends on mechanisms that encourage partnership to build out ecosystems. With the growth of computing, the internet, and now digitization, migration to the cloud, AI, blockchain and edge computing, IBM realized that its ability to lead depends on embracing partnership and innovation.

Over the past ten years IBM and Veritas Technologies (founded in1983) have forged a powerful strategic relationship the value of which is evident from the fact that 94% of Fortune Global 100 companies as well as most leading banks, financial services and telecoms companies rely on Veritas to reveal data insights that drive competitive advantage and for their core data protection capabilities. “We're focused on the recovery aspects of data protection, and we're trusted with more data than any other data protection company on the planet.” explains Mike Walkey, VP of global channels, strategic partners and alliances. 

It's no wonder then that this year, 2021, IBM has certified NetBackup 9.0 to run on the IBM Cloud to offer clients additional data protection for cloud-based workloads. NetBackup 9.0 now supports integration with IBM SKLM (key management) when used with NetBackup, and delivers data encryption for backup data that increases ransomware resiliency as encrypted data is harder to extract and exploit.

The Veritas NetBackup application simplifies data protection in physical, virtual, software-defined or cloud environments. It's a solution that lets organizations choose the right software for managing and protecting data while simplifying backup administration, improving efficiency and delivering scalable capacity. 

The dramatic shift of businesses to remote working drove the pace of digitization and cloud migration, and with that the level of ransomware threats, says Walkey. “Being able to recover from any attack in a timely predictable fashion – and if they occur, a partner that you trust to recover from those events, is absolutely critical to every business today.” However, it's not all about secure backup. Veritas empowers businesses of all sizes to discover the truth in information – their most important digital asset. Using the Veritas platform, customers can accelerate their digital transformation and solve pressing IT and business challenges including multi-cloud data management, data protection, storage optimization, compliance readiness and workload portability – with no cloud vendor lock-in. “We support all of the modern workload containerization platforms that customers are using to manage their multi-cloud environments like Red Hat OpenShift, Kubernetes and VMware. These are the solutions customers are asking about when they want to migrate or execute their digital transformation. 

“Software defined storage is another important area,” Mike Walkey continues.” It offers greater flexibility and choice, better economics and enterprise class service levels. Finally, multi-cloud is a critical aspect for most companies: they have a large on-premise footprint, and they want to leverage capabilities and flexibility whether it's in hybrid cloud, private cloud, or public cloud. Giving them the ability to migrate and protect their data in all of those cloud environments is critically important for our strategy going forward.”

NetBackup is Veritas's flagship product, Walkey confirms. “It protects customers' most valuable asset, their core data infrastructure while giving them the resilience to recover in the event of a ransomware attack, or any other type of outage, man-made or otherwise. It also ensures availability for mission-critical applications as we look at our overall strategy in our enterprise data services platform. Availability, protection and insight are the three key foundational legs of the stool that we bring together with IBM to deliver those capabilities to their customers.”