Data and security are on the cusp of realizing the benefits of data and technology to improve business operations with AI/ML.
The 44th IT Press Tour had the opportunity to meet with Lawrence Wong, Chief Strategy Officer, and Doug Matthews, SVP Data Protection Product Management at Veritas.
Veritas is a global leader in multi-cloud data management providing data protection and recovery regardless of where the data resides, keeping mission-critical workloads up and always on, and fulfilling legal and regulatory data management requirements.
Veritas sees tremendous opportunities in public cloud data protection. Many customers think their cloud service provider backs up data. They do not use enterprise-scale backup. Taking snapshots and then storing them back into the cloud domain results in data bloat and more revenue for the cloud provider. More and more workloads and data are running in the public cloud. This data requires enterprise backup.
Strategy
The three key strategies are:
Next-generation autonomy – fully aware, learning, adapting. This is being driven by R&D investment of more than 15% of revenue.
Extend cyber leadership – AI-based ransomware resilience with operational-gapped cloud protection.
Dominate multi-cloud – by providing protection, availability, and compliance within and across hybrid, private, and public clouds
These strategies will be enabled by
New consumption models – subscription and as-a-service.
Partnering for success – by being embedded with major CSPs and technology ecosystem partners.
Accelerated profitable growth – 8 - 10%+ YoY revenue growth, 80%+ recurring revenue, and 35%+ EBITDA by the end of 2026.
The Data Management Problem
In 2019, edge devices generated 18 zettabytes (ZB) of data. By 2025, edge devices will generate more than 73 ZB of data. This is being driven by corporate data, video, banking, medical imaging, cellular IoT, telecommunications, and autonomous vehicles.
This explosion of data presents several challenges to the CIO.
Keeping thousands of applications running 24x7.
Securing the increasingly diverse corporate IT estate.
Cyberthreats and ransomware protection.
Compliance and data privacy.
Managing costs across the data center and clouds.
94% of businesses today have a multi-cloud strategy. More than $400 billion is being spent on infrastructure, clouds, and software. However, only $30 billion is being spent on management and security.
This underinvestment is creating new challenges. Unexpected costs due to the massive amounts of data, over-provisioning or cloud resources, and inefficient storage. Cyber security vulnerabilities due to insecure data storage and an increased number of more sophisticated attacks. And, lack of visibility results in limited governance and multi-cloud visibility, as well as inconsistent policies and protection.
Automated versus Autonomous
Veritas believes data management and protection should just happen, invisibly and autonomously – without sacrificing human oversight. They are committing to eliminate the burden of human intervention from data management by 2026.
Automated solutions: performs tasks based on pre-defined parameters; requires well-defined inputs and outputs; and, requires parameters to be updated as situations change. Examples include hands-free driving, elevators, washing machines, office software, and assembly-line robotics.
Autonomous solutions: learn and adapt based on the environment; makes continuous adjustments; and, require little to no human intervention. Examples include driverless cars, robotic vacuums, smart speakers, and intelligent robots.
With automation, human intervention is still required.
Autonomous Data Management
Autonomous data management allows the system to adapt and respond instantly by combining automation with advanced AI and cloud learning. The benefits of autonomous data management are continuous intuitive adaption and correction, improved business resilience, more efficient operations, actively defending against cybersecurity threats, and reducing the carbon footprint.
The pillars of autonomous data management are:
Multi-cloud optimized – the most cost-efficient secure and performant in the cloud: elastic, containerized, API-enabled, multi-tenant, multi-cloud. Autonomous data management will independently find and protect data no matter where it lives. It will continuously determine where and how to store data in the most efficient and secure way possible. All without human involvement.
Cyber resilience – achieve cyber resilience with autonomous security: AI/ML-driven, ransomware proof, SLA assured, CI/CD integrated. Autonomous data management will provide ransom-free recoveries at any scale. NetBackup has a 100% ransomware recovery success rate. This is critical when you consider that 79% of companies in the US and Europe were hit by ransomware in 2021 and 56% of those reported paying the ransom.
Intelligent protection – meet business goals without management overhead: optimized, self-updating, auto-healing, as-a-service. Autonomous data management will eliminate the human burden from data and lifecycle management.
Key Takeaways
Given that Veritas is already working with 87% of the Fortune Global 500, they have access to the leading corporations that realize:
The importance of securing their data and their infrastructure.
How hard it is to hire security and IT professionals.
They need to transform their business by using data and technology.
It will be interesting to watch the transformation from automated to autonomous data management.