Changing the Data Management Game: Introducing Veritas Cloud Scale

By Christophe Bertrand, Practice Director
FEBRURARY 2021

Abstract

The traditional data protection market is quickly morphing into the intelligent and autonomous data management market. This fundamental shift is one that Veritas has recognized by introducing an innovative new architecture: Cloud Scale technology. With it, NetBackup will be able to operate autonomously by automatically provisioning, configuring, optimizing, and healing data management services with little or no human involvement.

Getting To Autonomous Intelligent Data Management

The data protection market, which broadly includes backup and recovery, disaster recovery, replication, and other technologies, is changing and is quickly evolving. ESG has developed a 4-stage maturity model that explains how the market is fundamentally changing toward intelligent and autonomous data management (see Figure 1).

On the left-hand side of the model, the focus is placed on IT and supporting IT production, with data and application backup and recovery as the core objectives. As outlined earlier, the market is changing rapidly with the swift adoption of cloud-based technologies to extend traditional on-premises environments.

In the context of backup and recovery, solutions and technologies, in time, will seamlessly and natively leverage public and private cloud infrastructures, protecting workloads to the cloud, in the cloud, and across cloud and on-premises infrastructure.

However, the requirement for context and content about the data is becoming more acute as organizations are increasingly supporting digital transformation. Organizations must be able to derive more intelligence from their data. The data management chasm is an obstacle organizations need to overcome as they move toward the data intelligence and autonomous stages, which is where the data protection market is headed.

Organizations’ ultimate goal should be autonomous data management. In this stage, the inclusion of AI and ML technologies allows organizations to automate their data management processes and minimize human intervention, offering significant opportunities for operational efficiencies, as well as increased uptime, security, and service levels.

These two stages, data intelligence and autonomous, are particularly relevant to Veritas’s introduction of its new Cloud Scale Technology and net-new architecture.

Figure 1. From Backup to Autonomous Data Management

Source: ESG, a division of TechTarget, Inc.

Market Landscape: The Need For Intelligent Data Management Is Accelerating

ESG research shows that digital transformation initiatives have significantly accelerated and placed data at the heart of the business. Today, 21% of organizations report that data is their core business, while another 36% told us they plan to offer both tangible and data products.

44% confirm that data helps to support their business. Looking ahead, 70% of organizations surveyed by ESG expect to develop new data-centric products in the next 24 months. The verdict is clear: Businesses recognize the fundamental value of data. Data has clearly become a key business asset and data reuse is critical.

Intelligent data management leverages data reuse. 53% of ESG research respondents said they use secondary data for cybersecurity testing/sandboxing, 51% said they use it for data copies for application developers, and 45% said they use it for data compliance testing and reporting.

That’s why it should be no surprise that 67% of organizations, almost twice as many as in 2019, said that their intelligent data management/data reuse strategy is one of their top five data protection and management priorities. As a matter of fact, 73% of organizations indicated that data reuse is extremely or very important for their digital transformation strategy (see Figure 2), and 70% indicated that data reuse and/or data management is an extension of their data protection strategy.

However, there are challenges because of the deluge of data that is not stopping any time soon. 65% of organizations surveyed by ESG reported that they believe that they have a problem getting a holistic view of all of their data because they have too many data silos. The current evolution is further complicated by a lack of skills sets across IT in key areas such as cybersecurity, IT architecture, and planning; IT orchestration and automation; and machine learning, to name a few. This means new solutions are needed to alleviate these challenges, augment resources, and remove inefficiencies in a way that can scale in a distributed cloud environment.

Figure 2. Intelligent Data Management and Digital Transformation

How important is data reuse to your organization’s digital transformation strategy? (Percent of respondents, N=353)

Source: ESG, a division of TechTarget, Inc.

Overcoming IT Challenges

As we highlighted in our maturity model, it has become clear that new needs are driving new technology requirements, but there is typically a lag between current state and ideal/future state: Current data management technologies were never designed to meet the distributed/multi-cloud challenges.

Taking a closer look at the cloud-enabled stage where many organizations are today, solutions in place tend to be limited because they are either cloud-service-provider-native or cloud-service-provider-specific. This results in a lack of unification, as each solution will operate efficiently in one cloud but not in others. Alternatively, some solutions may offer some level of multi-cloud capability, but this may come at the expense of additional resources and inefficiencies and higher costs.

In addition, the depth and breadth of data management technologies can be limited and still very manual, which makes them hard to deploy at scale because of data and cloud silos. These silos multiply management and operational headaches and require many and often uncoordinated teams to manage. This means incoherent and inconsistent data protection and data management policies and centralized data governance and compliance challenges.

The multiplication of silos can also lead to the multiplication of data management solutions, which creates complexity and increases operational costs. Current data management processes are, in turn, fragmented and often prone to an excessive amount of manual operations at the application level. This combination of factors has become untenable at scale. That’s why it has never been more pressing for organizations to employ automation to help them keep pace with organizational and business needs. Remember: Data is the business!

Veritas CloudScale

For many years, NetBackup has demonstrated a proven reputation for unified and scalable enterprise data management. NetBackup is squarely focused on meeting the new era of data management.

By combining the software-driven programmability, dynamic resource provisioning, and multi-cloud optimization of Cloud Scale Technology with the vast amounts of compute and storage capacity of the cloud, NetBackup can operate autonomously by automatically provisioning, configuring, optimizing, and healing data management services with little or no human involvement.

This translates into data self-service for other parts of the organization, such as application developers, cloud architects, data scientists, etc. It also means enhanced operational agility, cloud cost optimization, and comprehensive protection. With AI-powered anomaly detection, malware scanning, and flexible data recovery options, whether in the cloud or on-premises, this new version will help IT organizations more autonomously protect and leverage the data and applications that power their business.

Figure 3. Veritas Cloud Scale

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group

The Bigger Truth

With data now scattered across multiple clouds, data management has become more complex, a trend confirmed by ESG research. With the current data “deluge,” organizations are struggling to identify, protect, and manage their data assets, as they are concurrently under pressure to support digital transformation initiatives and fight off cyber-criminals who go after these very data assets.

In this release of NetBackup, Cloud Scale Technology will enable NetBackup to operate in the most cost-efficient and agile way possible within and across any cloud, while providing a major step toward delivering autonomous data management.

This innovative new architecture is changing the game for Veritas. It is truly a new generation of NetBackup for the new era of data management

LEARN MORE

DOWNLOAD PDF REPORT

This ESG Showcase was commissioned by Veritas and is distributed under license from TechTarget, Inc.

All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at 508.482.0188.

Enterprise Strategy Group | Getting to the Bigger Truth™

Enterprise Strategy Group is an IT analyst, research, validation, and strategy firm that provides market intelligence and actionable insight to the global IT community.