Kathy Gibson reports – There are four key structural trends in the industry today, shaping the industry and making the role of IT more challenging.

The first is explosion of data. “In the digital-first world, every company is a software business,” says Brendan Widlake, regional director at Veeam Africa.

Speaking at Veeam Unplugged event taking place in Johannesburg, he say the second trend is vendor lock-in., the third infrastructure complexity, and the fourth the increasing volume and sophistication of ransomware attacks.

On this last, at least 75% of companies have experienced at least one ransomware attack in the last year – and many of them had been attacked several times.

In addition, one in four companies report that even when they pay the ransom, they don’t get their data back.

“This can all be summarised in one overall theme: your data is critical – without it, your business stops.”

This is why data resilience is key, Widlake says.

“This is why we believe it is our purpose to power data resilience, to keep every business running.”

He says Veeam believes data resilience is built on five pillars, starting with data backup, followed by data recovery, data freedom, data security and data intelligence.

These pillars form the basis of the Veeam product and solution offerings.

Among new features demonstrated at Veeam Unplugged are increased workloads, increased data freedom and a focus on data security.

“We also give the customer the choice of whether to deploy on-premise or in the cloud; and now we are adding software as a managed service as well.:

This is currently available for Microsoft 365, but will soon be expanded to bring other software on board.

This year, Veeam acquired Coveware, which helps customers experiencing a ransomware attack to contain and remediate it, then restore and recover data.