Veritas Vision: Veritas Enhances Multi-Cloud Data Management, Strengthens Ties With Microsoft Azure Cloud

Data protection and data management vendor Veritas Tuesday unveiled new technologies and a deep new strategic partnership with Microsoft Azure to help businesses take advantage of multi-cloud environments.

The new enhancements, introduced during the Veritas Vision conference being held this week in Las Vegas, are based around Veritas' 360 Data Management portfolio for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud data protection and management, said Jyothi Swaroop, vice president of solutions portfolio for the Mountain View, Calif.-based software vendor.

The past few months have seen Veritas, which only two years ago became an independent company after 10 years as a part of Symantec, sign partnerships with several cloud providers including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM, and soon with Oracle, Swaroop told CRN.

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About 86 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Veritas, and 56 percent of those companies have a cloud-first strategy, he said. "They ask us how we can help them in their transition to the cloud."

Veritas' answer lies in part in enhancements to its data protection and data management technology and the new relationship with Microsoft.

Veritas' data protection and data management capabilities for modern workloads are based on the company's 360 Data Management portfolio, said Rick Fairweather, vice president of the company's Americas partner organization.

The 360 Data Management portfolio includes products focused on data protection, data visibility, data portability, and data compliance and governance, Fairweather told CRN.

"It's platform-independent, and works in private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments," he said. "And it is a platform, not a collection of products."

As part of the enhanced 360 Data Management portfolio, Veritas introduced version 8.1 of its flagship NetBackup data protection software.

New to Veritas NetBackup 8.1 is NetBackup Cloud Catalyst, a deduplication technology that is three times faster than competing offerings, said Mike Palmer, executive vice president and chief product officer at Veritas. Faster deduplication means customers need less time and bandwidth to move data.

Veritas NetBackup 8.1 also includes NetBackup Parallel Streaming, a new data protection capability for next-generation on-demand, cloud-based, scale-out workloads and applications such as NoSQL, Hadoop and Cassandra. "[These are examples of] how Veritas is expanding enterprise data protection into new workload environments," Palmer said.

Veritas also expanded its Information Map technology for getting real-time interactive looks at data, Swaroop said. Information Map can be purchased as part of the Veritas 360 Data Management suite or as a stand-alone product.

New to Information Map are over 20 new connectors that allow Veritas Backup Exec, Veritas Enterprise Vault and Veritas Access to quickly integrate with such Microsoft applications as Azure Storage, OneDrive for Business, SQL Server, Office 365 and Exchange, as well as for Google Drive and Google Cloud Storage, Oracle Database, and Box. The connections are handled by Information Map's new Connection Center, he said.

The Veritas 360 Data Management portfolio shows that Veritas remains at the top of its game when it comes to data protection and data management, said Kurt Klein, CEO of DataEndure, a San Jose, Calif.-based solution provider and Veritas channel partner.

Enhancements to Information Map and the new Connection Center make it easy to integrate Veritas' data protection and data management technology with many of the common applications customers are running in public and hybrid clouds while maintaining the same tools they use with on-premises data, Klein told CRN.

"And the new high-speed deduplication of NetBackup 8.1 Cloud Catalyst means customers spend less time migrating and protecting data between on-premises and cloud environments," he said.

Veritas' 360 Data Management portfolio also received a significant boost in partnership with Microsoft as a way to bring the benefits of the portfolio to the Microsoft Azure public cloud.

The enhancements include integrated data protection for Microsoft Azure with such capabilities as snapshot management, and the ability to move data to and from the cloud, Palmer said.

Veritas also is providing increased visibility into data stored in Microsoft Azure via Information Map. Palmer said that increased visibility will provide customers with the ability to use automated classification engines to automatically move and merge data between on-premises and cloud infrastructures and provide governance for such data.

Mark Russinovich, chief technology officer for Microsoft Azure, said customers face multiple challenges related to managing data between the cloud and on-premises infrastructures.

One challenge is data classification, or understanding where the data is and what it is in order to keep it under control, Microsoft's Russinovich said. Another is the challenge of taking compute to the cloud, which forces customers to decide whether to go the Software-as-a-Service route, purchase new apps or find some other way. "There are lots of moving parts, and shortage of skills needed in the cloud world," he said.

Finding better ways to manage and protect data in the cloud is extremely important, especially given its growth, which has doubled year over year for the last eight quarters, Russinovich said. "I thing we're going to see that [growth] continue to accelerate," he said.

To meet those challenges, Veritas unveiled the Veritas Resiliency Platform, which lets customers monitor and fail-over or fail-back multi-tiered applications to and from Azure with a single click, making it a recovery target, Palmer said.

Veritas also unveiled Veritas Access, a software-defined storage offering that lets customers automatically migrate old data to the cloud for long-term storage or mix on-premises and Azure cloud storage to create a single scale-out file system.

Customers can also the use new Veritas Information Map connector for Microsoft Azure to get a real-time picture of their unstructured data stored on Microsoft Azure Blob Storage and Microsoft Azure File Storage.

As part of the strategic partnership between Veritas and Microsoft, the two companies will partner on joint marketing campaigns, Russinovich said. Microsoft also is offering its sales teams incentives to sell the Veritas offerings, he said.

"Veritas understands the enterprise customers," he said. "We understand the enterprise customers. [Together] we get them to the cloud quicker."

Fairweather also said Veritas is evolving its partner program with new rewards and incentives around its 360 Data Management portfolio, including accelerated rebates for focused products like Veritas Resiliency Platform and Veritas Access.