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data. Where is the data going to reside?
Should it be off-site? Should it be on-site?
How do I protect myself? I think this is the
last cycle of data certainly that Veeam has
looked at.
How far off are we from that
last step?
We’ve got a methodology that will make
you 100% safe and secure every single time.
Malware and ransomware are really just
viruses and we have been living with them
for many different years.
In the past we would have about one a
month and you would get a patch from
your anti-virus provider. The challenge
now is that these viruses are a lot more
prevalent and malicious.
Can you ever protect 100%
against them?
We have a methodology which means you
won’t be immune, but you should be able to
recover from any sort of disaster.
This is the three, two, one, one rule. So three
copies of data, at least two different medias,
in terms of having one on disc, one in cloud,
one wherever, and generally off site and
one that is disconnected from any cloud or
infrastructure. If you follow those principles
at any point in time you can go back and
you are able to recover. You might have a bit
of data loss for one day or whatever.
We have a feature now that when we
rehydrate and restore data we isolate it and
we have it security checked before we bring
it up, so we can see whether that malware or
ransomware hit already and we can make sure
we don’t bring it live into any environment.
I think the automation process has a bit to
go but I think it’s something that we are
definitely heading towards.
How many customers has Veeam got
in the Middle East?
We have almost 5,000 customers in the
Middle East. If we take a look at the latest
IDC results what’s notable is in Saudi Arabia
we are number one across all environments.
Generally across the Middle East we are
either one or two.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
“
THE CHALLENGE
NOW IS THAT
THESE VIRUSES
ARE A LOT MORE
PREVALENT AND
MALICIOUS.
If I were a CIO and I was looking to
move fairly quickly into a new market
how can Veeam help me do that?
Traditionally you would go to a legacy
backup recovery vendor. They would charge
you a price and then charge you as you
grew in terms of data so it’s not predictable
in terms of your cost. When you have a
new business you like to cost correctly so
you can enter the market very quickly. You
can control your costs and you can grow.
We’ve got flexible models in terms of
subscription and licence-based models. So if
you start a business today and you’ve got a
couple of physical servers and some virtual
environments generally what happens is you
buy perpetual licences for a year or two or
three years. If the company develops and
you might think about moving workloads
into the cloud but you need to protect
them still and make sure they are recovered
quickly, we give you the flexibility to buy
licences that equate to points. You can use
points to buy any product and move that
workload or licence across any platform so
we don’t tie you into anything and your
business can grow and shrink while you are
protected and moving workloads around.
That’s a comfort for CIOs looking to start
something with a predictable cost. It means
you can grow and shrink as you need to.
Are enterprises in the Middle East
feeling more comfortable about the
use of cloud?
If you have a look at the big players AWS
is putting up bricks and mortar in Bahrain,
Microsoft is putting up bricks and mortar
in Abu Dhabi. I think with the feel that the
data resides within the borders, within the
GCC, within the Middle East is going to be
a big enabler. The interest and the comfort
is there. People are having the discussions,
people are testing it, people are moving
those workloads into those environments. I
think within the next two to three years you
will see massive growth in this area.
Do we tend to forget about the
impact of outages having an effect on
factors such as staff morale, customer
loyalty and business reputation?
The challenge here is it’s (the damage to
business reputation) is not measurable from
day one. But over time consumers will exercise
their options and it might be over one week,
or one month. I know specifically in South
Africa the big banks have had quite a few
outages and I know customers won’t move
their assets or money over night but they
make a conscious decision to say ‘this level
of availability is not acceptable I’m going
to move’. So the damage to the brand is
measureable over time. For organisations that
have an outage, the first thing I would do is
I would reach out to every single customer
and offer them something of comfort. In
the digital age it is very easy to forget that
you’re not just dealing with an application on
somebody’s phone. At the end of that there is
a human being, who has got an opinion and
feelings and too often in the data world we
tend to think we operate with applications but
at the end of everything is a human being.
We tend to forget that but it’s very important
in terms of brand reputation and keeping that
consistent. You get those customers who are
quite vocal about it. In the Middle East people
aren’t very vocal about it because it’s not
the done thing but generally on social media
around the world they are very vocal and they
will move quite quickly.
Is it true that strategies for data
availability may seem adequate until
they are tested and fail?
With Veeam we look at your DR plan, or your
orchestration plan, and we automate that for
you. We scan and look in your environment
and we help you build a plan that you can
test that every single day, every single week
in a semi-live environment. We simulate
failures and the software then builds your DR
plan for you and you know that when you
present that plan to auditors it was tested
last week and you can feel quite comfortable
that if you have an outage there is a way
you can recover quite quickly. n
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