Over the last 12 months I’ve traveled across the globe meeting with customers and partners. And consistently, I’ve heard the same message repeated over and over – “help me understand my data better, so I can manage it more optimally.”
This is why I’m happy to announce today a new strategic partnership between Veritas and Microsoft designed to help hybrid-cloud enterprises do exactly that – manage their data better. More on this in a sec.
Now, as I dissect the customer feedback, the two major buckets of what’s needed in order to tackle this problem become clear:
First, “understand my data better”
Organizations need help understanding what data they have, where it exists, how many copies there are (and subsequently whether every copy is necessary), if the data is subject to regulation or legal hold, or if it’s just junk data that’s taking up space. Enterprises need to be able to answer these questions and effectively manage their data the right way so they can free up storage resources and reduce exposure to risk.
This is where global data visibility comes in. Veritas can help shed a light on the 52% of data that’s currently dark[1] – or by definition, not managed by policy. We can help reduce the 33% of redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT) data[2] that exists and move the 41% of data that hasn’t been touched in 3 years[3] or longer, freeing up precious storage resources and dramatically reducing the cost and risk exposure to the business.
Second, “manage it more optimally”
Once you better understand the data, managing it more optimally is a matter of policy. Organizations should have the freedom to choose when and where data moves in order to optimize for performance, agility, costs, recoverability, and compliance. Organizations should be free to move data throughout their infrastructure without sacrificing visibility or increasing management complexity.
And that’s where the Microsoft partnership becomes particularly valuable. Veritas solutions connect seamlessly to the Microsoft cloud environment – including Azure storage and Office 365 to give customers the tools they need to manage their data better. Both NetBackup and Backup Exec today leverage new Azure storage connectors to move data to the cloud as an extension of the data protection strategy – a strategy that for many businesses includes getting rid of tape.
The move from on-premises Office to Office 365 is also rapidly picking up pace. As this move is heavily influenced by a desire to outsource email management[1], there needs to be a robust set of archiving and eDiscovery capabilities in place to truly make the move “enterprise ready.” Enterprise Vault.cloud has supported these needs for some time now. However, the value to customers is about to increase even further as the entire Enterprise Vault.cloud SaaS application will be migrating to Azure infrastructure, increasing the integration potential and the feature velocity customers have been asking for.
More than 86% of enterprise organizations rely on Veritas data management capabilities today, and an even greater percentage leverage Microsoft technologies as well. While there has always been complementary overlap between our various offerings, this strategic partnership helps address the needs of a hybrid-cloud enterprise to a greater extent than ever.
Learn more about this partnership by reading the press release or visit the Microsoft partner page on Veritas.com.
Lynn
[1] Global Databerg Report, 2016
[2] Global Databerg Report, 2016
[4] Gartner: 2016 Office 365 Survey Results
