Cyber Resiliency Summit | Anand Eswaran, Veeam

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Anand Eswaran

CEO

Veeam

Veeam’s five data resilience pillars for business continuity, cybersecurity and innovation

In today’s increasingly digital world, businesses and individuals depend heavily on data for decision-making, operations and innovation, making data resilience critical.As a result, backup, recovery and cyber resilience should all come together under the same umbrella of data resilience, according to Anand Eswaran (pictured), chief executive officer of Veeam Software Group GmbH.Veeam’s Anand Eswaran talks with theCUBE about why data resilience plays a critical role in cybersecurity.“I’d say data is the currency of every modern business today, actually not just business [but] of every city [and] of every government, regardless of size,” he said

play_circle_outline Enhancing Data Resilience for Business and Government: The Five Pillars of Backup, Recovery, Portability, Security, and AI

play_circle_outline Focus on customer innovation and partnerships with security companies, Microsoft, and hyperscalers

play_circle_outline Evolution of decision-making in data protection, backup, and cybersecurity

play_circle_outline Expect breaches to happen, plan for data loss and business downtime

play_circle_outline Holistic approach to resilience: backup, recovery, security, AI use cases

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Anand Eswaran, Veeam

Anand Eswaran

CEO Veeam

At the Cyber Resiliency Summit, theCUBE Research's Dave Vellante speaks with Anand Eswaran, CEO of Veeam Software, about the critical role of data resilience in modern businesses. Eswaran outlines the five pillars of data resilience -- backup and recovery, portability, security, AI, and intelligence -- and underscores the importance of a proactive, holistic approach to preparing for breaches.

Find out more about theCUBE's coverage of the Cyber Resiliency Summit https://www.thecube.net/events/thecube/cyber-resiliency-summit

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What are the different dimensions of data resilience that Veeam considers, and why is data resilience important for business continuity? add

What partnerships does the company have in place for data and cyber resilience, and how do these partnerships strengthen their security posture for customers? add

What event triggered the involvement of CISOs in backup and recovery decisions historically contained in the CIO world? add

What statistics should be considered when planning for a data breach? add

What factors should be considered when thinking about resilience in a holistic approach? add

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Anand Eswaran, Veeam

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Dave Vellante

>> All right. Welcome to SiliconANGLE and theCUBE's Cyber Resiliency Summit. My name is Dave Vellante. We're here at the New York Stock Exchange. We have a special guest who's going to be keynoting our summit. We pre-recorded this a little earlier. Anand Eswaran is here. He's the CEO of Veeam. One of the leaders in this space and really focused on cyber resilience, data resilience. Anand, thanks so much for participating in the summit. Great to see you.

Anand Eswaran

>> Pleasure's all mine, Dave. Excited to be here.

Dave Vellante

>> So let's start with the big picture and some of the trends that we're seeing as we've often talked about. Back up was used to be an afterthought and then it became pretty fundamental. It started to pull together as an adjacency to cyber, cyber resilience and it's now become a fundamental component. CISOs are thinking about it, the SecOps team is working much more closely with the IT team. How do you see the landscape of back up, data resilience, cyber resilience, all coming together under the same umbrella?

Anand Eswaran

>> Great question. Firstly, I'd say data is the currency of every modern business today, actually not just business, of every city, of every government, regardless of size, whether you're an SMB or an enterprise, data is the currency. If data stops, if that data becomes unavailable, your business stops. Flights get grounded as we saw recently with what happened with CrowdStrike. Access to civic services for citizens completely stops as we see when there's a ransomware breach in a city. So life as we know it stops. And that's why data becomes super critical. And when I think of then this whole thing, you talked about backup, recovery, cyber resiliency. For me, I encapsulate the whole thing in data resilience. And Veeam as the number one market leader in data resilience. We've been at it for 18 years with one intention, bring the focus on data resilience because data resilience for me is business resilience. And I'll say one more thing. When we think of data resilience as Veeam, we think of it in five different dimensions. It obviously starts with backup and recovery. 96% of the time the ransomware hackers, the bad actors start with trying to compromise the backups for a reason. So it's very critical, but then-

Dave Vellante

>> For an obvious reason, you can't back up, you're not able to recover.

Anand Eswaran

>> A famous president said some time back, "It's the economy stupid." I say it's the recovery stupid. So backup and recovery is critical. It's the foundation. But for true resilience, you need to think about three more dimensions. You need to think about portability. How do you make sure your data is portable across environments. For many reasons, whether it is you got reached by ransomware and you need to move your data or move your recovery to a different platform. And you need the ability and the flexibility to do that. Simple one button, automated orchestrated portability. The fourth pillar, which is critical, is security. Far beyond what we've talked about historically, which is MFA, end-to-end encryption. You need to think about security in a much more holistic way, which allows you to have the best ransomware protection and recovery posture as a company. And finally, AI, there's a lot of hype, but there's a lot of reality around it. Veeam uses AI to make our products better, to make our customer security posture better. So how are you using AI to get insight and get to the best cyber security posture possible and stay five steps ahead of the attackers? Those five pillars need to come together for true data resilience, which is what we are focused on.

Dave Vellante

>> So much to unpack here. First of all, I want to say the pandemic taught us that disaster recovery in and of itself is not a business resilience strategy. And now with attackers being so the adversaries are just so capable, we're seeing that this idea of business resilience. And I want to get into data resilience, really transcends what we used to think about as disaster recovery or backup. But these five pillars, let's unpack that a little bit. So backup, it's the foundation. You got that end recovery. To me it's all about, okay, what's the granularity that you can achieve with RPO? How much data can you actually afford to lose as a business? And how much budget do you have to protect that data and how fast can you get that back? Backup is one thing, recovering is everything. So to pick up on it's the backup recovery stupid. Now, portability is interesting and I want to try to tie this in if I understand it correctly. So portability, everybody puts things in containers and Kubernetes to be able to move things around from cloud to on-prem, multi cloud. But that data has to be protected while it's being moved. Is that the right connection? And you guys were early on.

Anand Eswaran

>> Yes. There's a couple of ways to think about it. By the way, just going back to backup and recovery, even before we go to portability.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah. Sure.

Anand Eswaran

>> Some of the things which people don't realize is your backup and recovery. You've got to be able to do this well without dependencies. For example, when you use a lot of our competitors for backup and recovery, we feel that some of the fundamentals are not in place because they need access to the internet. They need access to many back up infrastructure components like the catalog server, the Ddube, you know has to happen. And if they lose access to the Ddube catalog server, the backup and recovery doesn't happen very effectively. It helps you recover regardless of whether you have access or not to your backup infrastructure products.

Dave Vellante

>> Why? Because you control the catalog or? Everybody's got a catalog, right?

Anand Eswaran

>> Because that's the way we have the portable data format, which we use to create backups basically has considered all of that.

Dave Vellante

>> So it's really that portable data format more so than the container that is narrative that I was talking about.

Anand Eswaran

>> That is correct. And then you come to portability. Now portability has many dimensions to it. One is containers and we'll come to containers hardly anyone protects containers. But when you look at broad protection and take one workload. If you take virtualization as a workload, you are going through, everybody's going through. A scenario right now with Broadcom's acquisition of VMware. 56% of our customers we have talked to have said they are exploring what a plan B could look like. They're also realizing that moving off of VMware is expensive. It takes time, it's not easy. So let's see how many actually act on it. But many are thinking about it. But one of the key things for them is, how easy is it to move their data, which they have protected within this virtualized environment. How easy is it to move it? Can they even do it? Forget about how easy, can they even do it With. With Veeam, because our founding principle was hardware-agnostic. I mean portability had to be one of the founding principles. So for us, if you are using Veeam, you literally have an easy button which you can press and move your data from wherever. VMware to Nutanix or Hyper-V or Azure Stack or any of that. You can just do it in a very, very simple way. So portability is super critical. So whether that is because you've had a ransomware attack and you need to recover to a different platform, you need a backup from Azure recover to AWS, you have something like this. Or you just have a plain old simple technology refresh where you just have decided to upgrade or move to a different platform. Data portability is key. It didn't get enough air time until this recent incident with Broadcom and VMware. Super critical.

Dave Vellante

>> Interesting. And then the other two pillars is security and intelligence. So are you a security company? How do you think about that? Some companies have pivoted fully into security, you guys haven't gone there. How do you think about that?

Anand Eswaran

>> Yeah. When some companies can't create the best platform around resilience as we call resilience, five pillars and they have to pivot to a different story. My perspective on security. So security is very important. It's got many dimensions to it. No company is a end-to-end security company. If someone says they are, then that's complete BS. We work with a lot of the security companies, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, so forth.

Dave Vellante

>> Even those guys aren't end-to-end security companies.

Anand Eswaran

>> They're not end-to-end security. So we work with them on SIEM integrations, SOAR integrations with Palo Alto Networks for example. Because those product-level API, bidirectional integrations is what makes the industry more secure. If someone says, we are a security company, man, you got to start to see through that right away. But that said, let me take a step back. When we think about security, beyond all the things I talked about. Integrating with Palo Alto and Splunk and CrowdStrike et cetera, simple things. We started looking at what happens, what's the workflow when a company gets breached through ransomware? And we started talking to the cyber insurance companies. We realized that the first port of call for these cyber insurance companies is a very small set of companies they trust to bring them in and start to help them through the responding to that incident. And long story short, Coveware was top of that list, which is why we ended up acquiring Coveware. It's been a part of Veeam since March.

Dave Vellante

>> Explain what those guys do because really I got the demo when I was out in Arizona.

Anand Eswaran

>> So they do a couple of things. One is they are the 911 for ransomware in a very simple way.

Dave Vellante

>> Like a mini Mandiant in a way.

Anand Eswaran

>> And we have slightly different swim lanes. Because I'll tell you things we do which Mandiant doesn't. They're at a different scale and Mandiant actually pulls in Coveware for a lot of the times they get involved in these-

Dave Vellante

>> But a lot of customers can't go the Mandiant path. It's too much of a heavy lift and too expensive.

Anand Eswaran

>> So at the heart of it it's incident response. When Coveware gets involved, they have a patent pending assessment of what's happening, which is pretty quick. They have the ability to do deep forensic analysis of the ransomware attack. In minutes, they can tell you what's happening and what should be the path. They even get involved with the clients in helping through the extortion negotiation, the entire negotiation process. They get involved in doing things. And that extortion negotiation is not something Mandiant will do. Mandiant won't do decryption and actually getting the final data recovered and the final decryption process and then they help even with the post incident insurance documentation and everything else as well. So this is literally a 911 service, which Veeam is the only company in our space to have a first party incident response capabilities. But there's more there Dave, because it's not just incident response. The fact that they do it every day. They have one of the strongest commercial databases of ransomware threat patterns and ransomware threat signatures, which they then use to essentially create, they've created IP and software, which they're able to help customers give it to customers for them to run. We call it recon. And that gives you a great sense across your entire infrastructure. What does it look like? Do you have threat patterns? Do you have dormant files waiting to be triggered and activated at some point in time? And what we've done is we now take these threat signatures and we basically have put it in Veeam's data platform and we've scaled it across to a 550,000 plus customers. So not only are we able to now look at ransomware protection and recovery in a very holistic manner, the product helps you get ready. Coveware by Veeam helps you react because it's an when, not an if. You are getting breached. And then a platform is every day taking what we see as patterns and scaling it across to our customers so they get better every day. And this AI-based malware detection is an absolutely cool innovation.

Dave Vellante

>> Now does that feed into the fifth pillar, which is intelligence? Help us cut through the noise and AI.

Anand Eswaran

>> The AI BS?

Dave Vellante

>> And get to the signal. That's what we like to do here on theCUBE. What's real and how do you guys approach that?

Anand Eswaran

>> So we look at AI in four different dimensions. The first is how do we make our own products better using AI? And this is what I just was talking about. We have AI-based malware detection and this AI model learns every day based on the threat patterns we see from Coveware. So that makes a huge difference. We use AI to make our customers better in their security posture. That's number two. These are the examples are things like we launched the second version of Veeam AI digital assistant on December 3rd. So it frees up the admins from routine tasks and allows them to focus on what's really much more valuable. We also announced the launch of Veeam co-pilot for protecting Microsoft 365, which eventually we will extend to all workloads. So all of these in a Gen-AI way, conversational way, allows our customers to get to the best security posture possible. The third thing we're doing with AI, which is important is we are the third and the fourth are in our roadmap where we are working to create meaningful insights out of the data we protect the customers protect. A simple example would be a compliance use case to make sure that we look this long immutable data set over a long period of time in cold storage where compute is cheap. Looking at do they have the right compliance with GDPR, for example. Are they treating PII data in the right way? So simple way to do that. And the final thing we are doing with AI is very important. Nobody has talked about it yet, but we are exploring this part of a long-term roadmap is protecting the models which fuel AI in the first place. Your large language models, your small language models. So we are working through that as well.

Dave Vellante

>> Interesting. So that's actually like you guys were early on with cast-in and protecting containers you were earlier on an M365 and Salesforce. Here's another example where-You're Looking ahead not much of a market there today, but there will be. I want to ask you, and by the way, I think the use case specific thing is where you guys really shine because you can't just throw a bunch of backup data into an LLM and say, "Okay, tell us what's going on." You have to have various... So compliance is a great use case. You've got the metadata and you can do that with confidence. You use the term data resilience. Why data resilience? What does that mean to you? Is that a new category that you're trying to establish? Is that a marketing term? Help us understand that.

Anand Eswaran

>> Yeah, no. So the one thing you will see from Veeam and Dave, you've covered us for a long time, and you know this industry well. In fact, some folks will tell us we are not good enough at marketing. They tell us that you've got to be a little more bolder. And we don't do BS marketing. It's just not our DNA. So for us, data resilience is a very specific term where we talk about how protecting data is life itself. And that's why I go back to the five pillars. And it is resilience in all its forms to make sure a company's best suited to never lose access to the data, get insights from it, and get their business transformed in the right way. That's why every time I talk resilience, it's the five pillars. Are you backing it up right? Do you have everything set up so you can recover instantly? Theoretically, an RTO and an RPO of zero? Do you have extreme data portability, no matter what the reason is, whether it's triggered by ransomware recovery or a vendor lock-in scenario or a tech refresh. Do you have the right security postures? Do you have a holistic view of ransomware protection and recovery? Are you looking at the right AI use cases? So when you put all of these together, it'll make sure that your business never stops.

Dave Vellante

>> So we're getting a sense of the dimensions of your business. You've got five pillars, you've got four dimensions of AI. It's a very rich tapestry that you're putting here.

Anand Eswaran

>> Absolutely. That's the reason I always say I don't start with, we are a $1.7 billion company growing 30% at 29% EBITDA. We are number one in market share per Gartner, per IDC. Not like some companies who just throw up saying you're number one. It's very data based. And then just last week, as I said, CRN announced that Veeam is a 2024 data resilience product of the year. All of this is a consequence, not a starting point of what our focus is. This goes back to our mission, secure the digital world with exceptional resilience and intelligence and focus on customer innovation way ahead of the curve. Whether it was SaaS apps, whether it was containers, or whether it is our approach to AI.

Dave Vellante

>> And then how does the cyber resilience, data resilience trend, how does that affect your partnerships, your API posture in that ecosystem?

Anand Eswaran

>> So when I think about data and cyber resilience, we talked about how companies can claim to be end-to-end cyber or security companies. On one side, we work with the security companies. We work with Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, Sophos and the list is long to come. This is where we have API level integration between us. So we are passing information back and forth to what the threat patterns we see on our site to Splunk, CrowdStrike, et cetera. And we log the data and the patterns they see on their site in the Veeam API incident center. So if anything it makes our security partnerships absolutely stronger. The second thing I would call out is our partnerships with the larger companies like Microsoft, Amazon huge. And that's where the AI partnership with Microsoft was driven off the fact that together we can actually create a much better security posture for our customers. That's why recently at Microsoft Ignite, when they talked about Microsoft 365 protection. The highlight to bring why this is important and how you do this well was what Microsoft and Veeam did in partnership to protect ServiceNow. And ServiceNow has 29,000 users. So partnerships with hyperscalers, partnerships with the GSIs. We are working with GSIs so that Veeam is the foundation of their ransomware recovery services to their clients. We are not talking about opportunistically, "Hey, bring us in when you're at a sale." No. We are working with them on a much more foundational level to power their client services for their clients.

Dave Vellante

>> How does the intersection of data protection, backup and cybersecurity, how does it affect the personas? Personas to whom you sell and market?

Anand Eswaran

>> That probably has been one of the biggest, I wouldn't say changes, but evolutions. Historically, these decisions because it was just backup and recovery was made by the backup admin and largely contained in the CIO world. I think ransomware was the first trigger where the CISOs got involved. And now with what we see, it's the CrowdStrike outage which happened, which grounded flights, I mean businesses were emphatic. They knew anything.

Dave Vellante

>> Which had nothing to do with cybersecurity, by the way. Talk about business resilience.

Anand Eswaran

>> Business resilience.

Dave Vellante

>> That was an IT issue.

Anand Eswaran

>> It was an IT error. An error of testing QA and a faulty upgrade.

Dave Vellante

>> You remember the flash crash?

Anand Eswaran

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> Remember the flash crash? What was that? It was a glitch.

Anand Eswaran

>> It was a glitch.

Dave Vellante

>> What does that even mean?

Anand Eswaran

>> Remember what happened with the Australian hedge fund?

Dave Vellante

>> Yes.

Anand Eswaran

>> Unisuper?

Dave Vellante

>> Yes.

Anand Eswaran

>> They had everything done right, multiple resiliency zones. But what happened? Some fact fingering which deleted the entire account, it didn't matter what you did.

Dave Vellante

>> This is the world, the digital world.

Anand Eswaran

>> This is the world we live in, which is you can get impacted by a natural disaster. You can get impacted by just playing rookie errors. You can get impacted by lack of quality then the right process, obviously ransomware. So given the world we live in, we see that the decisions are now a trifecta of the CIO and the CISO obviously needing to be together. But this has become a board priority. So I feel now... And by the way, when I talk to CIOs and CISOs, I tell them five or six things which they have to think about, everyone has to think about. And one of the key things I tell them is I still feel uncomfortable that there's a gap between CIOs and CISOs and how they approach resilience together for the company because it's a board priority. These worlds are converging, Dave.

Dave Vellante

>> Let's end there because I draw on your experience talking to customers. And I want to get to how you would advise organizations because, CISOs sit on board means a lot of companies, the CISOs talking in acronyms that the board doesn't understand. They need to understand if I'm going to invest a dollar in cybersecurity, I'm going to lower my risk by some amount. That's the way boards think. But so what advice would you give organizations and specifically boards in terms of how they should be thinking about what you call data resilience?

Anand Eswaran

>> Yeah. I'd start with the most fundamental one. Expect a breach to happen. It's not a question of if, but it's when. Simple data supports that. 3/4 of all companies have been breached this year. A 1/4 have been breached more than four times. When breaches happen, 92% of the time the data is encrypted. 76% of the time the data is exfiltrated. And 80% of the companies pay ransom. But even then, a 1/3 of them do not recover data. So plan for something to happen. And what is your appetite for RTO and RPO. Appetite for data loss and business downtime time. Just time on that. What is your appetite for those two? Number one. The second thing I would say is think of resilience holistically. Not just backup, not just recovery or not just as some companies would want you to do just security. It is a holistic approach to resilience, which means backing it up right. It's the recovery stupid, data portability, one button, easy click, security in all its forms. Do you have the best protection and ransomware recovery platform? And then what are the AI use cases you're applying for getting to that posture. That's number two. The third thing I would say is make sure that your company is looking at it as a company. It's not CIOs, it's not CESOs. They need to come together. So no air gap between the CIO and the CISO. The fourth thing I would say is back up your SaaS apps. I know it's getting there, but it's honestly not yet there. Back up all your SaaS apps and back up your containers. 90% of the companies have DevOps and container work going on. Less than 10% protected. Protect it now don't wait to be the example which others will follow. Get there yourself right now. And number five, what I would say is there's no substitute to practice. A playbook is useless. If you haven't practiced, simulate a breach. Practice it. Assume you've been breached. Make sure you put your teams through the drill and then when you do that, Automate everything. Automate recovery. You cannot make it manual process. Test, run the breaches, automate and bring it all together.

Dave Vellante

>> Great advice with some real depth, Anand. Thank you so much for sharing that. I'm so glad we could have you in at our NYSE studio as part of our summit. Really appreciate your time.

Anand Eswaran

>> Number one data resilience platform on the planet. By the way, I love the Veeam color all across the vice as well so.

Dave Vellante

>> Excellent.

Anand Eswaran

>> Thank you.

Dave Vellante

>> All right. Thank you for watching this recording of our expert guest at the SiliconANGLE and theCube Cyber Summit. Keep it right there. Live and on demand from our Palo Alto Studios and of course from our NYSE location. Thanks for watching.