Veeam has expanded its cyber protection capabilities and added AI assistance with a recent update to its Veeam Data Platform. To find out more, VMblog spoke with industry expert Rick Vanover, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam.
VMblog: As we’ve seen, cybercrime and ransomware attacks have continued to skyrocket in the last few years. How will the latest rollout of Veeam Data Platform help organizations to quickly address cyber incidents?
Rick Vanover: According to Veeam’s Data Protection Trends Report, 76% of organizations recognize a ‘Protection Gap’ between how much data they could afford to lose and how often their data is protected. In response to this, the new Veeam Data Platform, which includes Veeam Backup & Replication v12.1 as its foundation, helps to reduce downtime and data loss. This latest update will shorten the gap between cyber-attacks and recovery, giving our customers radical resilience to keep their business running and moving forward.
VMblog: You state that sixty percent of organizations need significant or complete overhauls between their backup and cyber teams– can you elaborate on how the upgrade can help to address this issue?
Vanover: Yes, so the updates of this latest upgrade are designed to unite IT, cloud, and security teams with the technology to combat ransomware attacks. Some of the new features like the YARA content analysis will help pinpoint any ransomware strains to prevent reinfection of malware into an environment. So, it has the capability to detect the presence of sensitive data in backups, (I.e PII, PHI and PCI data) and protect that data in real-time. Also, the enhanced backup protection prevents accidental or malicious deletion of backups. In addition to the immutability capability, there is greater security for cloud backup. This ensures privilege access to backup and recovery tasks with more granular IAM permissions, as well as immutable backups for Amazon RDS PostgreSQL databases.
VMblog: Describe the new features and enhancements. Which new feature do you think will be most valuable for cyber and security teams?
Vanover: The Veeam Data Platform has several new capabilities, including the expansion of workloads in the cloud, which protects the Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, Azure Blob, Azure virtual networks. As well as the automated cloud recovery validations which reduce recovery time for an on-premises workload. The Veeam App Service Now provides open integration to leverage ServiceNow workflows, monitoring backup jobs. The newly expanded enterprise capability can support large volumes on NetApp ONTAP FlexGroups, providing instant recovery for PostgreSQL and native backup immutability on EMC Data Domain and HPE StoreOnce Catalyst Copy storage.
Out of these new offerings, I believe the new AI-powered built-in malware detection engine will be most valuable for cyber and security teams. According to Astra Security, there are 1.7 million ransomware attacks every day, which is the equivalent of 19 attacks per second. Time is of the essence for many cyber and security teams, and they need a solution that can easily and efficiently detect immediate threats and alert malicious activity, to ensure the shortest gap between risk and recovery.
VMblog: As part of this upgrade, there is a new AI-powered built-in malware detection engine and threat center. Can you go into detail on what benefits customers can expect?
Vanover: The AI-powered built-in malware detection feature performs file system analysis during backup, so it can immediately alert the user to ransomware and malicious file management activity. This works in tandem with our new threat center, which works to highlight threats, including identifying risks and measures the security score of an environment. When these two features work in tandem, they offer cyber protection capabilities that can detect and stop cybers attacks in its tracks, further demonstrating our ongoing efforts to keep customer environments secure.
VMblog: It’s also announced in this release that the Veeam Data Platform includes the Veeam Backup & Replication v12.1. as the foundation. Can you explain how these solutions work in tandem to reduce downtime and data loss for your customers?
Vanover: The Veeam Data Platform and Veeam Backup & Replication together provide secure backup and fast reliable recovery that keeps our customers up and running. It brings together our latest features provides into a single, robust solution that is offered in three enterprise-grade editions for protecting cloud, virtual, physical, SaaS and Kubernetes applications across complex IT environments to address a range of issues from outages to errors and ransomware.
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