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Data resilience at VeeamON

Michael Cade.

SMART Security Solutions attended the VeeamON Tour in Johannesburg in August 2025 to learn more about data resilience and Veeam’s initiatives to enhance data protection, both on-site and in the cloud. Numerous Veeam partners, including Exagrid, Nutanix, Datacentrix, Pure Storage, Red Hat, Ndende and more sponsored the event.

Brendan Widlake, regional sales director for Africa at Veeam, opened the proceedings with a brief overview of the company, noting a 30% growth in the region over the past year. Mena Migally, regional vice president for EMEA East, followed with more insights into the company and its leading position in data protection software, including Office 365 protection.

Veeam’s Sr. VP head of global strategy, Dave Russell, followed with a talk on resilience, how data protection has become a critical aspect of corporate resilience planning, especially as ransomware attacks continue to proliferate, with companies having seemingly limited ways to protect themselves, or some are still not taking it seriously enough.

Data resilience is not only about cybersecurity. Russell noted that there are several “eventualities” that can impact your data. These include power and cooling issues in data centres, hardware failures (which still happen), and everyone’s favourite, human error. However, as many organisations have discovered, cybersecurity failures are the most high-impact events.

As an example, he said that ransomware made up 69% of cybersecurity incidents in the last year, with 40% of those victims paying the ransom demand (7% of those who paid did not receive the encryption key to decrypt their data). And, of those attacked, 69% were attacked again. Veeam, apart from its software solutions, also has an incident response team and “the world’s largest collection of decryption keys”.

Data resilience is therefore a critical aspect of running a business, and is built on five pillars:

• Data backup,

• Data recovery,

• Data portability,

• Data security, and

• Data intelligence.

Veeam’s research has shown that approximately 78% of companies believe they are resilient, but only 8% have achieved ‘best-in-class’ status. Moreover, 94% of companies plan to increase their disaster recovery spend in 2025, but are still only covering a fraction of the requirements to be considered ‘best-in-class’. The data protection company’s Data Resilience Maturity Model (DRMM) provides customers with an indication of their current position on the resilience path.

Product update and evolution

Michael Cade, Veeam’s Global CTO, then took the stage to provide some updates on the company’s product roadmap. The company offers two primary platforms for customers looking to manage and protect their data: the Veeam Data Platform (VDP) and Veeam Data Cloud (VDC), a managed service for customers who prefer not to host the platform on-site. Veeam is a channel focused company and the VDC is provided via Veeam Cloud Service Providers (VCSP), on an as-a-service model.

The new version of Veeam’s data platform, version 13, is scheduled for release by the end of 2025, featuring a new user interface that enhances the clarity and accessibility of information about clients’ data. VDC will also enable data restoration on any Windows or Linux server, and recovery services will facilitate restoration to a cloud-based ‘clean room’, which includes malware scanning and data classification services. Continuous Data Protection will also cover any server, whether physical, virtual or cloud-based.

Version 13 will also see a nearly 100% increase in workload processing speed, along with a 50% improvement in backup performance. Other VDC services customers can look forward to include policy automation, compliance and better reliability. Additionally, Veeam’s Data Cloud Vault on Azure provides a fully managed and secure cloud storage solution for companies seeking to outsource the complexity of data resilience.

Can’t forget AI

As the world becomes increasingly obsessed with AI, Cade noted that Veeam has been utilising it for some time to provide customers with intelligence to enhance their security operations. For example, it is used in disaster recovery operations; in data security, it is used to understand malware and remediation (and will integrate with cybersecurity platforms); AI will also be used as an admin assistant to reduce workloads and improve usability; AI will also be used for data classification. The company will also provide LLM functionality, but it will be restricted to the customer’s data and will not be available to the rest of the world or LLM developers.

The above is a summary of the main points mentioned at the summit. There was naturally much more information and other sessions open to attendees.

For more information, visit www.veeam.com.

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