Veeam Software says it has identified significant opportunities for growth in the South African Kubernetes market, as it strengthens its strategy to better serve the market in this vertical.
The backup and disaster recovery firm says it is looking to create additional revenue streams as it targets SA’s ripe Kubernetes market.
Traditionally partner-centric and vendor-supported, the company says it is driving the transition to swap this approach to become vendor-led and partner-supported − in order to build intimacy with customers in SA and across Africa.
During an e-mail interview, Chris Norton, regional director for Africa at Veeam, told ITWeb this new approach entails a strong focus on Kubernetes and containerisation. He notes local organisations are increasingly modernising their environments, while realising they must build resilience upfront to ensure a smooth operating environment across all platforms.
Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling and management.
According to Norton, Kubernetes enables businesses to fast-track digital resilience by allowing for the development of scalable applications that can be deployed more quickly and securely.
While the advantages brought by Kubernetes are compelling, organisations must protect these environments by implementing a backup, recovery and security solution tailored specifically to this architecture, he asserts.
“For the coming months, I want to help Veeam transition from evangelising Kubernetes to selling the technology to customers and creating differentiation for the business. We are already seeing a precursor of this happening in the local industry, and Veeam is beginning to grab the opportunities available to us in the Kubernetes market.
“Companies realise they must be cloud-ready and mobile-enabled in the modern world. Even though it took the better part of the last two years, companies are in a more optimised space. This provides a significant opportunity for us to provide them with a secure environment that injects resilience into their processes,” says Norton.
To protect local firms, Veeam has introduced its Kasten K10 data management platform, to provide enterprise operations teams with a scalable and secure system for backup/restore, disaster recovery and application mobility of Kubernetes applications.
Modern data protection
Veeam says over the past decade, it has created a huge market for virtualised environments, predominately through its VMware vSphere backup and availability solutions, and has become a dominant player in the market.
While the market has changed over the years, backup is still critical for businesses, particularly as cyber crime remains one of the biggest challenges facing local organisations, notes Norton.
“The Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022 shows 86% of South African organisations suffered ransomware attacks in the last 12 months, making cyber attacks one of the single-biggest causes for business downtime for the second consecutive year.
“The biggest challenge here is that per attack, South African organisations were unable to recover 31% of their lost data on average, and businesses don’t get to choose which data that is.
“Veeam wants companies to realise the importance of making backup and recovery a core part of a digital transformation strategy by focusing on assisting customers on a modern data protection journey as they modernise their environments, while securing rapidly changing (and growing) data locations.”
Beyond that, Norton sees massive possibilities in the software-as-a-service market.
“Data can be an agent for positive change and growth within a business. If it is managed and protected successfully, this enables business leaders to make data-driven decisions based on the insights and analysis of the company data. By assisting business to do just this, Veeam solutions position its customers, its channel and itself for growth,” he concludes.
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