Chris Norton, Regional Director for Africa at Veeam Software

Having identified significant opportunities for growth in Africa by looking at modernising companies’ data protection strategies, Chris Norton, the Regional Director for Africa at Veeam Software, is confident the company is on the right track for continued growth after it has adapted the way it engages with customers across the continent, starting with its hub in South Africa. 

“The pandemic has taught everybody that relationships with customers are critical for success. Traditionally, Veeam has been partner centric and vendor supported. In this new world of business, I am driving the transition to swap this around to become vendored and partner supported for us to build intimacy with our customers in Africa,” he says.

Veeam wants companies to realise the importance of making backup and recovery a core part of a digital transformation strategy. To this end, it is focused on assisting customers on a Modern Data Protection journey as they modernise their environments while protecting and securing rapidly changing (and growing) data locations.

Revenue and beyond

“From a revenue perspective, we want to keep growing. In the region, we have identified Kubernetes and Software as a Service (SaaS) as core technologies to target in this regard. Globally, Veeam is looking for substantial growth as a business over the coming years.  Our CEO Anand Ewaran has publicly stated he’s looking to scale the company to $10B in reveue over the mid-term, and I believe South Africa and the rest of the continent will help play a vital role in that regard,” says Norton.

Many businesses have accelerated their digital transformation initiatives and flexible working practices as a result of the pandemic. These components are dependent on the adoption of hybrid cloud or cloud-native solutions. Both digital transformation and hybrid work require resilience, security, backup, and recoverability to protect businesses from the downsides of disruption and data loss. These can include everything from loss of profits to damaging their reputation and negatively impacting on the confidence of existing and future employees.

Opportunity in disaster

“There is a business saying that goes ‘when disaster strikes, the cheque books come out.’ Organisations who have previously viewed business and disaster recovery as grudge purchase are realising that they must build resilience upfront to ensure a smooth operating environment across all platforms. But digitisation and the cloud accentuate vulnerabilities,” adds Norton. “It is far better for their pockets, operations and market confidence if they bake-in resilience from the off.”   

Data mobility between clouds has become important as a lot of mission-critical apps and DevOps are taking place in containers. Companies must therefore ensure these are as protected as the critical data they are storing on other platforms. Veeam also expects Kubernetes and the Kasten by Veeam K10 cloud native data management platform to be big talking points in the coming months.

The Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022 and the Veeam Ransomware Trends Report 2022 highlight the need to adopt more secure backup and recovery practices. Across EMEA, 86% of companies have a protection gap between how much data they can afford to lose and how often IT systems are protected. In South Africa, this number sits at 78%. These statistics have grown over the past 12 months across EMEA indicating that while the criticality of data continues to soar, so do the challenges in protecting data to a satisfactory level.

“We are seeing that customers are now understanding that backup and recovery are critical components of a digital strategy. They realise they must be cloud-ready, mobile-enabled in the modern world. Even though it took the better part of the last two years, companies locally are in a more optimised space. However, they are looking at optimising even more. This provides a significant opportunity for us to provide them with a secure environment that injects resilience into their processes,” says Norton.

Enter immutability

This is where immutable backup is important as it provides a last line of defence for companies. Those businesses with large legacy tape environments have difficulty in managing it and being able to restore the right version of the data. Having an immutable copy is becoming something more companies are becoming interested in and want to understand more. This is a key component of our backup and recovery approach and is part of the 3-2-1-1-0 rule. This states that companies must maintain at least three copies of their data, on two different media, with at least one copy stored at an offsite location, one copy offline, and all backups being verified containing no errors.

Veeam provides hardware agnostic Modern Data Protection solutions which enable companies across the continent to go with what best suits their current and future technology infrastructure needs.

“We do not dictate to our customers what they backup and where they backup. We believe that a backup strategy must have no impact on the technology direction a customer chooses to follow whether that is physical, virtual, cloud, or a combination of the three. We allow them to use their chosen platforms and technologies to run their businesses.”

Growth opportunities

Norton is also confident about the opportunities available to Veeam in Africa for the rest of 2022.

“There is a lot of pent-up demand in Africa. Businesses are sitting on huge cash reserves after shelving many projects over the last two years. It is therefore critical to be considered in our approach to South Africa and the rest of the continent. We do not want to be standing behind partners but rather building that intimacy with our customers directly and having our partners fulfilling that vision,” he says.

Veeam will also continue to build a strong partner network while having good end user engagement. It is about helping one another to take our services forward. This means helping our customers and giving our partners the best tools that enable a great customer experience when working with Veeam technology.

Vision

“For the coming months, I want to help Veeam transition from evangelising Kubernetes to selling the technology to the customer and creating differentiation for the business. We are already seeing a precursor of this happening in the industry and Veeam is beginning to grab the opportunities available to us in the Kubernetes market.”

Beyond that, Norton is also seeing massive possibilities in the SaaS 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.