Recently we had the opportunity to catch up with Veeam's regional director for Africa, Chris Norton, and ask some of the questions that have arisen during the year as 2022 rapidly draws to a close.

The theme of our discussion was Change - specifically how the company has seen the industry and organisations in general change during the tumultuous and earth-shattering three years.

Norton began by noting that the often-used wisdom that if you cannot change what is happening around you, then change your response, has certainly applied to the arenas of technology and business from 2020 till today.

''For businesses in South Africa, being able to change the way they respond is where the power lies. it's not always about having all the right answers or having the right technology. Rather it is about assessing whether an organisation can influence a particular development they are subject to, and if they cannot, then looking how they can they capitalize on the shift, or optimize their business's strategies for success instead," he elaborates.

 A prime example of sudden and unexpected change was the pandemic, which, Norton notes, was a catalyst that greatly accelerated IT progress  in a number of ways.

"Suddenly, initiatives had to become a reality, not in years or months but in days. Companies that were highly office bound went into reactive survival mode and rolled out remote working. Over the course of multiple lockdowns at various stages, companies began to refine their response and their policies,"' he explains.

''As a result, today a lot of companies have realized that the old fishbowl management mentality that employees need to be sitting at their desk and that they need to be visible to management,  or else they are not actually working, has fallen away to a large extent,'' Norton continues.

It has been replaced by a long overdue realization - and proven by the pandemic - that having remote workers doesn't not necessarily mean lost productivity. Quite the opposite. Often, he stresses, the consequence of allowing employees greater flexibility is more productivity.

Head in the clouds

Another major change that Norton has seen over the past couple of years has been the rapid adoption of the cloud.

He explains that while there were some organisations that were already deeply engaged in the cloud, the majority were still tentative about how much value they could obtain from it. The pandemic changed that. 

''Suddenly organisations needed to suddenly run data centers where they didn't have any staff in the physical data center., and they need to place workloads somewhere where it was being managed. For that reason, cloud became very attractive and we saw cloud adoption rates increase significantly . As the pandemic really hit, those adoption rates accelerated beyond all recognition,'' he relates.

An Essential Key - Backup and Restoration

This rapid adoption of cloud had an interesting effect. Norton explained that  cloud native backup capabilities suddenly moved from being 'nice to have'  to a blatant requirement, as the ability to migrate data between clouds became a real necessity.

The reason for this is that many organisations found that one cloud offered particular ancillary services that their current provider didn't and being able to migrate their applications to another provider would better serve their business strategy.

''We as a company have always done backup and recovery well, and backup and recovery is a ticket to the game.  The baseline is being able to take a workload, back it up and then recover and restore for the customer,'' he explained.

While offering backup and recovery capabilities is common, Norton stresses that the value added ancillary services are what its offering considerably more powerful and  viable for customers.

''Customers started to realize that a lot of the technologies that were once considered leading edge are now absolute necessities,'' he noted.  In essence, much like surviving a tsunami, it would be fair to say that businesses are emerging from the pandemic on a higher ground than when they entered it - more cloud savvy, finally accepting the benefits of having a mobile workforce - and hopefully, more resilient to unforeseen disruptions as well.

In part 2 of our discussion, Norton unpacks the second reason why data backups have been pushed to the forefront and explains how organisations can more effectively protect their business from one of the most common scourges.