Tech Insights: Interview with Charles Clarke, Veeam Software

In our new Tech Insights series, we quiz industry leaders to get their views of what the year ahead holds for the IT world. Today we speak with Charles Clarke, Technical Director, APAC, Veeam Software.

What do you see as the single biggest challenge facing the ICT industry in the year ahead, and why?

The single biggest challenge Veeam sees is how to provide availability that meets user demand without breaking the bank. As data volumes explode, caused by the rise of IoT, existing infrastructure will prove insufficient for increasingly demanding users. The expectation from users for businesses to be ‘always-on’ will put IT under pressure to deliver those services seamlessly and uninterrupted.

Another trend that is expected to create challenges is the growth of personal file-sharing usage for corporate data. There are plenty of providers in the market; however, they all create a dilemma, which is how to balance between convenience and data security.

What do you see as the two or three biggest growth opportunities for your customers in 2015, and why?

A key opportunity for 2015 is to look to disaster recovery and availability solutions through the cloud, as a service, with data being streamed to hosting providers offering fast and effective recoveries. This will enable end users to increase data availability and ensure the 3-2-1 rule of data protection.

As data grows exponentially due to ‘always-on’ business, storage will present a massive challenge. Therefore, there is also an opportunity to encourage organisations to create a strategy of data classification. In other words, what to keep in-house, what to discard and what is appropriate for cloud storage.

What emerging trends or developing technologies may influence or change the way the ICT industry will do business in 2015, and why?

Next year we can expect to witness business users having even bigger requirements for uninterrupted access to applications and data than consumers, and this pressure will drive IT executives to re-think their availability models. Network agility and reliability will be given greater prominence as virtualisation continues to gather momentum, but availability will become a strategic concern to business leaders. No longer will recovery time or point objectives of hours or days be acceptable; instead, IT will be expected to deliver recovery in a matter of minutes.

What are your customers demanding of you more today than five years ago, and how will you meet these requirements in 2015?

Customers demand solutions that bridge the availability gap: the divide between being ‘always-on’ and the cost required to ensure it. This is what Veeam has excelled at over the last five years and will continue to do in 2015 by adding features such as better hardware integration with partners like HP, NetApp and EMC, plus plenty of agentless recovery options.

As cloud services continue to mature and with the introduction of cloud platforms, such as Microsoft Azure in Australia, we will start to see greater adoption of cloud as an availability platform next year, evolving beyond test-and-dev. Veeam will strive to meet this increasing demand by enabling our ProPartners to offer innovative availability solutions for the cloud, such as backup-as-a-service. This will differentiate the partners and provide great recoverability for their customers.

Charles Clarke is Technical Director, APAC at Veeam Software. He leads and mentors a team of highly skilled software engineers and represents Veeam at industry events around the globe. His focus for the last four years has been on helping organisations get the most from their investment in the modern data centre, built on virtualisation and the cloud.