3 insights you might have missed from the VeeamON event

After two years holding online-only events, the recent VeeamON 2022 event saw the launch of the first hybrid VeeamON. While the in-person crowd gathered in Las Vegas to celebrate the lifting of pandemic restrictions with live sessions and corridor chats, close to 40,000 additional attendees took part in a parallel virtual event that included live keynote speeches and content from Las Vegas alongside exclusively online sessions.

It was also the first VeeamON appearance for Veeam Software Corp. Chief Executive Officer Anand Eswaran (pictured), who outlined big goals for the future of the company. Data protection is a crowded market, with Gartner’s Magic Quadrant showing newer entrants, such as Cohesity Inc. and Rubrick Inc., joining Veeam, Dell Technologies Inc., CommVault Systems Inc. and Veritas Technologies LLC, in the leaders’ quadrant. 2021 marked Veeam’s fifth year in the top position.

But, the big news was that IDC Corp. data had Veeam and Dell neck-and-neck for market share. It’s not a position Eswaran plans to stay in for long.

“We see a path to taking share and getting from here, 12% [of market share], to 25% to 40% and being an outsize number one,” Eswaran told theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and David Nicholson in an interview at VeeamON, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

In case you missed VeeamON, here are theCUBE’s top three takeaways from the event:

1) Cybercriminals target backup first.

There’s an old information technology joke: “We’re the best at backup … but terrible at recovery.” It used to be funny, but with known zero-day exploits being stockpiled by criminals, it is inevitable that companies are going to get hit with a ransomware attack — that is, if they haven’t already been unknowingly infiltrated.

Seventy-six percent of organizations reported an attack in 2021, according to research in the “2022 Top Trends in Data Protection” report published by Veeam. Of the data targeted, only 47% was encrypted and only 64% of that was recoverable.

“Ninety-four percent of the time, one of the first intrusions is to attempt to get rid of…