How to Conquer Every Cloud: Introducing The 5 C’s of Cost, Cyber, Cloud, Compliance and Culture

The alignment of people, technology, processes,culture and skills are core catalysts for agile and scalable digital transformation that lasts – and the recent ‘Conquer Every Cloud’ virtual conference by Veritas Technologies afforded exactly that critical combination in focus.

This was a conference designed to support businesses in overcoming challenges, notably managing and protecting data in the cloud, and optimising the opportunities, especially as we transition beyond the pandemic. As I recently discussed on a panel exploring the future of digital events, it was fantastic to see such strong attention to detail in the curation of the day – right across design, content and audience engagement. 

Setting the scene for the day, CEO Greg Hughes explored how the global acceleration in digital transformation to support a remote/hybrid workforce – alongside accelerated cloud computing adoption – is not without its challenges, focussing in on the 4 C’s, namely:

Costs – CIO’s are managing an explosion of data (20-25% growth per year) – how can organisations both optimise and protect this data with budgets remaining within single digits?

Cyber – Ensuring resilience in the face of rising ransomware threats – how can you best ensure your business can still run after an (inevitable) attack occurs?

Cloud – With expanding ecosystems seeing organisations leverage scalable private cloud and multiple public cloud providers, how can data management policies best be standardised? 

Compliance – With the increasing value and sensitivity of data, governments are creating new and rapidly evolving regulations – how can organisations abide across disparate systems, clouds and infrastructures, and geographies too?

These 4 key considerations were core to the agenda aligning with a Veritas principle that has guided its solution design and development to protect data wherever it resides: information is more important than infrastructure. And as discussed by eminent futurist, Dr. Michio Kaku this protection is vital: ‘data will be the source of wealth in the future’. Veritas software and hardware products are enabling large complex enterprises to address such challenges and today help support 86% of the world’s Fortune 500 companies. Expanding this further, key announcements included the release of NetBackup 9 with Flex Scale, and the scaling of Veritas’ enterprise data protection platform with acquisition of Hubstor.

NetBackup is core to the Enterprise Data Services Platform (EDSP) affording protection from edge to core to cloud, with the NetBackup 9 news reflecting both the embracing of scale-out computing alongside extant support for traditional scale-up platforms. This extends the capacity to deliver any cloud, any data source and any workload – to any architecture – with the addition of Flex Scale. Rather than relying on forecasting capacity needs in a complex context of explosive data growth, NetBackup Flex Scale supports IT teams by dynamically invoking additional capacity across a distributed computing environment as and when it is required, allowing always aligned unified data protection. The range of enhancements includes scale-out and hyperconverged ‘Flex Scale’ nodes, simpler operations, and OpenStack integration.