What an exciting week this has been! I got the opportunity to attend VeeamON virtually from Columbus, OH, while the main event was in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The nice thing about hybrid events is that you can join them from other locations, making them more accessible to more people. Session-wise, I chose to focus primarily on Veeam Backup for Azure and Coveware by Veeam’s ransomware sessions since that’s where I’m geeking out lately. The nice thing is that several sessions are now available on demand, so attendees can go back and see what we missed.

Of course, I started my time at VeeamON with the opening keynote where data and data resilience was the theme. Veeam CEO Anand Eswaran kicked us off wearing some awesome custom Veeam sneakers and introducing the City of Ft. Lauderdale’s CIO, Tamika McKay. McKay welcomed attendees to her city, highlighting Ft. Lauderdale’s role in the tech industry as well as its beaches and cultural offerings. She said her top priorities as CIO are cybersecurity, modernization, and human capital, all of which play a role in data protection. She reminded us that data is an organization’s most valuable asset and when it’s compromised, it affects all areas of the business, not just IT. This is why it’s important that business and technical sides communicate regularly and effectively.

The keynote then dove further into the topic of data resilience looking at what it means when a company has data resilience and showing off some of Veeam’s product demos. There are five pillars to data resilience – data intelligence, data backup, data security, data recovery, and data freedom. In addition to these pillars, Veeam keeps security at the center of their designs and views zero trust as the core. That set the stage to talk about how Veeam Data Cloud helps organizations because it’s easy to deploy, scalable, and provides a predictable cost model.

Microsoft’s Global Demand Center Corporate Vice President, Sue Paige, and Veeam COO Matthew Bishop joined the conversation to discuss Veeam’s partnership with Microsoft. Paige told us about Microsoft’s new API which will allow backup and recovery of Microsoft 365 data at scale and thanked Veeam for being a launch partner. The companies have also been innovating together on Microsoft’s Copilot AI which will transform productivity by making it more efficient for users to troubleshoot and resolve issues. Veeam now has AI-powered ransomware protection to assist this process; and both parties are continually working to evolve it.

Conversation turned from data backup, recovery, and freedom to data security. Veeam recently acquired Coveware, an organization that offers ransomware incident responses, and invited their CEO, Bill Siegel to the stage to share more about what they do. According to Veeam’s 2024 Ransomware Trends Report (veeam.com), which was conducted by an independent research firm, 75% of companies experienced at least one ransomware attack in the last year; and 25% had four or more attacks. Of those who paid ransom, 27% or organizations still couldn’t recover their data. Coveware by Veeam can help mitigate these losses by providing data aggregation, financial operations, and technical expertise. Coveware by Veeam also had more in-depth sessions throughout the rest of the event; so I’ll share more about them in a future post.

The keynote wrapped with a discussion on data intelligence featuring Sue Paige from Microsoft along with Brandt Urban, Veeam’s Senior VP of Cloud Sales. They shared the organizations’ mutual goal of pioneering AI and increasing its use, and shared recent Copilot innovations. They announced the launch of a differentiated Copilot for Veeam Data Cloud in Microsoft 365. It includes capabilities for personal productivity, an AI PC, and technology that allows organizations to build their own Copilot. Copilot for Veeam is being developed which will allow customers and users to get better data insights, more efficiency at work, and guidance in determining the course of action in an incident.

I previously said that the keynote focused on data and data resilience. If there was one key takeaway for me, it was this. The world and its organizations run on data. Data is an organization’s most valuable asset, which is why it’s a target for bad actors. For this reason, we need data resilience. It powers our organizations in data backup, data security, data recovery, data freedom, and data intelligence.

There was so much more covered in the keynote; but I don’t want to spoil the whole thing. If you’re interested in viewing it, check out the VeeamON 2024 On Demand sessions. They’re free to watch and download. I’d recommend watching the keynote then prioritizing your other sessions based on which sections of the keynote catch your attention. That way, you have an overview and can dive deeper into the topics that are relevant to you. It was a great foundation for me; and I can’t wait to share my insights from other sessions next week.