Strengthens Veeam’s commitment to hybrid cloud, providing customers with broad platform support and choice

Veeam^® Software, the leader in Backup solutions that deliver Cloud Data Management™, today announced its expansion of public cloud support with the general availability of NEW Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform – completing Veeam’s support for all three major public cloud providers. With the majority of organizations now running hybrid or multi-cloud environments and 72% of those using public cloud currently having more than one vendor in place[1], Google Cloud is one of the top five-largest public cloud infrastructure providers worldwide[2]. With this new offering, Veeam delivers a single platform to protect, secure and manage all applications and data – cloud, virtual and physical – enabling organizations to accelerate hybrid-cloud adoption.

“Veeam recognizes the strategic importance of the cloud to our 400,000+ global customers and we are committed to providing broad platform support and choice,” said Danny Allan, chief technology officer and senior vice president of product strategy at Veeam. “As we now expand public cloud support even further with the general availability of Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform, we have simultaneously expanded our partnership with Google Cloud, enabling Veeam to jointly engage customers through the Google Cloud Marketplace. Additionally, with Veeam recently acquiring Kasten, customers can also acquire Kasten’s K10 datamanagement platform, purpose-built for Kubernetes, through the Google Cloud Marketplace.”

Veeam helps customers address security and data protection responsibilities by delivering Google Cloud backup and recovery to protect and secure applications and data, utilizing and automating Google Cloud-native technologies to quickly and reliably overcome any cloud data loss.

New functionality of Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform includes:

• Google Cloud-Native: Simple yet powerful web UI, deployable from the Google Cloud Marketplace starts protecting data in minutes; Policy-Based Automation of Google Cloud-native snapshots for fast and frequent recovery points, and rapid full- and file-level recovery options to overcome any cloud data loss.
• Cost Optimization: Industry-first cost calculation to align service-level objectives (SLOs) with budgets while avoiding cloud overspend; back up to Google Cloud object storage for cost-effective long-term retention and compliance.
• Security: Overcome security threats including ransomware as well as insider threats by isolating backup data from production (cross-project/cross-region); layered security to protect against brute force attacks with multi-factor authentication (MFA).
• Hybrid-Ready: Portable data format and integration with Veeam Backup & Replication™ external repositories enables easy recovery outside of Google Cloud; utilizes flexible Veeam Universal Licensing (VUL) to simplify license management and enable Cloud Mobility.

New Veeam Backupfor Google Cloud PlatformFREE edition (up to 10 Google Cloud workloads can be backed up with unlimited restore options and basic support) and BYOL edition (VUL with flexible Cloud Data Management and production 24/7 support) is available now in the Google Cloud Marketplace.

[1] 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence – COVID-19 Update: 2020 Trends in Managed Services & Hosting

[2] IDC Semi Annual Public Cloud Services Tracker, H1 2020

By: Jacob Chacko Regional Business Head – Middle East, Saudi & South Africa (MESA) at HPE Aruba

With CES a staple in the tech calendar for as long as I can remember, January always heralds the launch of some of the best, and at times most bizarre, devices of the year. And despite its virtual setting, this year’s show has delivered no differently.

Indeed, products “on display” at the 2021 conference included a furry anxiety robot, a home gardening machine, and smart perfume – all of which are either already available to buy or reportedly will be later this year. Good news for all the consumers who are eager to take them home and plug them into their network.

Of course, normally this wouldn’t represent any kind of problem for business leads and their IT teams – you can watch the launches with curiosity and consider each device’s merits as a consumer would. Expect this isn’t a normal year – and now it very much could be a problem.

According to Trend Micro research, more than half (52%) of global remote workers have IoT devices connected to their home network, and at least 10% are using lesser-known brands. With many such devices – especially from smaller brands – having well-documented weaknesses such as unpatched firmware vulnerabilities and insecure logins, the security implications of your corporate devices now being connected to the same network and vice versa are significant.

While I am certainly not casting any aspersions on this specific crop of CES gadgets, as the lines between work and home networks continue to blur smart home devices and their apps could represent a major weak link in corporate cybersecurity chains.

So with home working likely to remain standard practice even after the vaccine rolls out, how can you ensure your business is secure no matter where, how and what employees connect to it? And perhaps more importantly, how can you do so in a way that protects employee productivity versus simply locking them out?

The way I see it, securing the new hybrid workplace has three core requirements:

Identification – the only way to police access to your corporate network is to know what devices are trying to connect to it (either by name or behaviour), who is operating them and how and why they need to connect. With these details to hand, and the right security solution in place, you can differentiate the type of access you grant according to device or user group – full access, access to certain resource only, no access at all.   

Visibility – of course, in order to identify and segment all the devices accessing it, the network must first be able to see them. But with networks now extending across home, branch and cloud environments the picture most companies have today is fragmented at best. And this is only likely to get worse when hybrid working has employees constantly moving in and out of the office. That is why unifying your network infrastructure to ensure a single-pane-of-glass view is such an important step. After all, you can have the smartest technologies running on your network, but if they aren’t seeing the full picture then they can’t function 100% effectively and you’re still leaving yourself open to dangers.  

Automation – even with all this visibility, the sheer volume of devices now connecting to the network makes manual intervention to enforce any access policies practically impossible. Many IoT devices are operating around the clock and have the potential to “go bad” at any time – regardless of whether it is during work hours or not.

With AI you can develop policies that leverage context, such as the user role, device type, and location to make quick, accurate and automated decisions about how to react to anything out of the ordinary. That means that when an IoT device joins a network or starts to act suspiciously, it can be automatically quarantined (to borrow a topical word), keeping the rest of your corporate traffic separate and secure.

As we head deeper into 2021, security requirements might be getting more sophisticated, but so are the solutions available to meet them. We know hybrid working is coming, so why not take the time now to get your security prepared for everything this will mean.

By setting up comprehensive visibility as an essential foundation, and then building machine learning and artificial intelligence on top your business can stay one step ahead of, and reduce, the threat of the home-connected IoT device – and much more besides.

By John Madisson, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet

Organizations have distributed data and workloads across both cloud environments and on-premises data centers. As a result, IT teams have to deploy, manage, and secure increasingly complex and hybrid networks. And even though many organizations have moved many of their workloads into the cloud, the majority of them still operate hybrid environments. 

Hybrid environments allow organizations to keep important data on-premises. This allows them to maintain full control over sensitive assets, while also taking full advantage of the scalability and agility the cloud provides. However, as organizations become more hybrid and distributed, their security needs to be able to span across all environments.  

As applications, resources, devices, and workers work from anywhere, networks need to be able to adapt in real time. Workflows now often span physical data centers as well as multiple cloud environments; applications follow users regardless of where they are connecting from or what device they are using; and data and other resources need to be securely accessed by any user on any device in any location. Security needs to be able to adapt and scale to meet these new requirements.

Five Essential Security Functions to Hybrid Networks

To properly protect and defend these hybrid environments, organizations should look for security solutions that provide the following critical functions: 

1. Broad: Security solutions need to support a distributed security model where the exact same security solutions can be deployed in any environment. 
2. Integrated: All of the various security solutions deployed across the network need to be able to see and work together as a single system to detect threats and respond to them in a coordinated fashion, regardless of where they occur. 
3. Fast: These security functions need to operate not just at the speed of business, but at the speed of threats as well. 
4. Automated: Anomalous and malicious behaviors need automated responses. 
5. Security-driven Networking: Security-driven Networking weaves security and networking into a single, integrated system. This enables them to establish and enforce zero-trust access, dynamic network segmentation, and unified enforcement anywhere, on any device, in any location, without introducing security gaps or performance lags.

Success Requires Networking and Security to Function as a Single Solution

The majority of today’s security solutions are simply not fast enough, nor smart or responsive enough, don’t operate in enough places, and can’t adapt as quickly as today’s business requires. This is especially true in multi-vendor environments with disparate security solutions that don’t integrate when deployed. This lack of integration makes it impossible for organizations to securely use the flexible network environments they need to compete effectively. 

Instead, these organizations need a security platform, like the Fortinet Security Fabric, designed to span, adapt to, and protect today’s dynamic environments. If they can’t, their business will not be able to keep up. And that is critical in today’s digital business environment, where the difference between success and failure can be measured in microseconds.