In my conversations with IT and business leaders, I’ve seen a significant increase in interest in re-thinking data resilience. It’s always been important, but the Russia-Ukraine war put a magnifying glass on where data was stored and how fast it could be recovered. Since then, the growth of ransomware, the CrowdStrike breach, and other events have only added fuel the data resiliency fire. In fact, it was one of the top topics of discussion at RSA 2024, and I expect that to also be the case at the event later this year.
This has also been reflected in IT budget allocation. While most companies have kept IT budgets flat or seen a moderate increase, I consistently see more money allocated to security, ransomware recovery, and data resilience. Historically, these have fallen under the domain of an IT priority, those areas of spending are rapidly becoming a board-level issue.
I look at this partnership as a win-win-win. Microsoft gets a trusted partner with Veeam around which it can build a better data resiliency portfolio. For Veeam, protecting and recovering Microsoft workloads is what it does best. This partnership adds to the strong tailwinds the company currently has. Last year, it booted Dell as the top share player in backup and recovery, it has a great partnership with Salesforce, and now Microsoft sees it as such a strong partner, it invested in them.
The big winner, though, is customers. Microsoft software is used by almost every company, and being able to protect and recover data as needed brings a level of assurance to move forward with AI projects.
