Veritas Alta brings enterprise backup management to cloud
Veritas Alta looks to bring the full suite of Veritas Technologies backup products into the cloud with SaaS purchasing options and a new suite of management tools.
The latest offering from Veritas Technologies will provide a web-based management console that includes purchasing capabilities for data backup services and products from the cloud.
Veritas Alta is a new web interface and purchasing front-end for Veritas products available in the cloud, whether sold per license or as a subscription. Alta will also soon include a console feature called Veritas Alta View for multi-cloud management, which provides an overview of data under Veritas supervision both on premises and in the cloud, according to Veritas spokespeople. Both Alta and Alta View will launch into limited availability later this year and general availability during the first quarter of 2023.
Veritas is one of the largest enterprise backup vendors competing with the likes of Commvault, IBM and Veeam, noted Johnny Yu, a research manager at IDC. Increasingly, enterprise customers prefer the Opex model of buying, offered by cloud hyperscalers like AWS, over the Capex model still in use by many traditional vendors with on-premises components like Veritas.
Backup the sky
Veritas Alta and forthcoming Alta View provides visibility into what data is under the vendor's protection. Through associated Veritas services, the console can automate protection and recovery of workloads as well as set backup and archiving policies agnostic of location and vendor.
Veritas Alta will play a key component in the company's multi-cloud protection ambitions and increased SaaS offerings, according to Tim Burlowski, senior director of product management at Veritas.
"The world is moving to as-a-service offerings," Burlowski said, calling Alta the first part of a larger product strategy for the vendor. "There's always a bit of ebb and flow in that area. In general, we're going to see more [products] as a service."
Additional features and capabilities available through Veritas Alta include analytic capabilities for reporting on potential vulnerabilities or misconfigurations.
Anyone who is spanning multiple clouds wants to have a common management space.
Steve McDowellVice president and principal analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy
SaaS offerings are new to the company, Yu said, as many products sold by Veritas, such as its flagship NetBackup, still primarily sell through a license model.
Subscription versions of Veritas' traditionally sold products, such as NetBackup, will become more in demand as enterprise customers seek out established vendors with mature software to protect multi-cloud workloads, according to Krista Macomber, an analyst at Evaluator Group.
"Veritas brings a robust capability set to the table when it comes to backup and recovery but also adjacent capabilities like IT analytics that add value and are becoming increasingly important to IT ops," Macomber said. "As usage of SaaS delivery for backup software evolves, this comprehensive capability set becomes important."
Who manages the managers?
The addition of a management console to a cloud service isn't a new practice. Hyperscalers have been providing web management tools and API interoperability to associated services for years.
What is new is the number of IT vendors now providing some version of their own management console, according to Steve McDowell, vice president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.
Enterprise users adopting cloud technologies, such as Kubernetes, are likely to try and take advantage of multiple clouds to combine differing technologies depending on the workload or the opportunity to shop around for the best contractual terms.
Viewing data in any cloud or edge location is an advantage, but no vendor-neutral service or management tool interoperable among cloud providers has emerged, McDowell said. VMware's vSphere provides an agnostic view of on-premises infrastructure, but no such product exists for multi-cloud customers.
"It validates multi-cloud is hard," McDowell said. "It creates a different kind of fragmentation. … Anyone who is spanning multiple clouds wants to have a common management space."
Tim McCarthy is a journalist living on the North Shore of Massachusetts. He covers cloud and data storage news.
