Veritas has announced its cloud-based Alta data protection and security software and Alta View dashboard to review and manage data in the public cloud, datacenters, and edge sites.
Alta “combines our entire cloud services and solutions portfolio” to create a cloud data management platform enabling customers to protect their application data in the public clouds”, says Veritas. They can use the Alta View dashboard to view and manage their data wherever it lies.
Veritas CEO Greg Hughes said: “Veritas Alta advances our mission to empower customers to own and control their data no matter where it resides – on-prem or in the cloud – while reducing the operational complexity and costs associated with managing multi-cloud environments.”
Taken literally, this applies to all of a customer’s data but that might be questionable. We think it is to do with data that Veritas can see and it’s directed at protecting public cloud data. We asked Veritas to clarify this.
Christophe Bertrand, Veritas Enterprise Strategy Group practice director, said: “Organizations are often confused about their data protection SLAs when they move their data and/or applications to the cloud, and may think that their responsibility to ensure the protection of these digital assets is somehow mitigated or just the vendor’s responsibility.
“The reality is much different: the data is in fact always the organization’s responsibility. In a multi-cloud environment, which is becoming the norm, this data protection disconnect can easily become exacerbated, in particular when organizations use many different and poorly orchestrated data protection and data management mechanisms. Limiting the number of standalone, bolt-on solutions is much needed, which is the challenge that Veritas is taking on with its Alta unified management platform.”
Druva? Clumio? OwnBackup? Nope, no need. The idea is to extend Veritas’s data protection and security scope to the public cloud, so persuading Veritas customers there is no need to buy other suppliers’ products to do this. Cloud-native Alta creates “the most comprehensive cloud data management platform built for any environment … Alta application resiliency solutions support all major cloud infrastructures, whether virtual, containerized, or bare metal,” claimed Veritas.
Alta functionality includes:
- Data protection and ransomware resiliency
- Five nines application availability
- Application portability across clouds
- Optimizing storage capacity usage
- Increasing storage IO performance
- Data compliance-as-a-Service to capture data from all communication platforms and automate content classification
Portfolio simplification
Our understanding is that Alta represents a bundling and integration of existing Veritas cloud-based products such as:
- Enterprise Vault to capture and archive high-risk data across all communication platforms
- Enterprise Vault.cloud SaaS archiving, eDiscovery and Supervision platform
- Merge1 to capture and archive high-risk data across all communication platforms
- Advanced eDiscovery
- Veritas Advanced Supervision – compliance framework for capturing content in regulated communications through Merge1 integration
The data protection capability is, we understand, NetBackup 10 and its Cloud Scale technology. Agaim, we have asked Veritas to confirm this.
Alta View
Veritas said the Alta View management console “provides a unified view and control of the entire data estate – across edge, datacenter, and cloud – from a single pane of glass.” If we take that literally, the “entire data estate” then includes data in every conceivable digital location; databases, data warehouses, data lakes, mainframes, IBM Power servers, SaaS applications, backup repositories, archives, etc. We have asked Veritas for the detailed scope.
Alta View is a cloud-based management console which uses a Veritas analytics engine, with AI and machine learning capabilities, to provide autonomous data management actions, lessening the need for manual activities. It looks to be a nicely powerful window through which to view and manage the data using the Alta products.
Customers can use Alta with on-premises, IaaS, hybrid, virtual, and SaaS consumption models. Veritas has a stack of downloadable PDF documents describing aspects of Alta, and you can start with a Solution Overview.
