Veeam confirms it is buying Securiti, the cybersecurity startup founded by serial entrepreneur Rehan Jalil, with a $1.725 billion price tag.
The Veeam-Securiti combo will provide classic data protection, modern cyber-resilience, and knowledge graph-based data security posture management (DSPM) that covers both primary and secondary data, the full data estate as they put it. The primary aspect refers to structured and unstructured data used in production systems and applications running in on-premises datacenters, public clouds, and SaaS environments. The secondary data means classic backup vaults. DSPM includes privacy, governance, and compliance.
Veeam CEO Anand Eswaran said: “We’ve entered a new era for data. It’s no longer about just protecting data from cyber threats and unforeseen disasters; it’s also about identifying all your data, ensuring it’s governed and trusted to power AI transparently… We bring those capabilities together in a single solution to help customers understand, secure, recover, and rollback, and unleash their data to drive new business value.”
Securiti CEO Rehan Jalil added his view: “Securiti AI solves one of the most urgent challenges facing every organization today – how to enable the safe use of data and AI. In the AI era, security will need to be data-centric, as there would be no AI security without data security.”
Securiti and its technology will be integrated with Veeam. Jalil will join Veeam as President of Security and AI.
A Veeam-Securiti AI customer will be able to identify and classify all the data used across their organization, protect it against loss and corruption, and manage and monitor accesses to that data. Eswaran told us: “When models drift, when models get poisoned, the ability to roll them back again, surgically immutably, is super critical.”
They can use a single data control plane, the Data Command Center, covering separate data stores or silos for apps, clouds, SaaS, endpoints, and backups. There is also Securiti’s Gencore module which provides AI search capabilities with integrated permissioning and identity-based access controls.
Eswaran talked about Securiti’s Data Breach Analysis technology, “which is the ability to basically… run Data Breach on a breach which happened in a customer. They can pinpoint exactly what happened and they can actually have automated capabilities to act on it. A simple example could be [that] they can tell you four users in Frankfurt got compromised. Their social security numbers got compromised. These are the privacy compliance laws in Germany and this is the automated set of actions which need to be done to stay compliant beyond everything else… We will come in then to actually go through the recovery process of the data.”
Veeam and Securiti will provide strong competition to other cyber-resilience and DSPM suppliers such as Rubrik and Cohesity. Securiti gets access to Veeam’s enormous channel, while Veeam gets access to Securiti’s enterprise selling skills.
The two companies have arrived at data management from a different direction than suppliers such as Datadobi, Hammerspace and Komprise, and also at AI data pipeline feeding, separately from storage system suppliers such as Dell, DDN, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, NetApp, Pure Storage and VAST Data, not to forget CTERA and Nasuni. Veeam+Securiti, with hundreds of Securiti data source connectors, can potentially lay claim to having the single largest data estate coverage in the industry for sourcing AI data pipelines.
One other aspect of this acquisition is the role of knowledge graph technology inside Securiti AI, which it uses to store and manage relationships between data items and accessing entities. B&F has written about knowledge graph technology in the context of providing structured data information to AI models, and looked at Illumex, Graphwise, and Neo4j.
Until now, knowledge graph has been seen as a niche technology slowly making its way towards possible mainstream adoption. Veeam’s Securiti AI acquisition brings the technology into the heart of the market-leading cyber resilience company’s offering, promoting its relevance hugely. Jalil said Securiti looked at existing knowledge graph technology but decided it had to write its own, because of the scale involved in covering millions, indeed billions, of data objects.
Jalil told us: “The most important thing around data is about intelligence. And the key thing there is relationships… We actually automatically figure out what files you have, what’s inside the file, what is sensitive, and then structured data; what tables and columns and schemas that you have and what is sensitive inside it. But the important part is actually not the flat list. It’s about relationship. It’s a social network of data”
An example: “If an AI model is in a company, we detect it automatically, which is important because, if you don’t know what AI is active in your company, you cannot do anything about it… First we detect it, and then we also figure out which data it can potentially touch.” Then you “just click on it [to see] this user or AI agent can access 26 data systems. By the way, they’re mixed, structured, unstructured and streamed data. It can see what is inside it, what files are inside it… What structured data systems they can see is right here or which streaming topics in a Kafka [it] can see… The point being that in our unified way you have overall intelligence in a knowledge graph which is unique. No other company, when we combine together, will have this depth of understanding.”
The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter and is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. Veeam will continue to offer Securiti AI’s Data Command Center alongside its existing product family and will announce new integrated capabilities very soon.
Bootnote
Jalil began his career at Sun Microsystems, where he contributed to early multicore processor technology. He was founder and CEO of mobile packet core technology startup WiChorus, which Tellabs acquired for $180 million in 2009. He then founded Elastica, which merged with Blue Coat for $280 million. Symantec later acquired the joint company for $4.7 billion and Jalil ran the cloud security business at Symantec. He left and founded Securiti at the end of 2018. Now that company is being bought for $1.7 billion. It’s the startup founder’s dream.
