Veritas completes Vision Solution Day in the UAE

Veritas successfully completed its Vision Solution Day in the first week of February in Dubai, UAE. Close to 250 IT decision makers and influencers attended the event at Address SkyView. The focus of the Solution Day was to learn how Veritas enables organisations to harness the power of information and serve complex heterogeneous environments.

The focus of the Solution Day was to learn how Veritas enables organisations to harness the power of information and serve complex heterogeneous environments.

The welcome address and keynotes at the event were presented by executives from Veritas Technologies. These included Damian Wilk, Sales Leader; Mark Nutt, Senior Vice President; Deepak Mohan, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Data Protection and Compliance; Johnny Karam, Vice President, Emerging Markets; Ian Wood, Head of Business Practices EMEA; Rich Rose, Senior, Distinguished Architect.

The keynotes and presentations at the event were built around informing the delegates how to make cloud migration simple; using digital compliance to re-shape data management; boosting data resilience with an integrated protection strategy; addressing the challenges from business transformation and the growth of modern workloads; seeing data clearly to achieve business goals; how data protection is more than just backing up data. The knowledge and understanding of data is not just an insurance policy to ensure compliance, it is an investment in the competitiveness of a business.

During the presentations, Nutt emphasised that merely having the data inside an organisation is not sufficient to generate results. Businesses have to transform to be able to use the data. With the growing deluge of data, complexity increase the costs of performance. Mohan pointed out that, with all these challenges, IT is probably the hardest job today. IT end users should focus on the application dashboard and let the application manage the complexity. Karam also pointed out that, businesses cannot keep adding storage into the data growth problem. Automation is a critical part of solving the management of data.

Merely having the data inside an organisation is not sufficient to generate results. Businesses have to transform to be able to use the data.

Wood explained that the cost of enterprise downtime is highly prohibitive today. Veritas global surveys indicates that the cost of downtime can vary from $5,000 per minute to $1M per hour. This cost is generated from the loss of brand reputation, stemming from the loss of data availability, and the lack of testing over disaster recovery. The process of disaster recovery is so labour intensive that it is hardly every tested. Wood pointed out that it is easier to focus on testing application availability and data availability. The Veritas Net Backup platform has been built over the last 20 years and is able to manage 500 types of data sources.

Veritas global surveys indicates that the cost of downtime can vary from $5,000 per minute to $1M per hour.

The event was concluded with a panel discussion moderated by Ian Wood from Veritas. The participants of the panel discussion included Fayaz Ahamed Badubhai, Group IT Director, Al Yousuf Group; Shujah Ahmed, Executive Director, Dubai Holdings; Nitin Bharghava, CIO, Mashreq Bank; and Mahmoud Yassin, CISO, United Arab Bank.

The panel pointed out the challenges of managing people and culture, security, and legacy technology assets during the process of digital transformation. Managing technology is the easy part for IT executives, they felt.