No one wonders anymore whether it is important to protect a digital environment. Today, the question is rather how, and how quickly recovery is possible. Without data, webshops go offline and factories stop running. Veeam sees an important role for itself in the resilience of organizations.
Summarizing Veeam in one sentence is no challenge for Tim Pfaelzer: “We ensure our customers stay operational.” According to the SVP and General Manager EMEA, the modern economy revolves entirely around data. Not only webshops and cloud platforms, but also manufacturing companies, governments, and even vehicles function today on a continuous stream of data.
We meet Pfaelzer during Cybersec in Brussels and pick his brain about the growth of cyber threats, the impact of AI on data security, and how companies today should handle backup and cyber resilience.
Impact of data incidents is significant
Pfaelzer illustrates the importance of data with an example of a webshop that goes offline for one day. Customers not only lose access to the service, but often also their trust in the company itself. “Even if you are back online a day later, customers wonder if their data is still safe.” For manufacturing companies, the consequences are even greater, according to him. Veeam recently helped a German manufacturer where it used to take three weeks to fully recover production data. Thanks to a new approach, that was reduced to one day, saving millions of euros in lost production.
According to Pfaelzer, the perception of backup has completely changed in recent years. It is no longer a technical choice but has become a prerequisite for keeping a business running. “It used to be somewhere at the bottom of the supermarket shelf. Today, it is a top priority.” This shift is mainly due to the massive increase in cyberattacks and stricter regulations regarding data security.
Cyberattacks are evolving drastically
Over the past five years, Veeam has seen the cyber threat evolve sharply. When Pfaelzer started at the company, customers mainly wondered if they would ever be attacked. Today, according to him, it is mostly about the frequency of those attacks. “It is no longer a question of whether you will be attacked, but how many times a day someone tries to gain access to your data.”
He also notes that attackers are becoming increasingly professional. “Cybercriminals today work like companies.” The time between an initial breach and actual damage has shortened dramatically: from days to hours, and now even to minutes. This makes it much harder for organizations to respond in time. Furthermore, IT environments have become more complex. Data is no longer just in a local data center, but spread across public clouds, edge systems, and AI platforms.
European regulations
Pfaelzer does not see stricter European regulations as a brake on the market. On the contrary, they make the need for control more visible. GDPR, NIS2, DORA, and the EU Data Act force organizations to better understand where data is located, who can access it, and how quickly they can recover.
“If a customer doesn’t see their data as their most important business asset, you already have a problem,” says Pfaelzer. According to him, rules don’t necessarily make things easier, but they do provide clear boundaries. Veeam therefore integrates technology that analyzes metadata and provides insight into data flows, access rights, and usage. This allows customers to better demonstrate that they are in compliance with current obligations, according to Pfaelzer.
New AI risks
Unsurprisingly, AI also has an impact on companies and the role Veeam plays. According to Pfaelzer, AI creates huge opportunities, but also new security problems. He sees shadow AI in particular as a growing risk: employees copying company data to unapproved AI tools without the IT department’s oversight. “You can only control what you can control,” he says.
Organizations must invest in training, clear processes, and employee awareness. He compares it to phishing: there, too, the human factor often remains the weakest link. “You can have almost everything technically in order, but ultimately you also have to teach people how to handle data safely.”
“If you only have one backup, you’re relying on a single point”
Despite all technological evolutions, some principles remain unchanged according to Pfaelzer. One of these is the well-known “3-2-1” rule for backups: three copies of data, on two different locations, with at least one offline copy. According to him, companies still too often make the mistake of relying on a single environment. “If you only have one backup, you’re relying on a single point.”
Veeam therefore positions itself as an independent software vendor that does not want to lock customers into a single ecosystem. The platform supports various hardware partners, cloud environments, and hypervisors. Pfaelzer sees this flexibility as one of the company’s greatest assets. “Complete data freedom remains our most important differentiator.”
With AI, stricter regulations, and the continuous growth of data, he expects the importance of cyber resilience to only increase in the coming years. “Twenty years ago, companies wondered why they had to protect a virtualized environment. Today, no one asks that question anymore.”