Digital Compliance: Veritas Builds Full Tech Stack, Goes All In

‘With the new normal in the workforce, no business can afford to not be concerned about digital compliance. It’s a $6-billion business now, and will grow to $10 billion in the next few years. This is very much front and center with what we are trying to do,’ says Ajay Bhatia, general manager Veritas’ digital compliance business.

Veritas, fresh on the heels of its acquisition last year of data collection technology Globanet, is positioning itself as the only company to offer a full stack of digital compliance capabilities to meet a growing need for compliance to meet the exploding growth of data.

The move to create a complete digital compliance capability, which includes data capture, archiving, and monitoring and supervision, comes as the industry faces an explosive growth in the need to better manage their digital assets, said Ajay Bhatia, general manager for Santa Clara, Calif.-based company’s digital compliance business.

“With the new normal in the workforce, no business can afford to not be concerned about digital compliance,” Bhatia told CRN. “It’s a $6-billion business now, and will grow to $10 billion in the next few years. This is very much front and center with what we are trying to do.”

[Related: Former Veritas CEO Bill Coleman Mourned As Software Visionary]

Veritas has a long history in the archiving side of digital compliance thanks its Veritas Enterprise Vault for automated data retention and email archiving, and is a pioneer in protecting and managing data, Bhatia said.

“We had a piece missing until the acquisition of Globanet six months ago,” he said. “We had no front end. We had archiving and discovery. But no capture. Acquiring Globanet gave us the leading capture technology. Capture is about intelligent capture. We pair it with data insight to provide visibility and add metadata to use for policies related to data capture.”

Veritas took time to develop its data capture strategy as it continued to focus on the archiving side, including developing Enterprise Vault for on-prem archiving and EV.cloud for cloud-based archiving, Bhatia said. The company recently moved to make sure both versions have full feature parity, he said.

“Our bread and butter is in archiving,” he said. “Two-thirds of my digital compliance business is that, with the rest from discovery solutions. We are the only end-to-end player offering native content capture, data visibility, flexible archiving across any deployment, and leading-edge supervision and discovery to monitor and act on data. ... Data capture in the past was a small part of our business. But now with the COVID-19 pandemic and work from home, the need to do data capture is exploding.”

With Globanet now integrated into Veritas, Veritas is in a position to tell clients they can standardize their entire digital compliance with a single vendor, Bhatia said.

“We’re the one-stop company that can do capture, archive, and monitoring,” he said. “Other companies can do one or two of those. But only Veritas can offer a complete solution. And we’re the only company offering a unique stack of infrastructure, data protection, and digital compliance.”

Veritas, which had partnered with Globanet before the acquisition, decided to acquire it rather than give customers the chance to use best of breed products from multiple vendors, Bhatia said.

“Customers such as banks and financial institutions find it easier to work with a single global provider,” he said. “With Globanet, we have the leading capture solution.”

Bringing the entire data compliance stack under one vendor was a good move for Veritas, said Tom Lounsbury, director of business development at Bluesource, a Grapevine, Texas-based solution provider with a focus on data governance at customers ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises.

Lounsbury told CRN that Veritas and Globanet have partnered before, and that his company worked with both vendors.

“But now it’s a more seamless experience for customers,” he said. “It’s now easier to manage, especially with Veritas’ e-discovery platform it got with the acquisition of Clearwell. Veritas can collect the data with Merge1 on Enterprise Vault, and merge it into EDP (Veritas eDiscovery Platform). EDP can also now collect data from a variety of sources in a single motion.”

Data collection is a never-ending battle in that new sources of data needing to meet compliance requirements are constantly appearing, Lounsbury said.

“Globanet has historically been very quick to make new connections and do a good job of supporting them,” he said. “The only issue comes when a source changes something but doesn’t announce it so third-party vendors like Veritas don’t know about it right away.”

The IT industry is at a time when organizations are either being forced to deal with GDPR or other compliance issues, or are moving to understand what those issues mean to them, said Clayton Heuckendorf, senior architect at Insight Enterprises, a Tempe, Ariz.-based solution provider and long-time Veritas channel partner.

“Veritas provides for those being forced to move, and for those who are trying to figure out what they need to do,” Heuckendorf told CRN. “It provides the bridge for both sides.”

Businesses know they need to abide by regulations such as PCI and HIPAA, and that they need to do more to ensure compliance, Heuckendorf said.

“Veritas brings a solution set to companies who have not yet figured out what they need, and to those who are dipping their toes in matters related to governance,” he said.

The difference between Veritas and its peers is that Veritas looks at what its technologies can do holistically, Heuckendorf said.

“Look at Globanet, NetBackup, Enterprise Vault, Aptare [analytics], and Veritas Insight Manager,” he said. “Veritas has an end-to-end solution with file, governance, and availability. That’s the bundle that Veritas brings to the table that other companies don’t.”

For the rest of 2021, now that Veritas has shown it has a full digital compliance stack, it will be focusing on rapid delivery, Bhatia said.

“We will have no silos, and no technical debt,” he said. “There will be product parity between the on-prem and SaaS versions of the technology.”

Veritas this year will also be focused on integrating the Merge1 email archiving software it received with Globanet into the rest of its portfolio and on increasing its SaaS capabilities via its recent acquisition of HubStor, a unified SaaS backup and archiving technology, Bhatia said.

“We want to standardize on Veritas for all content,” he said. “We currently have over 100 connectors to different content, which gives us momentum as customers look to do more with Merge1 and Enterprise Vault.”

Veritas will also provide metadata enrichment for its applications, Bhatia said. “We already have the world’s best recognition engine with 900 patterns,” he said. “We want to enrich content in place without the need to move it to another repository.”

The year 2021 is still early, Bhatia said.

“But we are starting to win,” he said. “Everything is about upselling to the cloud. We have a strong customer base, a ‘Who’s Who’ list of customers in backup, archiving, monitoring, and scaling, all under a unified portfolio.”