In today’s complicated landscape for information technology, having a cross-platform solution that can perform critical data protection and recovery functions for enterprise data centers and hybrid clouds is a valuable tool. Veritas Technologies LLC’s NetBackup solution provides that support for the enterprise, and the product recently played an important role in an Amazon Web Services Inc. solution for a major Chinese company.

China International Marine Containers (Group) Ltd. is one of the world’s leading suppliers of energy and logistics equipment. The company wanted to migrate its business applications to the cloud and needed a backup and recovery solution for both cloud and on-premises, as required by Chinese law. Veritas teamed up with AWS to provide the solution.

“You’ve got critical data in the cloud, critical data on-premises, and they’re looking at one data protection solution for both,” said Harish Venkat (pictured), vice president of global sales enablement and marketing at Veritas. “It’s the partnership with AWS that really helped solve this problem. This is where Veritas NetBackup really comes in.”

Venkat spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed trends that Venkat has seen in the evolution of hybrid cloud and the growing importance of data protection at the edge. (* Disclosure below.)

No cloud-to-cloud movement yet

The solution for CIMC was an example of moving critical data from an on-premises operation into the cloud while providing data protection. Although the current enterprise approach favors a hybrid solution, which relies on cloud computing and on-prem operations in one IT model, any movement toward cloud-to-cloud migration has yet to materialize, according to Venkat.

“There are talks about whether we’re going to see cloud-to-cloud movement, cloud-to-cloud disaster recovery,” Venkat said. “I am not seeing that at all. The economics of cloud-to-cloud movement and failover are just too expensive.”

One trend Venkat is seeing involves the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning to an increasingly diverse ecosystem of data sets. In October, Veritas announced a partnership with Pure Storage Inc. to bring workloads together from different sources and facilitate the easier application of AI and machine learning in a variety of environments.

This will also become important as more data is gathered at the edge. “Veritas has the solution to sift through all of that data, figure out which is important, classify that, and then help provide data protection for edge computing,” Venkat said. “We’re able to do data protection with internet of things.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Veritas Technologies LLC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Veritas Technologies nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE