By now, much of the industry has seen the big news about Cohesity acquiring the enterprise data protection business of Veritas Technologies. The transaction will see the company’s NetBackup technology—software, appliances and cloud (Alta Data Protection)—integrated into the Cohesity ecosystem.
But what about other Veritas products? As stated in the Cohesity and Veritas press releases, the “remaining assets of Veritas’ businesses will form a separate company, ‘DataCo.’ ‘DataCo’ will comprise Veritas’ InfoScale, Data Compliance, and Backup Exec businesses.”
Data Compliance includes Veritas Enterprise Vault (EV), which might raise concerns for EV customers. As a new, standalone entity, ‘DataCo’ has no innovation track record.
In this blog, I provide my opinion on the questionable future of Veritas archiving products, why EV customers should start looking at alternative archiving tools, and why you should trust Proofpoint as your next enterprise archiving solution.
EV architecture isn’t future-proof
EV gained a following because it came onto the market just when it was needed. With its big, robust on-premises architecture, EV was ideal to solve the challenges of bloated file and email servers. Companies had on-premises file and email servers that were getting bogged down with too much data. They needed a tool to offload legacy data to keep working and so they could be backed up in a reasonable amount of time.
However, with key applications having moved to the cloud over the last decade-plus, storage optimization is no longer a primary use case for data archiving customers.
While EV has adapted to e-discovery and compliance use cases, its underlying on-premises architecture has struggled to keep up. EV customers still have headaches with infrastructure (hardware and software) planning, budgeting and maintenance, and archive administration. What’s more, upgrades often require assistance from professional services and support costs are rising. And the list goes on.
Today, most cloud-native archives remove virtually all of these headaches. And just like you moved on from DVDs and Blu-ray discs to streaming video, it’s time to migrate from legacy on-premises archiving architectures, like EV, to cloud-native solutions.
Future investments are uncertain
When you look back over EV’s last 5-6 years, you might question what significant innovations Veritas has delivered for EV.
Yes, Veritas finally released supervision in the cloud. But that was a direct response to the EOL of AdvisorMail for EV.cloud many years ago.
Yes, Veritas added dozens of new data sources for EV. But that was achieved through the acquisition of Globanet—and their product Merge1—in 2020. (They still list Merge1 as an independent product on their website.)
Yes, they highlight how EV can store to “Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Storage, and other public cloud repositories” via storage tiering. But that just means that EV extends the physical storage layer of a legacy on-prem archiving architecture to the cloud—it doesn’t mean it runs a cloud-native archiving solution.
Yes, Veritas has cloud-based Alta Archiving. But that’s just a rebranding and repackaging of EV.cloud, which they retired more than two years ago. Plus, Alta Archiving and Enterprise Vault are separate products.
With the Cohesity data protection acquisition, EV customers have a right to question future investments in their product. Will EV revenue alone be able to sustain meaningful, future innovation in the absence of the NetBackup revenue “cash cow”? Will you cling to hope, only to be issued an EOL notice like Dell EMC SourceOne customers?
Now is the time to migrate from EV to a modern cloud-native archiving solution.
How Proofpoint can help
Here’s why you should trust Proofpoint for your enterprise archiving.
Commitment to product innovation and support
Year after year, Proofpoint continues to invest a double-digit percentage of revenue into all of our businesses, including Proofpoint Intelligent Compliance. I’ve seen innovations like Proofpoint Automate launched, which is helping our highly regulated customers take advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning to significantly reduce false positives from their review queues in Proofpoint Supervision.
But one of the best indicators of how our clients trust our vision and innovation is our stellar renewal rate of more than 90%.
As for support, we’re proud to have a high CSAT score of 94 (as of December 2023), based on surveys completed by customers and conducted by Proofpoint technical support. One energy client who migrated from EV to Proofpoint Archive said in a case study, “The Proofpoint team is responsive and wonderful to work with. Sometimes, they even pick up on an issue before we do. They also are very receptive to suggestions we may have, and they develop enhancements based on those suggestions.”
Financially backed service-level agreements (SLAs)
One thing you will likely not get from any legacy on-premises archiving vendor is an SLA on virtually anything related to product performance. From staffing to hardware and more, there are too many variables to consider that are outside the primary control of the vendor.
Lack of search performance SLAs tops the list. This is why we hear about some EV customers waiting hours or longer just to receive their search results.
Proofpoint Archive, on the other hand, returns search results within seconds, regardless of archive size or query complexity. We offer financially backed SLAs for archive search performance and archive hosted service availability. That means we provide credits to your subscription if we cannot meet the performance levels specified in our Hosted Services SLA document.
Modern cloud-native architecture
Because Proofpoint provides archiving-as-a-service with Proofpoint Archive, you no longer have to face the headaches mentioned above. We manage all the supporting cloud infrastructure—and all the upgrades. Your archive administration is significantly simplified, compared with the EV experience. That’s one of the first things I noticed when I saw the Proofpoint Archive admin dashboard for the first time (see below).
Your Archive subscription includes Premium support, which provides access to our Knowledge Base, case reporting and management, communities and more. You also get 24x7x365 live access to customer support engineers for critical (P1) issues. Those are just some of the benefits Proofpoint Archive provides that EV doesn’t.
A screenshot of the Proofpoint Archive admin dashboard.
Engage with us now
I sincerely empathize with EV customers. I evangelized EV for a big portion of my professional career. And I still have a few friends there who continue to fight for the life of EV. But I’m also a realist. With the Cohesity announcement, there’s a specter of product uncertainty. Now’s the time to engage Proofpoint.
With proven data extraction partners at our side and new technology that makes legacy data ingestion into Proofpoint Archive much more seamless, we can help improve your migration experience and reduce overall migration costs.
Contact your Proofpoint account manager to learn more.