In the complex world of hybrid cloud, ensuring data is protected, recoverable, and available is more critical than ever. We’re joined by Maryanne Baines, a leading authority in cloud technology with deep experience evaluating the various cloud providers and their tech stacks. She’s here to unpack the recent expansion of the Veeam and HPE alliance, a partnership aimed at simplifying data resilience. We’ll explore the tangible impacts of their new integrations, from image-level backups for virtual machines and unified private cloud offerings to dramatic improvements in data reduction and recovery speeds. We will also touch upon new joint services designed to help organizations assess and fortify their cybersecurity posture against modern threats.
The article highlights a new Veeam plugin for HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, expected in 2026. Can you detail the step-by-step process of how this plugin provides image-level backups and share a specific example of how this integration will better protect hybrid workloads for an enterprise customer?
Absolutely. The beauty of this plugin lies in its native integration, which is all about removing friction, just as Patrick Osborne from HPE noted. From a user’s perspective, the process becomes incredibly seamless. An IT administrator working within their familiar HPE Morpheus console won’t have to switch to a separate backup application. They can simply select the virtual machines they need to protect, and the Veeam backup options will be right there. The plugin performs a hypervisor-based, image-level backup. This means it takes a complete, application-consistent snapshot of the entire VM—the operating system, applications, and data—at the virtualization layer. This is a far more robust approach than just backing up files. For instance, a global logistics company could use this to protect the VMs running its critical supply chain management software. If a system fails, they aren’t just restoring data; they’re restoring the entire, functioning virtual machine to a specific point in time, ensuring operational continuity with minimal manual intervention.
You’re now offering HPE Private Cloud Business Edition with Veeam as a unified solution. Beyond a simple bundle, could you elaborate on the technical integration that simplifies the user experience? Please provide some expected metrics on how this accelerates deployment compared to a fragmented, do-it-yourself approach.
This is a significant step beyond just bundling software. The technical integration means this isn’t a “do-it-yourself” project for the customer. In a fragmented approach, an enterprise might spend weeks, or even months, validating compatibility, architecting the solution, and then deploying and testing it. With this unified offering, the entire stack is pre-engineered and validated. When you deploy the HPE Private Cloud Business Edition, Veeam is essentially a built-in feature, not an add-on. This dramatically simplifies the experience because backup and data portability policies can be managed from a single pane of glass. While specific metrics vary, we’re talking about shifting deployment timelines from weeks of complex integration work to potentially just a few days of configuration. The streamlined support is also a huge factor; there’s no finger-pointing between vendors. It’s one solution, with one number to call, which is a massive relief for any IT team under pressure.
With the new HPE StoreOnce Catalyst integration achieving up to 60:1 data reduction and NVMe support for Alletra speeding up recovery, what is the tangible impact? Could you break down how these improvements work together to lower TCO and walk through a typical near-instant recovery scenario?
These two improvements work in tandem to tackle both cost and speed, which is the holy grail of data management. The HPE StoreOnce Catalyst integration delivering up to a 60:1 data reduction ratio has a staggering impact on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Imagine having 60 terabytes of backup data; with this, you only need to purchase and manage storage for one terabyte. The savings on hardware, power, and physical data center space are immense. Then, you have the HPE Alletra Storage MP, which brings the raw speed of NVMe. When you pair that with Veeam’s new snapshot integrations, you create an incredibly powerful recovery engine. Let’s walk through a scenario: A developer accidentally deletes a critical production database. The business is losing money every second it’s down. Instead of a lengthy, traditional restore process, we can leverage an immutable Veeam backup stored on that Alletra array. We can perform a near-instant recovery, mounting the backup snapshot directly to the host. The database is back online and accessible in minutes, not hours, while the full data migration happens transparently in the background. That’s the difference between a minor incident and a major business disruption.
You’ve introduced new joint services, including a Disaster Recovery Capability Maturity Analysis. Could you describe the key stages a customer goes through during this analysis? Please share an anecdote where a similar assessment using the DRMM revealed a critical vulnerability a company was unaware of.
This service is about moving from hoping you’re resilient to knowing you are. The analysis, which leverages Veeam’s Data Resiliency Maturity Model, typically starts with a discovery phase. We sit down with key stakeholders across the business—from IT to application owners—to understand their current processes, tools, and recovery objectives. Next, we perform a gap analysis, benchmarking their current state against industry best practices defined in the model. This isn’t just a technical audit; it’s a holistic review of people, processes, and technology. I recall one assessment with a regional bank. They were confident in their DR plan and their immutable backups. However, our analysis revealed that the administrative credentials for their backup environment were tied to their primary domain controller. The look on the CIO’s face when we explained that a single ransomware attack that compromised their domain could have simultaneously encrypted their production data and their backups was a stark moment of realization. They had a single point of failure that could have been catastrophic. We immediately helped them architect a new security model with true credential segregation, closing a vulnerability they never knew they had.
Looking at the trend of removing “friction and risk from hybrid cloud,” as Patrick Osborne mentioned, what is your forecast for the evolution of data resilience over the next five years, especially as AI and containerized workloads become more mainstream?
My forecast is that we’ll see a fundamental shift from reactive data protection to proactive, intelligent data resilience. AI will be the engine driving this change. It won’t be enough to just back up data; AI-driven systems will actively monitor data patterns to predict potential ransomware attacks or hardware failures before they even happen, automatically creating immutable copies or failing over to a DR site. For containerized workloads, the concept of backing up a single server becomes obsolete. Resilience will be about protecting the entire application state—the persistent data, the configurations, and the service mesh—and enabling instant re-deployment of that entire application stack anywhere. The ultimate goal is to make data resilience an autonomous, self-healing function of the hybrid cloud, abstracting away the complexity so businesses can focus solely on innovation, confident that their data is always available and secure, no matter what happens.
