One of the giants in archiving, Veritas has dominated the scene for decades. As with other companies, however, this has left them a slow-moving giant not flexible enough to easily match new developments in their field. And in addition to this, Veritas’ merger with Cohesity represents another challenge that their clients would do well to consider.
What does the merger with Cohesity mean?
After over 40 years in the industry, Veritas will now largely cease to exist. Cohesity has announced they will be acquiring a large portion of their data protection business. This will only include the NetBackup (SW and appliances) and ALTA SaaS Data Protection (Hubstor) products, with the remaining ex-Veritas portfolio (Enterprise Vault, eDiscovery, Analytics/Governance products) spun out into a new company that will be known as “DataCo.”
“The merger should ultimately be a win-win for our collective 10,000 customers and 3,000 partners,”
– Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen
While both companies have stated there will be no impact on current users, there is concern that we may see a repeat of the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, which saw the companies make similar assurances.
While this is most likely to impact users of NetBackup (since Cohesity’s products have significant overlap with it, making it most likely to be depreciated in some way), Veritas’ customers across all fields should consider carefully what potential effects this may have on the support and further development for their products.
Questions that remain unanswered as the merger goes forward remain, including:
- Will I lose my product as they merge tech stacks?
- What will happen to my account team?
- Whose customer support do I engage with?
- Will I need to change the partner or reseller I’m working with?
Should I consider leaving Enterprise Vault?
- Legacy Technology – Enterprise Vault came into being in 2006. Since then, not all portions of the technology have been refreshed equally. That legacy technology is coupled with third-party acquired products created in separate modules. As a natural consequence, the user experience is difficult and relies on navigating a variety of different modules, which may or may not cover all the electronic communications and data your organization generates.
- Lack of Real-Time Data Delivery – The archiving systems do not capture communications in real time, creating a gap between data being created and the archive securely storing a copy. This opens your organization up to potential risk.
- Limited Archive Access – Enterprise Vault only allows certain users to search and export and does not provide simple end user access to the archive. This places the burden on your IT department to manage any requests for access or file retrieval, ranging from mundane employee requests to legal requirements.
- Lack of Web Access – Enterprise Vault is not a web enabled system, meaning you can only access the archive from behind the corporate firewall. This places stark limitations on your ability to work with archived critical data.
- Separate Modules, Separate Login – Enterprise Vault forces you to log into separate modules piecemeal, with no ability to view all email, social, and mobile communication data from one location. This fragmentary nature has negative implications for your productivity and efficiency as it forces users to leapfrog between multiple independent systems to access archived data.
As a consequence of these issues, Enterprise Vault has long ceased to be a frontrunner in the archiving world; many of the lacking features and legacy elements represent either inefficiencies or outright risks for your organization. As such, it is recommended that you begin considering whether they remain a viable option for you long-term.
How can you best leave older data storage?
One of the factors that keep customers locked in with older data storage, archives and backups is the worry that any migration process will be costly and expose you to unnecessary risk beyond that of operating an older system.
When looking to leave a current system, you have to consider a number of different factors, including:
- What format is my data stored in, and is it compatible with the new system?
- Are my files going to lose anything in the process?
- Is the indexing going to transfer?
When enough of these concerns build, many organizations decide to not bother with the migration at all. This is a mistake, as it continues to expose you to operational risks associated with running an older, more and more out-of-date solution.
Migrating through contentGATE
TECH-ARROW represents an ideal option for companies looking to improve their current structure; our company can offer both services in migration using our powerful contentGATE migrator, as well as a modern and flexible archive and backup system in our unitary contentACCESS suite.
Our contentGATE migrator offers companies an easy and stress-free way to migrate their archived data while minimizing any risks of data loss. Leverage our decades of experience and take full advantage of our team to ensure your migration goes off smoothly.
If you are interested in the options we can give you, contact us – our team will be happy to go into detail about what possibilities we can provide and set up a demonstration or proof of concept.
Migrate safely with contentGATE
