Commvault on their plans and portfolios for GITEX 2021

Marco Fanizzi, Vice President and General Manager, Commvault EMEA, took the time to discuss their plans for the region, their ongoing partnership with Infinibyte and their ransomware protection portfolio.

How important is it for your company to participate at GITEX Global 2021, in terms of getting to network face-to-face with your customers and partners? 

GITEX is a big event for Commvault. It will be great to be there in person again this year – not only to underline our investment in the best solutions to support our local customers in the region, but also that we are investing in the best people.

We are making continued investment in markets across South East Europe, Middle East and African markets, not only with our own team, solutions and innovation, but also with our partners globally that work with us in this region, and our strategic partner ecosystem in every market.

All of these are the regions our newly appointed Regional Vice President Fady Richmany will lead are critical business opportunities for us to extend our partner network and support more customers and adding his expertise and experience to our team is a key part of our commitment and the next level of business growth we are driving.

Can you outline to our readers what products, solutions, or partnership agreements you’re announcing at GITEX Global 2021?

One of the best elements of GITEX is being able to spend time with these key strategic partners and customers in person, and I look forward to discussing the huge success we have had with our friends at StorIT Distribution, Infinibyte, Cell Information Technology, to name but a few.

At the show I will be spending a lot of time discussing customer engagement from major global enterprise to commercial and public sector with our Metallic SaaS offering. Our commitment to work with best in class partners to match our best in class offering is another reason for our success that I look forward to celebrating with Infinibyte and others. 

Our partnership allow us to offer advanced SaaS models able to deliver built-in protection against cyber-attacks through air-gapped and immutable copies of data, together with hardened security controls that prevent unauthorised access to backup data.

For both our private and public sector customers – locally and across EMEA – the biggest priority now is the recognition that moves made during the height of the pandemic to rapidly adjust to support a remote workforce – have left them more exposed to critical business risk – especially in the form of Ransomware

In your opinion, what are the key technologies that will fuel new innovations in 2022?

We saw many local projects that may have been planned for 18-24 months in the future brought forward and implemented in weeks as customers shifted to remote working support models and critical data management processes needing to be performed from off-prem locations.

This enforced acceleration, often driven by short term assessments of key workload and business process prioritisation has seen huge growth in multi-cloud environments to support multiple new SaaS based applications

Across all markets in EMEA we see these working practice changes now in place are unlikely to ever fully return to pre-pandemic ways.

As a result, IDC predicts that by 2023, 60% of data critical to business continuity will be generated by employees working remotely.

So, from that perspective the ability to securely move and use data in multi-cloud environments will become even more critical in 2022!

Therefore, in EMEA we see a huge increase in Ransomware attacks going beyond corporate IT systems and targeting the individual, often through the very SaaS-based applications rapidly deployed during the pandemic.

The message we are continually underlining to all of our customers is that any data stored on new SaaS platforms across multiple clouds needs to align with existing data backup and recovery SLAs within the organisations that have deployed them.

Our priority is to continue to deliver ransomware protection, across the increased variety of multi-cloud locations that a more remote workforce needs to operate. This is our customers’ biggest priority and through our trusted solution delivery partner ecosystem that is exactly what we are delivering to more and more organisations across the region!

We have seen this across markets such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey during this year as well as many success stories in UAE. Our customers tell the story across Government and Municipalities in UAE, as well as leading players in regional Telco, Finance, Government and Educations sectors including Meeza in Qatar, Saudi Telecom Company (STC) and Jeddah University in KSA, Garanti Bank and DenizBank in Turkey.

I’m looking forward to meeting as many of our partners, customers and prospects as possible at GITEX. I know it will be a great event to celebrate and expand the Commvault family!