Veeam Extends Data Protection to AI Data
As it logically should given that it’s a data protection vendor, AI is the biggest thing in IT, and data leakage is one of the biggest AI-related security risks.
Security analyst Richard Stiennon believes AI will eventually make AI security platforms obsolete. If he’s right, one of the companies affected will be Veeam, which is very much a platform provider.
Though not exactly a security platform provider. Veeam offers a “data resilience” platform designed to protect data left of boom and restore it when necessary right of boom. Augmenting the backup and recovery software Veeam’s still best known for with all the other capabilities entailed in that undertaking has been a long, patient process, according to Rick Vanover (pictured), Veeam’s vice president of product strategy.
“The Veeam of today is way different than what we would have had, say, two or two and a half years ago,” he says.
As it happens, that’s pretty much exactly when I first noticed that Veeam was starting to add security to its capabilities. Since then, the company has rolled out inline ransomware protection, added anti-malware functionality, and linked its software to over 60 third-party SIEM, SOAR, EDR, and other security solutions.
“Anything that the market is using, Veeam has an integration or an interoperability with,” Vanover says. Last April, meanwhile, the company acquired Coveware, an incident response vendor with proactive threat detection software as well.
“Our claim is that we have the most comprehensive end-to-end detection and response capabilities in the ransomware space,” says Vanover, pointing to the recently released v13 of the Veeam Data Platform as the latest proof.
That launch occurred about a month after Veeam signaled where it’s extending data resilience next by announcing an agreement to acquire Securiti AI, a data security posture management vendor with functionality in many of the emerging AI security categories we just reviewed.
Specifically, the company’s software includes functionality not only for data discovery and classification but for data privacy, governance, and real-time loss prevention too. Those are logical issues for a data protection vendor like Veeam to concern itself with now that AI is the biggest thing in IT and data leakage is one of the biggest AI-related security risks.
“If you think of AI as a brain and you can’t unteach it anything, it’s pretty imperative that you have an ability to understand what you put into it,” observes Shiva Pillay, Veeam’s Americas GM and senior vice president, quoting something Securiti AI CEO Rehan Jalil likes to say.
Which raises the question of whether or not we should include Veeam among the hundreds of AI security vendors in Stiennon’s database. The answer, as I hinted at the start of this week’s post, depends on how you define AI security. It also holds little interest for Pillay. Veeam remains now what it has long been, he says: a protector of data wherever it is and however it’s used.
“It’s not like a pivot in strategy,” he says of adding AI data protection to that mission. “The strategy’s been the same: we solve for our customers’ needs. Those needs have evolved.”
Happy New Year! Fully automated attacks are coming your way thanks to AI.
Speaking of AI and security, WatchGuard exec Corey Nachreiner predicts that a threat actor will use the former to compromise the latter on a fully automated, start-to-finish basis for the first time in 2026 during the latest episode of MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host.
“There’s going to be a breach where it’s a fully autonomous agentic AI that does the entire kill chain,” he says.
Listen to the whole interview for more sneak previews of what WatchGuard believes the new year holds in store for us in security.
