Veeam's big pivot on display at VeeamON 2026
Veeam Software Group GmbH used VeeamON 2026 in New York City this week to punctuate its shift from “the backup company” to a data and artificial intelligence trust platform for the agentic era. With a new architectural layer and an aggressive product roadmap, Chief Executive Anand Eswaran (pictured) and President of Products and Technology Rehan Jalil are betting […] The post Veeam’s big pivot on display at VeeamON 2026 appeared first on SiliconANGLE.
Key Takeaways
- With a new architectural layer and an aggressive product roadmap, Chief Executive Anand Eswaran (pictured) and President of Products and Technology Rehan Jalil are betting that the next decade of enterprise infrastructure will be defined less by how quickly you can restore a virtual machine or data set and more by how confidently you can let AI act on your data.
From backup vendor to trust layer For most of its 20-year history, Veeam has been synonymous with backups and fast recovery, to the point that "instant recovery" became part of the company's identity.
- In Eswaran's view, what has changed is not the importance of recovery but the nature of the threats and the actors who access enterprise data.
- Even more concerning, Veeam reports that 97% of those agents have excessive privileges, dramatically expanding the blast radius of a single compromised or misconfigured agent.
Eswaran argued that legacy security architectures implicitly assumed "the actor was human," and that assumption "just fundamentally broke instantly" when agents began accessing ERP, CRM, warehouses, email, files and SaaS systems in parallel.
- The solution is a unified data and AI trust layer that treats data, identities, access, regulatory posture and resilience as a single system.
"The infrastructure to deploy AI exists," Eswaran told attendees.
- By design, it spans both production and backup systems, enabling visibility into what AI agents can access, what they did and how to undo it with precision.
Stats & Key Facts
- #" That foundation now protects more than 550,000 customers in more than 150 countries, including 82 of the Fortune 500, and drives more than $2 billion in annual recurring revenue.
- #Veeam's research and telemetry indicate that autonomous AI agents already outnumber human employees by 82 to 1 on average, representing more than 250,000 non-human identities per organization.
- #Even more concerning, Veeam reports that 97% of those agents have excessive privileges, dramatically expanding the blast radius of a single compromised or misconfigured agent.
- #" The platform is the result of Veeam's December 2025 acquisition of Securiti, a leading data and AI security posture management vendor, combined with two decades of Veeam's recovery and data protection capabilities.
SiliconANGLE UPDATED 11:46 EDT / MAY 13 2026 AI Veeam's big pivot on display at VeeamON 2026 GUEST COLUMN by Zeus Kerravala SHARE Veeam Software Group GmbH used VeeamON 2026 in New York City this week to punctuate its shift from "the backup company" to a data and artificial intelligence trust platform for the agentic era. With a new architectural layer and an aggressive product roadmap, Chief Executive Anand Eswaran (pictured) and President of Products and Technology Rehan Jalil are betting that the next decade of enterprise infrastructure will be defined less by how quickly you can restore a virtual machine or data set and more by how confidently you can let AI act on your data. From backup vendor to trust layer For most of its 20-year history, Veeam has been synonymous with backups and fast recovery, to the point that "instant recovery" became part of the company's identity.
Eswaran reminded the VeeamON audience that Veeam earned its leadership by reducing customers' RTOs from hours to about two minutes and by building "the broadest workload coverage on the planet across virtual machines, physical, hybrid multicloud and SaaS. " That foundation now protects more than 550,000 customers in more than 150 countries, including 82 of the Fortune 500, and drives more than $2 billion in annual recurring revenue. In Eswaran's view, what has changed is not the importance of recovery but the nature of the threats and the actors who access enterprise data.
He framed Veeam's history as three eras: traditional backup and recovery ("assume restore"), cyber resilience ("assume breach"), and now the agentic era of AI ("assume autonomy"), in which nonhuman identities operate at a scale and speed that existing tools were never designed to govern. Defining the agentic AI problem At the core of Veeam's pivot is a view of how AI is deployed across large enterprises. Veeam's research and telemetry indicate that autonomous AI agents already outnumber human employees by 82 to 1 on average, representing more than 250,000 non-human identities per organization.
For more details please read the original article at SiliconANGLE AI.
Continue Learning
Comments
Sign in to join the conversation