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Data is critical. This was the stark message from Anthony Spiteri, Senior Global Technologist at Veeam, during an interview where he reflected on the impact of 2020 and looked to a future shaped by rapid digital transformation.

Founded in 2006, Veeam is a company at the forefront of backup, disaster recovery, and intelligent data management solutions for virtual, physical, and multi-cloud environments. Spiteri explained: "We first started shipping the core backup product in 2008, but before that we were actually founded on the back of a free utility for vSphere called Fast SCP." This tool allowed for simple file transfers between virtual servers—just the beginning for a company that would go on to develop a comprehensive data protection platform.

"Effectively, you know what we've done is we've now built a whole platform around data protection which covers pretty much every sort of backup platform that you can think about," Spiteri said, adding that Veeam's solutions now span virtual, cloud, software as a service, and physical systems. "We're about to ship our version 11 of backup replication so it's become a very solid foundation for a lot of our customers out there in terms of protecting their data."

With data now central to the digital economy, developments in payment technologies have accelerated, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Contactless payments, for instance, have moved from convenience to necessity, a trend Spiteri saw first-hand in Shanghai: "They're leading the way in terms of contactless. I couldn't even use my credit card, I couldn't use cash there… it was all based on the WeChat platform."

The pandemic, he explained, has "really accelerated the whole notion of contactless," even in regions previously slow to adopt such technologies. "In Australia and New Zealand, we've been doing pay pass and contactless really well for a number of years, but in places like the US people were only just starting to get the pay pass technology in. The pandemic accelerated the growth of contactless."

Spiteri underscored the seriousness of these changes: "Every time a transaction is completed, there is a data transaction happening… data was always deemed to be critical, but now when we're doing these payments in real time contactless, the actual severity of what could happen if there is a data breach is just magnified."

This focus on data extends to digital identification technologies, which are spreading rapidly in some parts of the world but facing privacy hurdles elsewhere. "Australia and New Zealand like our liberties, we like our freedoms," he said. "But we also understand… we need to give a little to be able to get back a little, to get a quality of life." Spiteri pointed out that while some regions have digital ID systems imposed by government, in Australia and New Zealand adoption is more culturally accepted but remains the subject of debate. "Even this weekend in WA where I am in Perth, we launched the Safe WA app… some people are probably not 100 percent okay with that. There's still the doubters… that want to protect their data and are very appropriate on that," he added. "But I see it as just a way of life moving forward."

Despite ongoing debates about privacy and acceptance, Spiteri was clear about the growing need for robust data protection, especially as more interactions shift online. "When we're transacting online… we're handing over our key identity, transaction information," he explained. "Not only does that information become super critical from the point of view of what we're doing in terms of the transaction, but on the flip side we want to be ensured that that data is actually being protected."

Here, he said, Veeam's mission comes into focus: "There is a certain criticality of data now, and at every level there needs to be a thought about how is my data being backed up, do I own my data, what happens if I don't get it. Certainly, in the next three to four years, I think consumers will catch up and understand that it is something that's more everyday, but on the flip side we need companies to ensure that because it is so critical now, it needs to be backed up."

Looking to the future, Spiteri described 2020 as a "watershed year for technology", noting: "We wouldn't have been successful this year without the technology that we had in play. If we think about if this was five years ago we might not have been doing this, even what we're doing today right in an interview." The move towards digital platforms has, as he put it, been "pulled kicking and screaming into 2021".

Even at the most basic levels of trade, he observed, the impact of digitisation is visible. "Just going down to local food trucks that we've got here, no one's really accepting cash, everyone's advertising digitally, they've got their EFTPOS machines. So even at that level, there's a sense of a digital platform being applied to this basic trade of food."

With these shifts, however, comes increased risk. Spiteri warned of the rise in cyberattacks: "What we've seen this year is a serious increase in cybersecurity attacks, ransomware. The sophistication of those attacks has increased, and also the targets." He cited the example of Garmin, which suffered a crippling ransomware attack that shut down operations for a week. "It wasn't just about the devices, it was about their GPS data that they use for pilots—so to think that a company could be offline because they were so digitised… that this cyber threat meant that they had to protect everything. At the end of the day, they paid the ransom which wasn't great, but they needed to weigh up the opposition to that, which was basically their business going down and not being a functional moving forward."

Ultimately, Spiteri outlined both the promise and peril of the digital era: "Digital platforms are great, but what happens to that data? Data is actually more like uranium when you think about it—extremely valuable, extremely dangerous to hold and transfer, but obviously if it falls into the wrong hands as well it becomes super, super dangerous." That is why, he insisted, the protection of data "needs to be thought about end to end."

He concluded: "As companies move to digital platforms we need to understand how we protect the data and then how we can recover and use that data afterwards for good, not just in the case of a disaster."