A Software Bridge Between Applications and IT Infrastructure

"A software bridge between applications and IT infrastructure" summed up an approach Veritas championed for years: application teams should not have to think about which storage array, virtualisation layer or cloud their data sits on; protecting, retaining and seeing data should be managed in a software layer independent of the infrastructure. When this article was first published, that layer had a single address: Veritas. Today the same products live under two separate vendors, but the approach still holds.

Why a separate layer?

In a typical organisation, data lives at the same time on physical servers, in virtual machines on VMware, Hyper-V or Nutanix, in Kubernetes clusters, in AWS or Azure, and in SaaS services such as Microsoft 365. If each platform uses its own backup and retention tool, the result is different policies, different consoles, gaps in reporting and no answer to "who holds the backup of this system?" A single software layer defines the policy once and applies it to every workload regardless of where it runs. When the infrastructure changes — new storage, a move to the cloud, a new virtualisation platform — protection is not interrupted: the layer stays in place while the resources beneath it change.

The three jobs of the layer

• Protection: Backup, fast recovery, immutable copies and the ability to return to a clean point after ransomware. Today's products in this area are Cohesity NetBackup and Cohesity DataProtect.
• Retention and compliance: Archiving email, file and collaboration data according to retention policy, making it searchable for legal requests and disposing of what has expired. On-premises, Enterprise Vault Archiving and Enterprise Vault Classification; in the cloud, Arctera Unified Platform.
• Visibility: Which data sits where, who can access it, how old it is and whether the protection environment meets its targets. Enterprise Vault Data Insight answers these questions for file data and Cohesity Alta Analytics for the backup environment.

What changed after Veritas?

Veritas split in two in December 2024: the data protection business combined with Cohesity, and the NetBackup family continues as Cohesity NetBackup; the compliance and governance products became a separate company named Arctera. In 2026 Arctera reorganised by deployment model: on-premises archiving is offered under the Enterprise Vault brand and cloud-based services as Arctera Unified Platform. For existing deployments this means the products keep running, but the counterpart for licensing, support and roadmap has changed. Organisations approaching renewal should review their contracts and support channels against the new vendor structure.

Where to start

• Inventory your critical applications and write down the acceptable data loss (RPO) and downtime (RTO) for each.
• Set retention periods according to data protection law and sector regulations, and do not confuse backup with archive: backup is for recovery, archive is for retention and search.
• Keep at least one backup copy immutable or isolated from the network.
• Test recovery regularly; an untested backup is not a backup.
• Bring reporting into one place: a workload outside policy, a failed job or an unprotected system should be visible at first glance.

To assess your existing Veritas deployment against the new vendor structure, or to plan your backup and archiving layer together, get in touch with ATEON's specialists.