George Axberg VP Data Protection Division, Vast Data

VAST Data, Inc. has appointed George R. Axberg III to lead the company’s data protection strategy with its global customers.

This appointment comes on the heels of firm’s recent ransomware protection updateshttps://bit.ly/3GdFXaI to Universal Storage, and further supports the company’s efforts in providing customers with expertise and technology solutions to meet today’s new data protection requirements.

“Universal Storage is globally known for delivering all-flash performance at disk-based economics, and now with its new ransomware features, businesses can take full advantage of a highly performant and hardened enterprise platform that they can trust,” said president Michael Wing. “George is a long-time industry leader who has played a pivotal role in helping customers choose the right solution to support their data protection strategy. His expertise and leadership at VAST will help drive the next major inflection point in data protection applications: the move from disk to all-flash architectures.”

Universal Storage combines levels of storage efficiency with all-flash technology, providing ransomware protection capabilities and fast backups and also powerful restore performance that lets system operators minimize user impact at a cost that is comparable to hard-drive-based backup appliances. Customers can now deploy Universal Storage to restore and recover thousands of VMs in minutes, not hours.

Additionally, on top of the data compression options offered through VAST’s backup partners, Universal Storage can deliver additional efficiencies and cost savings through its similarity-based data reduction algorithms that allow customers to further reduce data, thus increasing available storage capacity with all-flash performance.

“Data loss for any period of time is the worst thing that can happen to a business because it undermines customer trust. In the unlikely event of unplanned downtime, VAST Data’s all-flash storage architecture can help companies recover data up to 50 times faster than HDD-based systems,” said Axberg. “This is the biggest thing to happen to backup targets since they moved from tape to disk 20 years ago. Universal Storage is the architecture of the future because it delivers the performance, scalability, security and cost advantages that legacy storage just can’t match.”

Prior to joining, Axberg spent 16 years at Dell EMC where he led the company’s sales strategy for data protection, availability, backup and recovery.

Ransomware Increases Need for Data Protection
As businesses become increasingly digital, they become more vulnerable to cyberattacks, including ransomware which alone cost US businesses more than $2 million to remediate. Recently introduced VASTOS version 4 features indestructible snapshots that provide customers with an additional layer of ransomware protection. It also provides policy-based data isolation in multi-tenant environments which restricts data access along hardware and network boundaries.

“Cybersecurity is top of mind for every CIO on the planet,” continued Axberg. “VAST Data is setting the de facto standard for companies operating in the digital universe, delivering critical cybersecurity safeguards for all of their critical data sets. With Universal Storage, we truly are addressing a universal need for today’s enterprises.“