Veeam Debuts Data Resiliency Maturity Model To Assess, Improve Customers’ Cyber Resiliency

‘The one thing which I hear all the time from [customers] is the cost of recovery using Veeam is a meaningful differentiator. And so as you engage with your customers with Veeam, as we do that together, the cost of recovery should be an absolutely critical part of your early conversations,’ Veeam CEO Anand Eswaran tells partners at the company’s VeeamON conference.

Data protection and resiliency technology developer Veeam Software Tuesday unveiled its Data Resilience Maturity Model aimed at helping large businesses assess just how resilient their IT infrastructure is against cyberattacks.

Veeam’s Data Resiliency Maturity Model, or DRMM, is also aimed at helping those businesses develop strategic actions to close the gap between their perception of their cybersecurity capabilities and the reality of how well they are actually prepared.

Veeam along with McKinsey surveyed businesses and found that 30 percent of CIOs view their organizations as above average in how resilient they are against cyberattacks, while finding that less than 10 percent are actually resilient.

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The Veeam DRMM research divided businesses into four categories of maturation:

  • At the basic level, companies had many areas where they could improve their resiliency. They are typically reactive when it comes to cyberattacks and rely on manual processes, leaving them highly exposed.
  • At the intermediate level, businesses have many areas in need of improvement but are already doing some things beyond basic “table stakes.” This gives them a more reliable yet still fragmented approach to cyber resiliency.
  • At the advanced level, businesses are more sophisticated and strategic in their approach to cyber resiliency but still lack automated and proactive practices and are missing a fully integrated approach.
  • At the best-in-class level, companies have opportunities to further differentiate themselves via next-generation capabilities including autonomous and AI-optimized processes.

The DRMM research found that 74 percent of organizations fall short of best practices and are at the basic or intermediate level of maturity. However, those at the best-in-class level tend to recover from outages seven times faster, experience three times less downtime and suffer four times less data loss than their peers.

Veeam CEO Anand Eswaran, speaking at VeeamON 2025 at the company’s channel partner kickoff meeting, said that DRMM is not just technology.

“It is helping [customers] understand where they are and helping them understand what the path is,” he said. “What does best-in-class resilience look like?”

DRMM is aimed at enterprises with complex requirements, Eswaran said. It is a part of the market where Veeam already has over 2,400 customers that spend more than $100,000 with Veeam, as well as several hundred million-dollar-plus customers, he said.

“And the key is that they are growing three times faster than the average growth rate of the business,” he said. “The one thing which I hear all the time from all of them is the cost of recovery using Veeam is a meaningful differentiator. And so as you engage with your customers with Veeam, as we do that together, the cost of recovery should be an absolutely critical part of your early conversations.”

DRMM provides a way to start those boardroom conversations, Eswaran said.

“Before we even launched it this week, we went through the process of many customer conversations with the C-suites and the boards and held a workshop on what DRMM is,” he said. “What does data resilience mean to you? What do you need for it? We have a 100 percent hit rate with all of these customers. In fact, with one of them, when we started talking about DRMM and the thought leadership Veeam is offering, we basically had that customer commit to a half-million-dollar board deal as a key part of immutability and everything else they need to do. And we are in conversations with other aspects of data resilience, which will make this one of the largest million-dollar customers we have.”

Christine Bentsen, vice president and head of global product marketing at Veeam, along with George Westerman, a senior lecturer and principal research scientist at MIT, discussed the process behind developing the Veeam DRMM model during a Monday night press conference.

The Veeam DRMM model was developed in conjunction with McKinsey, which worked with Veeam to interview and survey over 500 leaders in global enterprises to form the model, Bentsen said.

“We talked to them to understand what causes outages in the organization, what leads to a greater resilience posture and what is detrimental to your maturity posture,” Bentsen said. “And after that, Dr. Westerman gave us guidance on how to form a model along with McKinsey and then we had our technology partners help us form that lens as well.”

Westerman said the idea of integrating DRMM across IT silos has the potential of helping customers get beyond thinking only about data protection or recovery.

“What can we do to make better decisions early?” he said. “How can we help make governance decisions? And the other side of it [that comes into play is] the ‘Lake Wobegon’ problem, where everybody thinks they're above average. We’ve got people who are trying to do [cybersecurity] work, but the bosses think they’re better than they are. Now [partners] can go in and say, ‘Here’s where we really are,’ and it becomes a conversation to justify things that they might not be able to justify just by saying, ‘Hey, things are bad.’ This gets everybody on the same page.”

Chris Thorne, a Veeam support manager for a U.S.-based solution provider and Veeam channel partner he preferred to not name, told CRN that he is still waiting to hear more about DRMM.

“It seems like it might be a checklist of things to get a customer from a basic security model and resiliency model to an advanced resiliency model,” Thorne said. “Guidelines are fine, and we can use that to talk to customers in that conversation. Customers think they’re resilient, but in truth they’re not really resilient most of time because they don’t test.”

DRMM presents a new way of speaking with customers, said JJ Mullin, head of AT S.A.S., a Montevideo, Uruguay-based solution provider and Veeam channel partner.

“Veeam is building a culture around that name, but it’s a way of speaking that we can use to share the vision of Veeam around that concept,” Mullin told CRN. “I think it’s important to understand how Veeam is looking at the market, and we have to share that vision with them.”

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