Veeam has acquired Coveware to expand and strengthen its ransomware recovery tools. Coveware adds cyber-extortion incident response services, including forensic and remediation capabilities, to the existing Veeam Data Platform. It will also be available as a set of proactive services to Veeam Data Secure customers.
Bill Siegel, CEO and co-founder at Coveware by Veeam said, “Recovering from cyber incidents is extremely difficult. Our goal is to minimize the cost of disruption by providing best-in-class incident response tools and services.
“The threat intelligence gathered from our incident response work also benefits our proactive large enterprise clients – 41% of which are in the Fortune 500 – reduce their risk and increase their resiliency.”
Coveware to continue as a standalone product
Interestingly, Veeam has taken the decision to allow Coveware to continue being sold separately under the Coveware by Veeam banner. It is also making no changes to how the product operates.
The company was quick to say, “Coveware by Veeam will continue to operate as it does today, providing incident response services to victims of cyber extortion attacks as well as working proactively with enterprise customers on incident response preparedness.”
What does Veeam get out of this?
There are several things that it gains from this deal.
- It gets a highly respected and fully-featured cyber extortion recovery tool that also comes with services it can leverage. These include rapid forensic triage, extortion negotiation and remediation, cryptocurrency settlements and decryption services.
- It gains from the data that Coveware has built up on threat actors. It will be able to use that to enhance its own data set
- That data can then be packaged and sold to customers as part of a threat intelligence offering.
- It will incorporate elements of Coveware into the Veeam Data Platform and Veeam Cyber Secure Program.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
This is a clever acquisition by Veeam. It immediately gains from the deal in terms of products, services, and revenue. Coveware offers various forensic and other services that will appeal to Veeam’s customer base of more than 450,000. It will be interesting to see if it charges a premium for the new solutions with the Coveware software and tools.
It will also provide Coveware with good cross-selling opportunities. Its customers may opt to replace their existing backup solution with Veeam due to the integration of Veeam and Software.
It will also be interesting to see if it impacts the existing $5 million warranty that Veeam offers. Will it increase that warranty for those customers who also use Coveware? Does it see Coveware as part of its warranty scheme, where it can use Coveware’s experienced negotiators to lower any ransom demands?
