Every customer wants an AI strategy. Very quickly, that conversation turns to the data underneath it: Can we trust it, govern it, and recover it?

That question was the starting point for our latest Everpure Partner Fireside Chat. Hosted by Devika Garg, who leads product marketing for partners at Everpure, the session brought together Hope Galley, VP of Americas Partner Sales at Everpure, and Leerun Laizerovich, Global Partner CTO at Veeam. The chat centered on cyber resilience in the era of AI and how partners can discuss it with their customers.

From a backup conversation to a data conversation

A couple of years ago, cyber resilience was mostly a backup conversation: Do I have copies? Are they immutable? Can I restore? That’s still the foundation, but the conversation has moved up a level to the data itself. Where does it live? Who has access? Is it governed? And which regulatory and compliance requirements apply?

AI accelerates all of that. The moment a customer connects models and agents to their data, identity and access controls become critical, and those AI capabilities become production workloads in their own right. Customers now have to protect and recover the pipelines, models, and data feeding them, not just their traditional VMs and databases.

As Laizerovich put it, “Resilience, security, and governance of data now have to be one conversation.”

Attacks are fast. Recovery has to be faster

Right now, attackers have the edge. They adopt new tools without change controls, procurement cycles, or compliance reviews. AI is also helping them to create more effective phishing campaigns, find vulnerabilities faster, and move through an environment more quickly. Defenders will catch up, but customers shouldn’t plan on outrunning attackers anytime soon.

The better strategy is to slow the adversary down, shrink the exposed data footprint, lock down identities, keep immutable and isolated copies of data, and be able to prove you can recover cleanly. “If the attacker’s fast, our advantage has to be that recovery is faster and more certain,” said Laizerovich.

Galley said Everpure is seeing the same shift. The conversation is no longer only about preventing an attack. It’s about how quickly and how successfully customers can respond and restore their data afterward.

Data is the trust layer

Data is becoming the trust layer, and it’s landing in the boardroom because every question in cyber resilience, AI, and security comes back to the data. What is it? Who has access? What is it being used for? Is it governed? If you can’t answer those questions, you can’t trust your AI outputs, prove compliance, or be confident in what you recover after an incident.

Boards now see resilience as a business risk, not an IT line item, and they tend to ask three practical questions: Where is our data? Can we shrink our cyber risk footprint? How fast can we get the business back to a minimum viable state? Partners who can answer in business terms, Laizerovich said, get invited back to the table.

The AI stack is the new crown jewel, and parts of it are often left exposed. The assets customers forget are the newer ones: training and fine-tuning data sets, vector databases, embeddings, model artifacts, and the configuration that ties a pipeline together. Data scientists and app teams often stand these up quickly, outside existing backup policies and sometimes in cloud accounts that infrastructure teams don’t know about. Losing or poisoning a training set isn’t a quick restore. It can cost months of work.

The measure of resilience has changed too. Having a backup isn’t the metric anymore. The time between compromise and clean recovery is. Restoring data that’s already infected or tampered with can create a second outage, so Laizerovich’s question for every customer is: Can you trust what you recover, and how quickly can you prove it? That means scanning, validating, and testing recovery points before you need them.

Three conversations in every account

Partners should assume there are at least three conversations in every account. Resilience usually sits with infrastructure and CTO teams, around recovery times, platforms, and architecture. Security and data sit with the CISO and security teams, around threats, identity, governance, and compliance. AI sits with digital transformation and application teams, who are moving fast and want to know the data they’re using is safe.

Each group speaks a different language and measures success differently, so enablement can’t stop at product training for a single persona. Sellers and technical teams need to understand all three perspectives and connect them to the questions boards are asking. Galley put it simply: “No one goes to the market alone anymore.” Infrastructure teams ask whether they can recover. Security teams ask whether the recovered data is secure and whether it’s the right data. AI teams ask whether data pipelines are protected.

The partner who brings those groups together around one data conversation becomes a trusted advisor, “not just another vendor in the room,” Laizerovich said.

Everpure and Veeam: One story, not two products

Customers usually come in with three questions: What data and workloads are protected? Can coverage gaps be closed without manual work? And when an anomaly or vulnerability shows up, how fast can they find the affected workloads and confirm a good recovery point?

The joint answer centers on Everpure Fusion™. Everpure Fusion gives fleet-wide visibility and coordinates the storage side, while Veeam handles backup and recovery. With Pure1® anomaly context added, affected workloads show up in Veeam and risky restore points get flagged. Teams then have a clearer path to investigate and recover.

Laizerovich said the solution gives customers “a cohesive strategy around making sure we can pick up on anomalies, back up the critical points, and be able to restore.”

There’s a simple test for any joint solution. Can it tell the customer what’s protected across the whole fleet, not just for one use case? And how fast can they get to a restore point they trust when something looks wrong? If it can’t do both, it’s just two products sitting side by side.

Where the partner opportunity lives

Hardware resale margins and services margins are both shifting, but cyber resilience is, in Galley’s words, “one of the few services whose value keeps growing.”

The shift from CAPEX to OPEX points the same way. Customers want to consume resilience the way they consume cloud, and the joint solution can be delivered as a service that fits with Veeam subscription licensing. For partners, the job moves from a single transaction to an ongoing cycle of assessing, implementing, testing, and managing recovery.

“Recovery testing is the most valuable part,” said Laizerovich. “Every quarter, it proves the customer can get back up, and it keeps you in the account all the time.”

Everpure™ Evergreen//One™ fits the same shift. “No one’s asking, ‘Which box do I buy from?’” said Galley. Customers now ask how they can buy it the way they want to. With Evergreen//One, the outcome is written into the SLA and contract, so partners can sell once and keep growing as the customer grows.

From the partner Q&A

A few highlights from the live questions:

“I already sell Veeam and Everpure. What’s in it for me to bring them to a customer together?” Galley said customers shouldn’t have to look at backup and storage separately. Think of them as a joint solution that spans platforms, built around Everpure Fusion, with packaged solutions available and more in development. Laizerovich added that the practical starting point is a joint account discussion and discovery session, building on the shared solution story and field motion. Specific packaging, pricing, or incentives should be confirmed with local teams together.
“What are the biggest hurdles for partners building real solutions, and how do I choose the right tech partners to build with?” Galley pointed to budgets. They now come from security, AI, and infrastructure teams, and partners that have historically gone after one need to go after all three, so look for solutions that let you speak across those groups. Laizerovich’s test from earlier applies here: If a joint solution can’t show what’s protected across the fleet and how fast a customer can reach a trusted restore point, it’s just two products side by side.
“My customer is doing an AI project, a hypervisor switch, and a cyber recovery refresh all at once. Should I sell these as one project?” Laizerovich recommended selling one design, delivered in phases, because all three depend on the same data and on being able to protect and recover it. The worst outcome is migrating hypervisors first, then finding the recovery design doesn’t cover the new platform, so put resilience and recovery testing in place before the cutover. Veeam protects workloads across many hypervisors, so the protection design can stay consistent wherever workloads land. Galley agreed, adding that when the data is stable, these can become multimillion-dollar projects for partners.

Where to start

Laizerovich’s advice for partners who remember only one thing: Start with the data conversation, and approach it with the right personas. Work out who is in the room, whether it’s the CTO, security team, or AI team, and that will shape the resilience design and program you build together.

From there, set up a joint account discussion and discovery session with Everpure and Veeam, and make recovery testing part of what you offer.

As host Devika Garg closed the session: Don’t wait for the next resilience conversation to find you. Your customers are already asking these questions.