USPS signs data management contract worth up to $70M with Veritas Technologies

Data security is something few organizations can afford to overlook. With the average cost of a data breach reaching $4.35 million in 2022, leaving data exposed can have devastating consequences. Yet in the cloud, the only way to avoid this scenario is to invest extensively in data management capabilities. 

That’s why today, Veritas Technologies announced that the United States Postal Service (USPS) has awarded the vendor a three year contract to help strengthen its regulatory, data compliance posture and eDiscovery capabilities with Veritas Enterprise Vault, Merge1 and eDiscovery Platform.

The contract has the potential to be extended for as long as 7 years, giving the deal a maximum potential value of $70 million. 

USPS will use Veritas’ solutions to implement automated data archiving and retention across all on-premises and cloud-based data sources, including cloud collaboration tools. This will give the organization the ability to pinpoint the resiliency of data assets wherever they live in the environment. 

Data management as the answer to data security 

The deal comes as organizations continue to reconcile cloud computing and data security: Research shows that 90% of organizations struggle to enforce security policies around sensitive or critical data. 

Part of the reason for these poor controls is that organizations lack visibility over where data is located in the environment, and what risks it’s exposed to. Back in 2018, USPS experienced these challenges first hand when hackers used a vulnerability in its systems to harvest the data of more than 60 million customers. 

Now, with a significant investment in a unified data management tool, the USPS is positioning itself to mitigate threats against customer data with greater data resilience across the cloud, rather than relying on siloed data management tools. 

“It’s not uncommon for cloud administrators, application developers, data managers and security teams to implement their own data management solutions,” said Kevin Youngquist, VP for the U.S. public sector at Veritas.

“This siloed approach increases the total cost of ownership and creates data management, security and compliance challenges,” he said. “As complexity in the multicloud increases, so does the difficulty of ensuring data protection, opening the door for potential vulnerabilities including ransomware.” 

With Veritas Enterprise Vault, USPS will be able to reduce complexity by capturing and archiving data whether it’s located on-premises or in the cloud. 

For example, the solution can pull data from email and messaging platforms and automatically classify it based on predefined archiving policies, to file sensitive information in compliance with regulations such as the GDPR. 

On the other side of the coin, the Veritas eDiscovery platform enables compliance officers and legal staff to execute data breach investigations and respond to regulatory requests to identify key resolution files. This provides a framework for streamlining responses to regulatory inquiries where time is of the essence. 

The enterprise data management market 

Veritas Technologies tools fall under the category of data management solutions, which are designed to automate and streamline the discovery, capture and retention of critical data assets across cloud and on-premise environments. 

It’s a market that researchers valued at $89.34 billion in 2022 and estimate will grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.1% up to 2030. 

One of Veritas’ main competitors in the space is Tableau, an analytics provider with integrated data management and governance capabilities. This gives users the ability to manage the entire data lifecycle from ingestion to removal. Under parent company Salesforce, Tableau raised $1.95 billion in revenue in 2021. 

Another significant competitor is Oracle, which offers Enterprise Data Management Cloud. The tool can integrate data from disparate applications via REST APIs, providing a framework to implement permission-based access to apps and data, while developing an audit trail. 

Oracle recently announced Q2 total revenue of $12.3 billion. 

However, Youngquist argues that Veritas’ unified data management approach differentiates it from other competitors in the market. 

“Our unified approach to data management and protection continues to deliver unmatched resiliency, simplicity and cost-savings across any workload, any cloud and any storage,” said Youngquist. “So, when it comes to addressing today’s urgent requirements associated with managing and protecting cloud data, Veritas is leading the way.”

To date, Veritas Technologies has more than 80,000 customers, including up to 95% of the Fortune 100, and supports over 800 disparate data sources, 100-plus operating systems, 1,400-plus storage targets and 60-plus cloud platforms.