Veeam Software saw "double-digit growth" in its South African business in 2018.

This is according to Kate Mollett, regional manager for Africa, commenting on the global full year results, which saw the company report total bookings of $963 million, a 16% growth year-over-year.

Founded in 2006, Veeam develops backup, disaster recovery and virtualisation management software. It focuses on products that increase the resistance of virtualised workloads, reduce downtime and ensure the system availability required by service-level agreements.

Mollett says the local arm of the business had a solid 2018, and the growth rate can be attributed to new customers across all sectors.

"This growth builds a solid platform for 2019. Veeam sees tremendous opportunity in Africa and is looking to the continent as a significant growth engine for the business.

"The public sector requires solutions that are easy to manage, can run remotely and deliver what they promise. In addition, the adoption of Microsoft Office 365 in this sector is exciting and a great use case for Veeam in terms of being able to backup and protect Exchange, Sharepoint and One Drive in a secure, proven and cost-effective way."

Mollett notes Veeam SA will continue to recruit and grow its local team, adding it is hiring a distribution manager.

Veeam's global business recorded its12th consecutive year of "double-digit bookings growth", adding 48 000 new customers during the year under review. This, according to the company, is an average of 4 000 new customers each month.

"Data management, compliance and risk, data theft and cyber crime are expected to continue to present businesses with challenges throughout 2019, and into the next decade," says Ratmir Timashev, co-founder and executive VP of sales and marketing at Veeam.

"What we have seen in 2018 is that no data is entirely secure. Customers are looking for an approach to manage data that unlocks its use and potential to drive business transformation but doesn't lock their data into one vendor or increase their risk exposure."