Office 365, AWS: Veeam strengthens cloud backup

Like many suppliers specializing in new technologies, Veeam experienced the Covid-19 crisis from a double perspective. Internally first with a switch to telecommuting but which did not impact the business: “We continued to grow and hire,” explains Daniel Fried, GM & SVP EMEA and head of the global channel at Veeam. The other side is precisely the activity which for once has not suffered any Covid-19 effect, “Q2 has been aligned with the objectives with a strong product demand”, slips the leader. Only small change, the annual event of the specialist of the safeguard, Veeam On, which took place usually in the United States was replaced by a virtual edition. And the success was there with nearly 30,000 registrations and nearly 13,000 participants during the 2 days of sessions.

Several announcements were made on this occasion with a focus on the cloud. First, the development of teleworking has highlighted the needs for collaboration and the rise of solutions such as Office 365. Veeam already had a tool for Microsoft’s collaborative and productivity suite and, there, it went to version 5 “We have integrated Teams in this version making it easier to restore and making the search more granular,” said Patrick Rohrbasser, Regional vice president southern EMEA & Africa. With the native API for Teams, Veeam offers full support for the collaboration solution by managing channels, settings and tabs. Version 5 is available this quarter.

Better integration with AWS and NetApp OnTap

Another focus at Veeam is strengthening ties with AWS with the second iteration of its Backup for AWS offer. Two improvements are to be noted. The first concerns better management of the cloud provider’s disaster recovery during regional outages. To do this, Veeam relies on the replication and recovery of Elastic Block Storage (EBS) snapshots across AWS accounts and regions. Another feature is integration with the AWS change block tracking API. By modifying the backups incrementally, “the time of the backup windows is reduced, as well as the compute and storage costs”, emphasizes Patrick Rohrbasser. The Backup AWS v2 version is available on the cloud provider marketplace.

Lastly, Veeam is committed to a process of simplifying and automating data backup and protection. Thus, the Availibity Orchestrator service goes to v3 by supporting NetApp OnTap snapshots. Through the functionality, Storage Orchestration Plans, Veeam orchestrates the switchover of replications from NetApp customers to secondary sites as part of a disaster recovery plan or the creation of a data center. “More and more companies are looking for data protection in the cloud. With the Availibility Orchestrator v3 solution, IT teams can test continuity plans and have up-to-date documentation. We want to become a trusted supplier, ”explains Daniel Fried. Finally on the outlook, the manager is not very talkative about Veeam’s roadmap. Asked about the support for containerized environments, he points out that “things are progressing”.