The final day of VeeamON saw Veeam announce a new DR tool for Azure, management pack enhancements for better visibility, and improvements to Backup for Office 365.
Demo time at Veeam Cloud Day!
NEW ORLEANS – Today, at the third day of Veeam’s VeeamON event here, Veeam’s announcements focused on their relationship with Microsoft around Azure, following a kickoff day focused on channel enhancements and a second day highlighting the enhancements to the flagship Veeam Availability Suite.
“Our strategy is to the cloud, from the cloud and within the cloud,” said Paul Mattes, Vice President of the Global Cloud Group at Veeam. “To the cloud is about cloud backup. How do we optimize the number of platforms we can support and provide Disaster Recovery in any of them as efficiently as possible? There is still work we need to do there obviously, and there are a lot of opportunities for us.”
‘From the cloud’ is about SaaS data protection.
“Office 365 is the primary one here today, but that’s just a first step,” Mattes said. “There is plenty of opportunity in software-as-a-service.
‘Within the cloud’ covers cross-cloud backup and cross-cloud availability
“We are making a significant announcement here around Veeam Management Pack [v8 update 4],” Mattes said. “This area is still early days for us, but there are clearly areas of opportunity.”
The Management Pack update addresses a growing need for better visibility and management across the board.
“As customers continue to grow multi-cloud environments, monitoring and visibility is a real challenge,” Mattes stated. “It’s especially challenging in mixed environments. Tight integration with Microsoft Operations Management Suite provides direct integration for all your Veeam assets into Azure-backed dashboards. It’s also done through one single pane of glass. It’s important to provide that simplicity. No one wants a 747 cockpit for management.”
To address the ‘to the cloud’ components, Veeam announced Veeam Disaster Recovery in Microsoft Azure.
“This new solution is designed to minimize downtime and productivity loss when disaster strikes, and sets up the networking into Azure for this,” Mattes said. “It’s a combination of two things. One is our existing Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure. The other is a new tool we are announcing – Veeam Power Network for Microsoft Azure. This new free network solution tool is lightweight and software-defined, and you can get it up and running in a couple of minutes. It lets you easily set up a point-to-point DR solution in Azure. This means that you don’t need to have the Azure infrastructure up all the time, which means you pay for it only when you need it. That’s a cool addition.”
SaaS data protection was enhanced with improvements to Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365. Some of these were announced earlier on Partner Day – new multi-tenancy and scalability capabilities enabling service providers to deliver backup and Availability solution for Office 365.
“These are especially important for service providers,” Mattes said.
On Cloud Day, Veeam dropped the other shoe relating to Veeam Backup for Office 365.
“We will soon have support for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online,” Mattes said. “These are the two most requested enhancements we have had for Backup for Office 365. SharePoint in particular is widely used, so being able to backup those two critical assets is huge.”
Veeam also announced native support for cloud object storage in Azure Blob, to reduce data archiving, long-term retention and compliance costs for Veeam backups.
Mattes also stressed that as Veeam increasingly moves into the cloud they will prioritize keeping their channel profitable.
“We are and will continue to be 100 per cent channel based, and we will not stray from that,” he said. “Resellers are used to being able to drop that big commission from an on-prem sale. But when partners build a commission-based business, customers find that the switching costs are not worth it. We will work with channel providers to help them understand that. They also need to build a services business around it. If you are a reseller or cloud service provider and don’t have a services business now, you have to get one in a hurry. The train is leaving the station. We are in a unique position to help with that, given the size of our channel.”
Mattes said achieving the success Veeam aspires to with the cloud requires moving forward with great speed.
“We hear a lot about cloud being the next wave of technology, but that wave is washing over us every single day,” he said. “The cloud is now. The biggest challenge is being able to move fast enough. We have an amazing opportunity here – delivering solutions quickly enough from an R&D perspective. This is not a compete-free environment, so we just have to go faster. My job is to get the parts of the machine moving in the same direction as rapidly as possible.”
