Veeam Software has announced the general availability of the latest version of the company’s fastest growing Software as a Service (SaaS) product — Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v6. The backup and recovery solution for Microsoft 365 enables users to securely back up to any location, including on-premises, in a hyperscale cloud, or with a service provider. New features in v6 increase time savings for IT departments due to diminished burden for recovery requests and additional cost savings as a result of more efficient backups.
“Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 reported 73% growth YoY, with 8.5 million users relying on Veeam to protect their Microsoft 365 data, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams,” said Danny Allan, CTO and SVP of Product Strategy at Veeam. “Within all SaaS platforms, including Microsoft 365, the organization owns and controls their own data, and it’s the organisation’s responsibility to protect it. The growth and momentum of Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 is an indication that more organizations are realizing the importance of managing and securing their data, and consistently trust Veeam with critical business assets.”
50% of backup and SaaS admins list accidental deletions as their top motivator for protecting Microsoft 365, citing the time spent restoring user data as a pain point due to frequent accidental deletions. New Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v6 introduces the self-service restore portal for Microsoft 365 environments, which empowers IT administrators to securely delegate restores of emails, files and more from one centralised location. Restore scenarios, like simple user accidental deletions, will not require an IT admin’s assistance and can be done independently by users and/or delegated to a group of restore operators without the need to provide direct access to the backup server — saving time while maintaining administrative security.
Now with over 300 million commercial paid seats, Microsoft 365 data is being generated at a rapid rate, and organisations are holding onto more data as retention policies evolve. This has created a need for organisations to leverage low-cost object storage as they retain growing electronic intellectual properties. To meet this demand, Veeam has added backup copy to Amazon S3 Glacier, Glacier Deep Archive and Azure Archive for a secondary copy on low-cost, long-term object storage with options for various retention periods. This enhancement of cloud object storage integrations is in addition to AWS S3, Azure Blob, IBM Cloud, Wasabi and other S3-compatible providers that were already included in previous releases.
Providing insight into what the launch means for customers in the region, Claude Schuck, Regional Director, Middle East at Veeam said, “Probably the most anticipated launch of our highly successful Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 product. Version 6 brings with it some features to streamline processes, saving time; with the new Self-Service Portal, users can navigate and recover their data quickly and without intervention from IT. Another feature that has been requested many times from the Middle East is the ability for Archiving, using Amazon and the Azure platforms. I am pleased that customers can now manage long-term archival retention with the simplicity and ease they are used to with Veeam.”
Veeam released the first version of Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 in November 2016. The continued innovation in this latest release is designed to further accelerate Veeam’s leadership in the Microsoft 365 backup market. New Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v6 provides:
- Automation and scalability for enterprise organisations and service providers
- Time savings in handling restores and not having to build and maintain your own portal
- Enhanced security with multi-factor authentication (MFA) access to restore data
- Recovery confidence with a secondary copy of data in low-cost object storage
Archana Venkatraman, Associate Research Director, Cloud Data Management, IDC Europe, said, “Organisations are adopting a SaaS-first strategy, and with high usage and demand, the business critical data in these environments is growing rapidly. This requires organisations to ensure their backup strategies extend to these new environments to protect, govern and manage SaaS data. Veeam is continuously evolving to meet customers’ modern data protection needs. The features in v6 such as the self-service restore portal and cloud backup copy options for long-term retention can further boost customers’ data resilience and mitigate their SaaS data risks.”
“Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v6 is the best gift for us as we are getting long-awaited functionality with the self-service portal. This feature is going to save us plenty of valuable time which can be spent on innovative projects. New backup copy to Azure Archive and AWS S3 Glacier will make the 3-2-1-1-0 rule so easy to achieve – there is no more excuse not to protect your data according to best practices,” said Aleh Sadaunichy, Infrastructure Solutions Architect, Staples Solutions.
Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 is designed for IT departments that use Microsoft 365, as well as Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partners who want to offer Microsoft 365 backup services to their customers. Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v6 is now generally available. Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 Community Edition provides FREE backup and recovery of Microsoft 365 data for up to 10 users, 10 teams and one TB of SharePoint data.
