Veeam enhances Microsoft Teams backup, AWS protection
The latest update to Veeam's popular Microsoft 365 data protection product features native Teams backup and recovery. Veeam also launched other product updates at VeeamON 2020.
As the number of employees working from home spikes as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, Veeam Software is launching more comprehensive Microsoft Teams backup.
Veeam also updated its orchestration and AWS backup products, the data protection and management vendor said during its VeeamON virtual conference on Thursday.
The conference, originally scheduled for May in Las Vegas, transformed into a virtual show -- as many other user conferences this year have because of the pandemic. Veeam said 27,000 people registered for the two-day virtual conference that began on Wednesday.
Teams support marks 'important' step for Veeam
The Microsoft Teams backup and recovery is included in the version 5 update to Veeam's Backup for Microsoft Office 365 product. Teams has more than 75 million daily active users, a number that has surged in the last few months as employees collaborate remotely.
The update adds native Microsoft Teams backup and recovery. It features native APIs for Teams to protect data, channels, settings and tabs. The product enables granular searches across Teams components.
Danny Allan
Veeam seeks to go beyond data backup and offer granular recovery, in this case down to the item level for all collaboration, said Danny Allan, Veeam's CTO and senior vice president for product strategy. The new version enables both backup of Teams data and the granular recovery of an entire 365 group, team membership, conversations, files and tabs, Allan said.
The enhanced Microsoft Teams backup helps round out Veeam's 365 product for enterprise use and keeps it competitive with other products in the market, said Krista Macomber, senior analyst at Evaluator Group.
The Teams support is important due to its timeliness.
Krista MacomberSenior analyst, Evaluator Group
"The Teams support is important due to its timeliness, with so many organizations dramatically ramping up their use of Teams due to pandemic-related work-from-home mandates," Macomber wrote in an email. "The [365] product already had a number of necessary features like granular search and restore, encryption and support for Exchange, OneDrive and SharePoint."
Other vendors that offer Microsoft Teams backup include AvePoint and Druva.
Veeam has offered a more basic Microsoft Teams backup and recovery capability in its 365 product. Data posted and shared within Teams is journaled into Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, according to Veeam's website. Veeam Explorers can find and restore Teams data, including chats, documents and sites; users can also "restore data attached to Teams tabs and channels and then manually reattach it to the corresponding Teams location," according to the site.
General availability for version 5 of the 365 backup product is expected in the third quarter.
Allan called Backup for Office 365 "the fastest-growing product in Veeam history," with about 120,000 organizations representing more than 12 million user mailboxes downloading it since version 1 launched in 2016.
According to Veeam's "2020 Data Protection Trends" report, 68% assume Microsoft is backing up 365 data, said Veeam chief marketing officer Jim Kruger. However, Microsoft's protection of the SaaS application -- now called Microsoft 365 -- is generally at the infrastructure level, leaving users responsible for data.
Veeam adds more cloud-based protection features
Veeam Backup for AWS originally launched in late 2019. Version 2, which is generally available, features AWS disaster recovery to protect against regional outages by replicating and recovering Amazon Elastic Block Store snapshots across accounts and regions. It also includes integration with the new changed block tracking API to cut backup windows and costs.
"We hear from customers wanting to leverage the cloud for business continuity, in the form of disaster recovery and failover," Macomber wrote. "The ability to replicate snapshots from one to another availability zone fits in here."
Veeam also launched version 3 of Veeam Availability Orchestrator, adding full recovery orchestration support for NetApp OnTap snapshots.
The new Storage Orchestration Plans feature enables users to orchestrate failover on NetApp storage to a secondary recovery site.
Veeam is targeting next month for general availability of version 3.
Veeam Availability Suite goes to 11
Just a few months after launching version 10 of its Availability Suite, Veeam is looking ahead to the next edition. Version 11 will include continuous data protection, called VeeamCDP, said Anton Gostev, senior vice president of product management. The CDP is for VMware vSphere workloads and features recovery point objectives of seconds, according to Veeam.
Version 11 is also set to include Google Cloud Storage support for Veeam's Capacity Tier, plus instant recovery of any backup to Microsoft Hyper-V and instant recovery of Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases.
Veeam Availability Suite version 10 included enhanced NAS support and ransomware protection. The NAS backup and continuous data protection were two top capabilities discussed by Veeam executives over the last couple of years.
Veeam did not provide an expected general availability date for version 11.
Closing the product keynote at VeeamON Thursday, Gostev noted that Veeam Agent for Mac is also coming soon.
Danny Allan
