SAN DIEGO -- With a focus on resilience, Veeam this week launched several products and a service aimed at helping businesses figure out how to improve their data protection.
At the VeeamON user conference Tuesday, Veeam's product unveilings included backup for Microsoft Entra ID, AI capabilities to provide insight into backups and an instant recovery to Azure feature. The company also released a framework to guide organizations in assessing their data resilience positions and taking actions for improvement.
"Resilience doesn't come from technology alone," said CEO Anand Eswaran in his keynote, noting that it's also about how businesses use tech. "Data resilience is not something you achieve overnight."
Five pillars make up Veeam's data resilience strategy: backup, recovery, intelligence, security and portability.
Data resilience is not something you achieve overnight.
Anand EswaranCEO, Veeam
Several data protection companies, such as Cohesity and Druva, have also pushed the concept of data resilience. Since the message can get muddled, Veeam's pillars help to put some concrete capabilities behind what data resilience means, according to Krista Case, analyst at The Futurum Group.
"Having the strong history in data backup in particular, [Veeam data resilience] is a broadening of that scope and an evolution, but it still keeps them grounded in those roots," Case said. "I think it's smart that they haven't over-pivoted into cybersecurity, which would be easy to do. We've definitely been seeing a bit of that in this industry."
Entra ID backup: This is the way
Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft Entra ID offers backup and restore capabilities for users, groups, application registrations and other objects. The SaaS service for Entra ID, formerly Azure Active Directory, provides unlimited storage, according to Veeam. Entra ID provides authentication and access control services from the Microsoft cloud.
Other data protection vendors, such as Druva, HYCU and Rubrik, offer Entra ID backup.
"It's a security vulnerability, so addressing it in this way is becoming table stakes," said Johnny Yu, a research manager at IDC. "If you can't restore it, you're in a lot of trouble."
The proactive protection bolsters visibility and control over changes in Entra ID, according to Veeam.
While it's still a relatively new backup service in the market, protection should ramp up faster than it did with Microsoft 365, said Veeam CTO Niraj Tolia.
"Microsoft is telling its customers to go protect it," said Tolia, whose two previous companies, Kasten and Alcion, were acquired by Veeam.
Entra ID protection is included in the premium tier of Veeam Data Cloud. As standalone protection, it costs $1 per enabled Entra ID member user per month.
Veeam launched an on-premises version of Entra ID backup at the end of 2024. The cloud-based version became generally available March 31.
'Model' behavior for data resilience
Technology can only take customers so far on their data resilience journey.
"What customers generally need is to be able to upskill their people or at least have people come in and tell them what they're doing wrong," Yu said.
Veeam is attempting to start that process for customers with its Data Resilience Maturity Model, which places organizations into one of four categories:
Basic: Reactive, manual and highly exposed.
Intermediate: Reliable but fragmented and lacking automation.
Advanced: Strategic and proactive but missing full integration.
Best-in-Class: Fully resilient.
Most organizations -- 74% -- operate at the two lowest levels of maturity, according to research from Veeam and McKinsey & Co.
The model was built on the research report of more than 500 IT, security and operations leaders. Additional partners MIT, Palo Alto Networks and Splunk informed the report as well.
The research shows many organizations overestimate their resilience. The framework aims to close that gap by providing insights to align people, process and technology with overall strategy.
"No matter how many technology tools you buy, if you don't have the process right, you're just asking for trouble," said George Westerman, principal research scientist at MIT and an advisor on the project. "Think more about the process, and then the tools can help you do that process."
Organizations can take action by participating in Veeam's tailored executive workshops that aim to improve data resilience maturity. Recommended steps could be both technology-based but also not technical actions.
"For example, making sure that there's accountability cross-functionally across IT, operations and security teams is critical," Eswaran said.
Yu said the framework is a step in the right direction, but it takes a certain level of knowledge to be able to answer questions about a company's data resilience.
"To expect every organization to have that knowledge natively is, I think, asking for a little bit too much right now," Yu said.
There's no additional cost to the service, according to Veeam.
But wait, there's more: AI and instant cloud recovery
Veeam's new AI features also aim to provide insight for businesses. Powered by support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard developed by Anthropic, the AI systems can securely access and use backup data stored in Veeam repositories.
The AI can aid in discovering documents, summarizing conversations from archived emails and automating compliance and e-discovery.
AI can be a buzzword, Tolia said, but the focus for a vendor like Veeam should be on the result and whether it helps customers.
"The average user is excited about AI because of the pain it solves for them," Tolia said.
Compared with a lot of their peers, Veeam has been less vocal about AI, according to Case.
"On one hand, that does potentially run the risk of seeming like they're not a part of that conversation," Case said. "But what I think is smart is they've been able to come to the table with a well-articulated strategy."
Future releases of Veeam Data Cloud will include support for MCP.
In addition, version 13 of Veeam Data Platform is expected by the end of the year. The update will include instant cloud recovery from Veeam Data Platform to Azure. Users can restore a backup of any Windows or Linux machine as a native Azure VM in less than five minutes, according to Veeam.
Paul Crocetti is an executive editor at Informa TechTarget. Since 2015, he has worked on the SearchStorage, SearchDataBackup and SearchDisasterRecovery sites.
