Veeam Backup Specialist recently rebranded its data protection offering as a Veeam data platform. But key among the myriad of feature updates and improvements was a Ransomware guaranteed, with financial compensation if the data cannot be recovered.
Obviously, Veeam hopes this won’t need to be invoked by customers and trusts its ability to monitor rapidly changing environments and maintain up-to-date backups.
Veeam Data Platform includes enterprise backup and replication solution, VeeamONE monitoring tool, Veeam Recovery Orchestrator automation functionality, and SaaS backup modules for Salesforce and Office365, all of which replace Veeam Availability Suite.
The problem backup that product manufacturers face today is that an organization’s IT estate can span many different application environments and operating systems, ranging from last century platforms to cloud-native solutions. and current today. containerized workloads.
As with most contemporary hybrid and containerized cloud applications, the challenge is especially great because data can flow easily to multiple locations, surging quickly and being suffocated in many environments.
“There is incredible complexity in IT for organizations, with legacy applications on AS400, applications built on Cobol, things from the 1990s and even the 80s,” said Dan Middleton, Vice President UK and Ireland at Veeam.
“It can be on mainframes, physical servers, virtual machines, SQL, cloud-native applications, containers, etc.”
How does Veeam propose to deal with such complexity? Some vendors have offered automated methods of data discovery and provisioning. Veeam’s Middleton suggested its use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to monitor deployments, but differed on specifics.
“How can data protection keep pace? This is the case when you update production methods, you also update data protection,” Middleton said. “For example, you can get Microsoft 365 deployments with 10,000 users with a churn of 10% or 20% per year. As we analyze the system, we constantly track changes in an automated way. »
In the meantime, Veeam is keen to point out its safeguards — which it says are unique among backup vendors — that provide recovery or financial compensation in the event of a ransomware failure.
“In version 12, this is the first time a backup vendor has offered a ransomware guarantee,” Middleton said. “As long as Veeam has been installed correctly, the customer has gone through an accredited service provider, and the correct level of protection is in place, then if the customer cannot recover their data, Veeam will provide a monetary amount.”
But before we get to that, Veeam’s reports aim to make sure all is well in the event of a ransomware-like disaster. In other words, properly protecting data, monitoring potential suspicious ransomware activity with Veeam One’s extensive detection capabilities, ensuring user access security, and ensuring the customer can recover by validating backups and testing.
Veeam also aims to ensure satisfaction through the lack of customer lock-in, Middleton said.
“A key point is the ability to never be locked into a technology,” he said. “We are making Veeam as agnostic as possible. The idea is that we don’t lock customers in and if they want to move, they can. To do this, we use “self-describing files”.