Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Veeam

Next up in my Tech Field Day 13 research is Veeam. It’s hard to talk about enterprise backup without discussing Veeam. Founded in 2006, Veeam was among the first to solve the challenge presented by backing up virtual machines. As the years have passed they continued to improve and add features to their product. It was just announced that in 2016 they saw 28% growth. That is remarkable growth for any company, especially if they have been around for 10 years.

It’s honestly a little tough to preview a company as well known a Veeam. Their offering is so robust it’s hard to speculate what we’ll see during their presentation. They do have a new product available that I hope to hear more about, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.

We are in a brave new world of subscription services. It seems like every part of my life has a monthly fee. This trend is extending into the enterprise, lead by Office 365. Microsoft has taken exchange management out of IT’s hands, however we still have to consider compliance and our end user’s expectations. If an email or contact gets permanently deleted the user will expect a quick restore. If you’re required to hold a copy of a mailbox for multiple years it’s hard to ensure that you will have that information.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 solves this problem. It can back up your data and allow you to retain them as long as needed. You can restore objects from the backup or do compliance or litigation holds on mailboxes without worry. In previous roles I regularly performed litigation holds and they are a headache at best. Doing a hold in Office 365 with their tool was still a pain. Now, that data could be held in my preferred location and search with Veeam’s engine. This tool alone could have saved me days of time in my past life.

I also feel like I should mention a beta they are conducting, Veeam Availability Orchestrator. Disaster recovery is a very complex process and an orchestrator is basically a requirement. Having a paper run book isn’t enough anymore as it becomes out of date the minute it is printed. Having a tool that can use your existing backups to automate a DR event could streamline everything, especially a hybrid physical and virtual environment. If they show this product I’ll be sure to go in depth about it.

I personally used Veeam at a couple of jobs and never really had to think much about it; it just worked. When you are an administrator and a program “just works” you may not realize the full power of the software. As I’ve been preparing to cover Veeam I realize they are much more than just a way to back up VMs. I can’t wait to hear from them at Tech Field Day 13.