I am happy to announce that the Update 2 download for Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 is now available for Veeam service providers! This is the latest update for our flagship product and adds support for the upcoming release of Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.0 along with other significant enhancements and bug fixes. But when it comes to our cloud and service providers, the biggest new feature is Veeam Backup Remote Access. Let’s dive straight into this new feature!

For a number of years now, Veeam has been talking about the 3-2-1 rule of backups, whereby you keep three copies of your backup data on two different media types with at least one of those backups held off-site. Traditionally, most organizations have been able to put this into play by taking advantage of on-premises storage and media hardware along with multiple data center locations to cater for the off-site requirements. This is where off-site data backup services can come into play to satisfy the off-site backup services requirement.

With the release of Veeam Backup & Replication v8 in 2014, Veeam redefined the way in which businesses of all shapes and sizes could extend their system and data Availability strategies to consume backup offerings from trusted service providers, with the launch of Veeam Cloud Connect Backup. Veeam Cloud Connect was made available for all Veeam customers who now had the ability to engage with a number of Veeam Cloud & Service Provider partners worldwide directly from their Backup & Replication console and configure offsite backup repositories to which virtual machines could be sent to over a secure internet connection, redefining the 3-2-1 rule of backups (three copies of data, on two types of media, one of which is off-site).

Many CIOs are now adopting a cloud-first strategy and backing up and recovering critical data in the cloud is on the rise. As more and more companies explore the idea of migrating applications and data to the cloud, questions like “How secure are cloud services?” arise. While there isn’t a standout number one concern when it comes to cloud computing, the one thing we can be sure about is that security is front and center in CIO’s minds. Veeam has identified the top two concerns from our recent 2016 customer survey to be security and price.

One of the common things that happen in my group of evangelists is helping organizations of all sizes take an Availability strategy to the cloud. When it comes to the cloud, Veeam has a lot of options and has had so for a number of years.

I frequently go back to one question: “What are you wanting to accomplish with a cloud or service provider technology?” This is where the answers get interesting. I’ve heard everything from: “I’m out of space in my data center,” “I want cheap storage,” “I have a credit to use in Azure,” “I want complete disaster recovery,” “I want to get data off-site but don’t have a second site myself,” and more.

The Always-On Enterprise must ensure that its services comply with today’s new demands and challenges. Availability plays a central role here. In addition to common situations where a backup is needed (for example, when a user accidentally deletes data or a system cannot start after an update), more recent issues related to encryption-based Trojans also plague organizations today. While protecting backups against encryption-based Trojans was discussed earlier in this Veeam blog, many companies continue to look for solutions that deal, not only with backup protection, but also with disaster recovery (DR) scenarios.

Veeam Backup & Replication added support for VMware vCloud Director back in the v7 release. It was an immediate success for many service providers because they were finally able to properly protect native vCloud components like Organizations and vApps, instead of relying on operations happening at the underlying vSphere level where no information about vCloud constructs could be saved and restored.

We have said it before and we’ll say it again: IT organizations around the globe are investing time and resources into public clouds, but there are still a lot of show-stoppers that make cloud-adoption less frequent than most people believe. Veeam has continued working on innovative solutions to bring added value to customers, including enabling service providers, and Veeam resellers that want to become service providers, with easy-to-use and affordable Veeam-powered backup services solutions.